In an interview to Business Line here on Saturday, Mr Maran remained steadfast in his stance that the forthcoming Doha Ministerial meeting should not ``overload'' the agenda, especially when the concerns of all the trading partners about the inadequacy of progress in the implementation issues have been untouched. He said that under the UR agreements, there were a lot of ``asymmetries and imbalances'' which need to be ironed out before bringing in new and additional issues to the multilateral trade negotiations. 

Citing the Unctad Secretary-General, Mr Rubens Ricupero, that some countries were not able to fulfill the obligations of the UR agreements which they had signed hurriedly and without grasping the underlying implications, Mr Maran said that when this is the case, it would not be expedient now to enlarge the WTO agenda. 

Mr Maran recalled that how Prof Jagdish Bhagwati, a consultant to the former Director-General, General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), Mr Arthur Dunkel, once said that by introducing trade-related intellectual property rights to UR agreements, ``how we turn the WTO into a royalty-collecting agency for multinational companies.'' 

He said that at a time when the HIV epidemic is threatening safety and nations such as South Africa cry for affordable medicine, the TRIPs clauses stand in the way of preserving public health machinery. Even countries such as Canada have asked for affordable cure for the extant anthrax menace and India stands justified in opposing the TRIPs' harsh provisions which prevent ensuring affordable medicine to maintain public health system in the country. 

Mr Maran was also critical of the divide and rule policy of trade majors which had succeeded in preventing any unity being forged by developing countries. He cited the recent package ``everything but arms,'' a ploy by a trading bloc to separate the least developed countries from the developing countries by giving them duty-free access to its markets, so that they do not oppose the launch of a new Round. 

Mr Maran said a recent study in the US conclusively stated how the UR agreements had disproportionately benefitted developed countries instead of bridging the development deficit with the rest of their trading partners. 

Mr Maran recounted how tariff escalation supervenes when the developing world exports value-added or processed products to the advanced markets as the latter wants the developing world to remain exporters of primary products only. Instead of addressing this growing imbalance, the trade majors now plump for a new round which would only aggravate the inequities in the international economic system, Mr Maran noted. 

Mr Maran recalled that the United States Trade Representative (USTR), Mr Robert Zoellick, said immediately after the Seattle Ministerial of WTO in 1999 that the WTO should not become a global government in its zeal to encompass every issue. But the same person now sings a different tune calling for the launch of a new Round, he quipped. 

Even at the recent Singapore meeting of several WTO Trade Ministers in a bid to advance consensus ahead of the November meeting, Mr Maran said WTO has been ``usurping'' the role of every other organisation such as patents issue from the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), investment from the World Bank's Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), labour from the International Labour Organisation and environment from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). 

Mr Maran maintained that as a founding member, India always believed in the rule-based trading system the WTO and the former the GATT came to assume. But under duress from trading majors which exhibit ``market muscle,'' the WTO is increasingly turning itself into ``power-oriented'' instead of ``rule-oriented'' body, Mr Maran regretted. 

Asked about his acerbic remark of WTO as a ``necessary evil,'' Mr. Maran retorted that to the extent that the WTO encroaches upon economic sovereignty, the food security, employment security and environment safety and myriad other matters of member nations he is not wrong.