NEW DELHI : India will drum up consensus at the Geneva round of the World trade Organisation (WTO) for setting up an integrated database that will compile all non-tariff barriers existing worldwide as it feels that changing quality standards for imports to developed nations and abrupt policy changes make things tough for its importers.
The seventh session of the WTO ministerial conference is slated later this year, and India has already made a formal submission to the organisation in this regard.
“Indian exporters send consignments to countries only to discover that they failed some specific quality or technical norm. This gap of information has to go as it causes a lot of losses to exporters,” a commerce department official told ET.
He said quality standards and specifications keep changing in the developed countries, including the EU and US, making it difficult for exporters in developing countries to keep a track on the latest standards.
“Once the WTO makes it mandatory to post all such data, there would be a pressure of some sort on the developed countries not to change their standards so frequently. Exporters too would know at the click of their mouse the existing standards in the destination countries,” the official said.
The WTO ministerial, which is a formal meeting of trade ministers from all the 149 member countries, is expected to give the ongoing Doha round of multilateral talks, which started almost eight years back, the much-needed push. The Doha round seeks to open up markets for trade in goods and services further.
India has started stressing the need to put a check on non-tariff measures as there has been a sharp rise in both sanitary and phytosanitary measures (restrictions to ensure food safety and control diseases) and technical barriers to trade (measures such as labelling requirements with a gradual decline in import tariffs in all countries) coinciding with a fall in import tariff levels.
The number of TBT measures has risen sharply from 365 in 1995 to 1,030 in 2007. China alone has 560 TBT measures in place followed by the US, which has 460, and the EC at 290.
India has already asked the organisation to conduct a study on how the multiplicity of international standards and technical regulations affect trade flows of developing countries.
Source : The Economic Times