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India readying bilateral deals with 12 nations
By Ronojoy Banerjee Nov 23 2009, New Delhi
The commerce ministry is working on a plan-B of bilateral trade agreements if the eight-year-old WTO negotiations involving 153 countries fail to reach a conclusion by the new deadline of 2010 and free up trade in goods and services.
India is looking to engage more aggressively with key trade partners at a bilateral level to pry open markets for its companies and exports, a commerce ministry official said, requesting not to be named.
Trade ministers from the 153 WTO member countries are scheduled to meet for the seventh time to try and break the logjam in the Doha talks. But trade experts see no signs yet of the deadlock being resolved in a hurry for the negotiations to close in 2010.
The official said India is engaged with at least 12 of its most important trade partners to strike bilateral deals on trade, investment and other forms of economic cooperation.
Negotiations are on with the US, India’s largest trade partner in goods and services. In fact, this forms a part of prime minister Manmohan Singh’s core agenda for his ongoing four-day visit to the US.
Some of the other countries with which India is negotiating bilateral deals include New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia and China.
“In the absence of any meaningful resolution to the Doha round, both India and China, have realised that bilateralism is the way forward,” the official said.
Post-2001, the year the Doha round was launched, India has signed half-a-dozen bilateral agreements, including comprehensive economic cooperation pacts with South Korea and Singapore. Besides, India inked free trade agreement with regional trade block Asean earlier this year. It also has a bilateral concessional trade arrangement with Latin American block Mercusor.
Apex export body, Fieo, said that a multilateral solution to complex issues of world trade is just not practical. “Zero-duty trade at a world stage is practically not possible…bilateral treaties are a general trend across the world, Fieo president A Sakhtivel said.
Some trade experts, however, are of the opinion that a rule-based multilateral trading system is in interest of countries such as India. “It is not necessary that bilateral agreements become a substitute to multilateral treaties, in my opinion both can co-exist,” Mukul Sanwal, consultant at the Geneva-based intergovernmental body, South Centre, said. He explained that India’s dynamism as a potential global economic power could not be merely satiated through a multilateral forum like WTO but would also require bilateral agreements.