Huge Cost of Suspension of Doha Talks: CUTS

December 06, 2006
With the current stalemate in Doha Round of trade talks, India should make all efforts to revive and concludes Doha Round of negotiations, as overall the country will gain much from multilateral liberalization, says CUTS International.

CUTS International, a leading research and advocacy group working inter alia on international trade issues has prepared a paper titled “Suspension of Doha talks: Cost Implications for India”. It has been circulated to various stakeholders all over the world having interest in trade.

In this paper CUTS expressed its views that cost of suspension may have various repercussions through economic loss, negative impact on geo-politics, setback to economic reforms and increase in trade disputes. With multilateral negotiations under suspension, countries are increasingly entering into preferential trading arrangements, which are not a substitute to multilateral liberalisation. Thus it is important to revive the Doha talks. This issue of revival of Doha talks is gaining ground and needs immediate actions on the part of WTO members.

In this paper CUTS also expressed that since the launch of the Doha Round in 2001, exports from India have grown at a rate of more than 20% per annum. However, it has been feared that with the suspension of Doha Round of talks India may not be able to increase its exports the way it should have especially in the farm sector despite taking positive steps domestically.

The high growth was experienced in spite of the fact that new round did not result in significant trade liberalisation at the multilateral level. However, our share in world trade has increased only by miniscule 0.1% during the last five years. Contrary to this, China has been able to increase its share in world trade from 4.3% in 2001 to 6.6% in 2004, says CUTS International.