US-India Business Council Says GSP Restoration Deal Unlikely Next Week
A restoration of India to the Generalized System of Preferences benefits program that's been under negotiation for more than six months (see 1909060029) is unlikely to be announced during President Donald Trump's trip to India next week, the U.S.-India Business Council said Feb. 20. Nisha Biswal, president of the USIBC, said on a conference call with reporters, “It does look at this juncture that we may not have a trade agreement as part of the president’s visit … which is of course a disappointment to our members.”
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The dairy industry and medical device exporters were the interests that requested India's eligibility for GSP end; Biswal said “there has been some strong progress” on getting India to move away from price caps on devices. She said her group had thought that issue and others under discussion were on a path to compromise. But she said that the proposal of dozens of new tariffs in India recently seems to have knocked negotiations off course.
She said that India has an “approach to trade that is still evolving or emerging from a more protectionist or closed trading system,” and that such evolution “necessarily will be halting and will have some steps forward and steps backward along the way.” Biswal said that the revocation of GSP benefits has been effective in getting India to the table, but that will fade if the country remains out of GSP for years.
“If it continues to be curtailed for a long period of time then I think the market prices it in and it ceases to be a point of leverage,” she said in response to a question from International Trade Today. “If we were to lose that point of leverage, that makes it all the more hard to get to where we want to be.”