India: Commerce Minister Calls for Non-Tariff Barriers Removal

Shri Kamal Nath, Union Minister of Commerce & Industry, called for removal of non-tariff barriers (NTBs) to trade and said that in view of the vulnerability of developing countries to NTBs, standards and conditionalities applied to exports of developing countries should be reasonable, transparent and fair.

Addressing the National Conference on “Non-Tariff Barriers for Indian Exports: Critical Inputs for the WTO Negotiations” organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) in association of Ministry of Commerce & Industry, here this evening, Shri Kamal Nath said: “I am not advocating complete abandonment of standards and conditions. These are necessary. Even India uses them. All I am saying is that these be transparently and openly arrived at and fairly and justly implemented”.

Stating that with the steady increase in tariffs the world over, NTBs had become the chief instrument of regulating trade, he observed that developed countries used sophisticated methods while less developed countries had more straightforward NTBs but the common objective of all these was to limit imports.

“A certain level of conditionalities, particularly when they relate to public health and consumer choice, is certainly tolerable. What is intolerable is when these measures place unreasonable demands on traders which they cannot meet, or when they drive up costs of products with the specific aim to make them uncompetitive in the importing markets”, he said.

Apart from sanitary and phyto-sanitary (SPS) requirements, there were a host of other NTBs, the Minister said, such as standards, testing, destruction of allegedly contaminated or damaged consignments and other more innovative forms of NTBs.