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Dialogue on resumption of Doha Negotiations and Challenges for Bangladesh

19 April 2007
 

Bangladesh has failed to reap benefits i.e. duty free and quota free market access and access to the international labour market from the WTO negotiations as she lacks from negotiating skills. This was observed at the CPD organised a dialogue on Resumption of Doha Negotiations and Challenges for Bangladesh held on 19 April 2007 at the capitals’ BRAC Centre Inn auditorium. The permanent representative of Bangladesh to the WTO Dr Toufiq Ali presented the keynote paper while Commerce Secretary Feroz Ahmed attended the dialogue as the Special Guest. Dr Debapriya Bhattacharya, Executive Director of the CPD chaired the dialogue. Following the resumption of Doha round of WTO negotiations the Keynote presenter said that Bangladesh needs to conduct a study how it can acquire benefit from the changed scenario. Dr Toufiq Ali said that developed countries were promising to wider market access, while some developing countries had come forward to allow a duty-free access of their markets to the least developed countries (LDCs) and Bangladesh needs to explore avenues to utilise the promises. He informed the dialogue that Brazil was preparing to offer a duty-free access to the LDCs. India and China were also working on facilitating a similar market access to the LDCS. It is to be mentioned here that the Doha Development Round (DDR) resumed recently and the G4 countries (India, Brazil, European Union and the USA) leaders in a meeting in New Delhi during April 10-12 urged the WTO director general to conclude the round by the year 2007 which was actually planned to conclude by 2004. Failure of which would represent a major blow for development, for agricultural trade reform and for the multilateral trading system. Bangladesh has to negotiate to attain duty free and quota free marker access specially in the US market and if she can have this access there will be an startling rise in export, the permanent representative noted. He mentioned that Bangladesh has paid U$ 478 million in revenue for U$ 3.2 billion export in the US market.

The discussants observed that it was a mistake for Bangladesh to become the leader of the LDCs. As a result she has failed to uphold her interests in the WTO as well as achieve them. They criticized the government for not putting the expert people at the negotiation talks.

Debapriya Bhattacharya said that attaining duty and quota free market access facility was the first priority for Bangladesh and later she should concentrate on exporting labour under Mode-4 of the WTO. The country at the same time should stress on eliminating non-tariff barriers and improve trade negotiation capacity for taking out the best result from the multilateral as well as bilateral negotiations, he added.

"The capacity of the government in international trade negotiation is very inadequate, which should be improved," he said.

Bangladesh should put hectic efforts so that the discussion, which is going on in WTO, could be ended fruitfully, favouring the poorer and least developed countries, Debapriya suggested, adding that the goal should be set to ensure market access of the products of the poor villagers, which will help reach out the benefit of gloablisation to them.

Civil society members, former secretaries, diplomats, NGO representatives participated in the dialogue.