New Delhi, Sep. 4 US Trade Representative Ron Kirk has urged World Trade Organisation members to engage in multilateral talks, and move beyond what was agreed upon earlier in order to reach a successful conclusion of the Doha round.
"More is required to get us to a successful conclusion or else Doha round would have succeeded in 2008, 2007, 2005. What we have not asked for is an abandonment of all the hard work that has gone before. We think we can build the existing text but obviously gaps needed to be filled in and more need to be added to," Kirk said.
Kirk was speaking in New Delhi where India has invited key trade ministers to discuss how to finish the Doha round next year.
To find a way out and to work on those gaps, Kirk said the WTO's 153 members must know "what those gaps and blanks are."
However, Kirk said the two-day talks in New Delhi were satisfying and leading to a positive direction.
"There is a wild receptive to our ideas but we are not drowning. The most important thing is that we are not drowning. So we are, at least, committed to going down a path in which we can have the sustained type of bilateral negotiations that we hope would yield a clarity in the market access that we seek," he said.
But Kirk reiterated the US view that big emerging countries like India, China and Brazil must do more to open their markets.
Most global growth in the coming years would come from those states, and they had to offer access to poorer developing countries as well as rich nations if the Doha round.
The ministers want to find a way to inject momentum into the faltering negotiations in Geneva on the Doha round, launched in late 2001 to help developing countries prosper by opening up world trade, rather than negotiate specific issues themselves.
Ministers agree that the basis for completing the talks, which will cut tariffs and subsidies in farm and industrial goods and open up services such as banking and telecoms, are negotiating texts drafted in December after an abortive round of negotiations last year. (ANI)
