ISLAMABAD, Dec 8: The ministry of commerce on Thursday briefed a joint meeting of the WTO Council and the Parliamentary Task Force on WTO on the strategy approved by the government for Hong Kong Ministerial Conference (HKMC) to be held next week.
The briefing session was headed by commerce minister Humayun Akhtar Khan and attended by parliamentarians and senior government officials.
The minister informed the meeting that in the upcoming negotiations Pakistan’s interest would be well served if permissible subsidy levels were reduced as much as possible for the developed as well as the developing countries and the number of sensitive and special products was brought down to a bear minimum level in the negotiations on agriculture sector.
So far as Non-Agricultural Market Access (NAMA) is concerned, the minister said that Pakistan’s interest was that tariffs in both the developed and developing countries, particularly on textile and other products of our export interest, were brought to close to zero as in the shortest span of time.
He further said that Pakistan would like tariffs of products in which we have a defensive interest and need to protect, if reduced should be reduced to a manageable level and over as long a time frame as possible.
The participants were informed that given our liberal services regime in practice, the assessment was that Pakistan stands to gain from opening of the services market globally.
This was because there were a number of services that Pakistan was already exporting, and there were others in which we have the potential to do so. From an import perspective also, it was likely to be beneficial in the overall context, if we commit our existing openness in this sector.
On WTO rules it was informed that Pakistan had a clear interest in seeing a change in the status quo in this negotiation because: Pakistan has itself been a victim of anti-dumping actions, which were not well justified. “We hardly, if at all, subsidize the fisheries sector but are certainly adversely affected by the over exploitation carried out by the larger fishing fleets of some developed countries,”,.
The minister said that “we are adversely affected by the host of Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) and other preferential market access arrangements enjoyed by our competitors”.
On balance therefore it would be in our interest to see the RTAs better disciplined, so that they did not under cut our MFN privileges and comparative advantage, particularly in our major export sector namely textiles.
On special and differential treatment, the participants were informed that Pakistan being a developing country stands to gain some benefit from this negotiations.