Tuesday, December 13 2005 17:11 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Hong Kong: The European Union today (Dec 13, 2005) put the onus of success of the WTO meeting on India, US and Brazil, asking them to move forward for reaching any agreement as the Ministerial kicked off on a cautiously optimistic note.

"Progress on removal of subsidies can come only if the roadmap for market access on farms goods and industrial goods is indicated by US, Brazil and India," EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson said even as he declared the EU's opens for a Swiss tariff reduction formula with two coefficients, a demand of the US and developing countries like India. Under the Swiss formula, which is linear in nature, higher tariffs are cut more than the lower tariffs. It was first proposed by a Swiss diplomat in Geneva but has undergone modifications since.

Addressing newspersons, Mandelson said, "For valuable progress here we need to ready the building blocks of modalities which would be the launch pad for final negotiations early next year."

In a veiled criticism of India and Brazil, he said while all discussions were on the basis of the Swiss formula on line-by-line reductions, when it came to making actual offers nobody came forward.

India has said it was ready to reduce two thirds of its tariffs of industrial goods basing the cuts on the principle of less than full reciprocity only after EU spelled out its offer on the coefficient.

On services, Mandelson said negotiations should proceed in a plurilateral manner instead of request and offer process. Under the plurilateral process few countries can reach an agreement among themselves.

On the LDC package, he did not indicate whether EU would accommodate India's demand of a development package for developing countries but Mandelson made it categorical that the duty free quota free access to good from LDCs should note be made reversible and be on permanent basis.

"I hope development package is agreed upon by the week and agreement reached quickly. Duty free, quota free access to LDCs should be for all their goods and should not be reversible," Mandelson said and added that the trade block would up its aid to LDC by two billion Euros by 2010.