India has asserted that trade issues with the US should be resolved through bilateral trade negotiations rather than unilateral measures, urging the US Trade Representative (USTR) to reconsider its proposed 12.5 per cent tariff, citing inconsistencies in its Section 301 investigation into forced labour concerns.
Participating in a public hearing, Joint Secretary in Department of Commerce Brij Mohan Mishra submitted that in light of India’s genuine engagement on forced labour issues, it strongly expresses its concerns at the USTR’s determination. “India takes the elimination of forced labour seriously as a constitutional obligation, and as a matter of international law and principle. India would like to highlight its concerns with the USTR's report and findings against India,” he said.
“The USTR has not satisfied the relevant legal standards under Section 301(d) of the Trade Act. A mere absence of a forced labour import prohibition without evidentiary basis of other statutory requirements cannot be construed as unreasonable under Section 301,” he added.
Mishra said the USTR determination does not provide a rationale for countrywide tariffs and impermissibly clubs 46 economies, including India, into a single category, according to the written transcript of the hearing, held on July 8 and published on the USTR website. The USTR’s Section 301 investigation report concerns the failure to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labour.
India has stated that the adopted methodology is particularly flawed as the determination is based on case studies of a handful of economies and relied on broad trade patterns. The report, he said, relies on broad data and it presupposes that an economy’s imports flagged for this stuff involving imports made with forced labour are exported to the US without providing any sector or country-specific evidence and actual linkages with forced labour.
In relation to India, there is inadequate and insufficient evidence that lack of forced labour import ban causes an unfair competitive advantage to the detriment of the American industry, said Mishra. “In conclusion, it is submitted that the USTR reconsider the imposition of tariff in light of the identified inconsistencies in the report in the Federal Register notice. We ask any trade problems be addressed within the framework of the India-US bilateral trade negotiation, not through unilateral measures, like this investigation," he added.
Making submissions on behalf of Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority (APEDA), Shreyans Gupta, First Secretary in the Embassy of India in Washington, DC, said the export promotion body objects to the USTR's observations on the import of rice allegedly made with forced labour into India and the alleged impact on such imports in distorting the competitive conditions for the export and domestic sale of rice produced in the US.
Gupta said the overall value of rice imported into India in relation to the value of rice exported from India to the US is not even 3 per cent. He said there are regulatory checks in place that prevent exports from India of imported rice that have been produced with forced labour. Export of rice from India to the US is allowed only from the rice mills and processing units registered with the agriculture ministry.
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