NEW DELHI: India and the US may have reached a “plateau” in their trade negotiations where further concessions from either side could be increasingly difficult, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Monday.
Sitharaman’s signal of an impasse in the negotiations came days after US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer played down the expectations of an early deal and said it was “not imminent”.
Participating in a discussion at the Munich Leaders Meeting here, the finance minister said, “We’d like to believe that both sides have reached a plateau beyond which giving or taking might be very, very difficult.” “But, maybe, if there is room, if there are rooms to operate from, both sides would do it,” she added.
The agreement still being “very rigorously negotiated,” she said, adding that the talks remain ongoing and the biggest sticking point is the trade imbalance that Washington wants to reduce. “Now the imbalance is being sought to be addressed through other means…tariffs have become weaponised,” Sitharaman said.
What was once an instrument within negotiations is increasingly being used as leverage, raising the pressure on both sides to find room for give and take, she said.
The US wants to reduce the trade imbalance with India before considering further progress in trade relations, she said, adding that if that is the way to address the imbalance, both sides should have been talking to China in the same manner. These issues rather need to be settled through negotiations, she added.
Sitharaman said countries will have to choose newer partners for their trade and therefore newer partnerships are being searched and they are being tied up with bilaterally.
The minister also said India is negotiating bilateral investment promotion and protection agreements (BIPAs) with Canada, Russia and other countries while awaiting cabinet approval of a new template. “I would think by December, if things go well, we should be concluding BIPA with at least three more countries,” she said. “If everything goes well with Canada, I hope either by December or sometime early next year, I should do the same with Canada as well,” she added.
Last week, India signed a BIPA with Saudi Arabia offering investors a shorter two-year timeline to exhaust domestic remedies before initiating international arbitration. This is the first such provision among a handful of new-generation bilateral investment treaties signed in the last couple of years.
Source: The Financial Express
