ISLAMABAD, Feb 10: The European Union has urged India, Brazil and South Africa (G-20 member countries) to open their markets more for the products coming from developed and developing countries.

Commerce ministry sources said the EU had initiated a round for seeking support from the ACP and G-90 member countries to put more pressure on larger developing countries to get maximum market for their products.

The G-20 and G-90 member countries came closer at the Hong Kong ministerial conference and constituted a coalition of 110 members for asserting more pressure on the EU to do away with their agriculture subsidy that is causing harm to the products of developing and least developing countries.

EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson in his first leg of round to Mauritius urged the G-90 to define their own interests in the Doha round and assert the importance of recognizing the differing interests of different developing countries and not be “swept along by others with different economic interests”.

“We are also putting friendly but firm pressure on big developing countries to open their markets to agriculture, industrial goods and services,” he asserted.

“The different interests of developing countries have to be recognized in the DDA. Hong Kong brought out these divergences....between the rapidly emerging economies without tariff preferences and the G-90 with them; between those who want aggressive liberalization in agriculture, at least and those, like Mauritius and similar developing countries that need a greater comfort zone to adjust gradually to global trade, increased competition and reduced preferences.”

“Recognizing these differences is not an attempt to divide and rule, differentiation among developing countries is a moral imperative that will help development, not impede it. So let us do away with the politically correct fallacy that developing countries are all alike and have the same interests, Mr Mandelson maintained.

He went on to say: “The G-20 and G90 do not have identical interests and capacities in trade. But that also requires on your part a willingness to assert your own demands, rather than be swept along by others with different economic interests.”

“South-South trade is already 40 per cent of developing countries’ exports. But barriers are still high. Around 70 per cent of duties paid today by developing countries are paid to other developing countries, chiefly on industrial not-agricultural goods because industrial goods are where the bulk of their trade takes place,” he added.