ISLAMABAD, Feb 16: Pakistan along with other developing countries has urged the World Trade Organization (WTO) to open negotiations on the trade remedy laws to prevent their abuse and the resultant losses to developing countries.
Talking to Dawn here on Monday, the Commerce Minister, Humayun Akhtar Khan said it was vital to start negotiations with a view to clarifying and improving the disciplines of these rules so as to eliminate its misuse.
Mr Khan said: "in particular, we needed to find a way out for outstanding implementation issues, to check misuse of trade remedy laws such as the anti-dumping measures and ensure meaningful special and differential treatment.
"Some new mechanism should be evolved so that meaningful special and differential treatment is available to low income and such other economies, which are still not fully competitive. There should be more emphasis on trade capacity building and technical assistance for developing countries", he said.
According to the minister, the trade remedy laws were a facility given by the WTO system to fight unfair practices or unfair competition, which a country's industry was too weak to face. "Certain members are abusing these laws," he said.
The Doha Development Agenda had duly conceded that difficulties were being encountered by developing countries as a consequence of the operation of WTO rules especially those relating to anti-dumping, subsidies and countervailing measures and regional trading arrangements.
The minister said that the negotiating members needed to have a clear resolve to get rid of all kinds of trade distorting subsidies and domestic support in agriculture.
He said many developing countries had still not been able to fully implement their Uruguay Round commitments specially in the area of TRIPS, TRIMS, Customs Valuation, etc. They should not be asked to take on too many binding new commitments or new rules.
The minister said for Pakistan major concern lies in the textiles and clothing sector. The target date for phasing out the 'quota regime' (multi fibre arrangement) in textiles was Jan 1, 2005 implying that there would be no quotas from this date.
To meet the challenges of the elimination of quantitative restrictions on international trade in textile and clothing, the government was taking steps to encourage joint ventures with reputed foreign companies, especially in the garments sector.
To facilitate this objective three garment cities in Karachi, Lahore and Faisalabad were being created, which would be owned and operated by corporate entities in which government, multilateral institutions and the stakeholders would be equity partners. The "Sunder Textile City" is fast coming up in the Punjab with the land acquisition process has been completed.