6/14
CONFIDENTIAL'
United Kingdom Delegation
to the European Communities,
52, Ave des Arts,
Brussels, 4.
14 January, 1969
UNCTAD PRÆFERENCES
I saw Would you please refer to my letter 6/14 of 7 January. Tran on 14 January and was given an account of the Community discussion on UNCTAD preferences which took place on 8-9 January.
2.
Tran began by saying that the meeting had been a most important one resulting in considerable changes in the Community's approach to the 1 March exercise. But so far no decisions have boen taken and what he was going to tell me represented no more than indications of the way things were going.
3.
The Community's aim now was to table an offer on 1 March that would contain no exceptions at all for industrial products. The offer would simply state that the Community would give tariff free treatment to industrial products from less developed countries up to a certain | quantitative limit after which they would cut off tariff free entry. There would be no exceptions to this list and no countries would be excluded from its operation. There would be no safeguard clauses other than that of the quantitative cut-off provision and the general provisions in the GATT on dumping etc. For agricultural products the offer would be, as envisaged before, a limited positive list of products on which there would be a reduction in the Community protection, perhaps expressed in the form of a percentage of the current protection given to the Community's transforming industries. In the agricultural field there would be not only the safeguards contained in the Community's own agricultural regulations but also special safeguards for the operation of this scheme.
4. This offer, which, as Tran explained should look most attractive to less developed countries and which was designed to appear more generous than the offers of other developed countries, would, if the Commission had their way, be all that was indicated to the OECD. There would, however, be a number of supplementary provisions within Broadly speaking the Community but these would not be communicated. there would be two categories of product, sensitive and non-sensitive. On non-sensitive products there would be no surveillance of imports and the percentage cut-off would for most products remain a dead letter; but it would be open to any individual member state to complain about the volume of imports of a non-sensitive product and
if surveillance showed to insist that surveillance be initiated;
/that
0.11. Kemmis, Esq., Board of Frade, Victoria Street, London, S...1.
CONFIDENTIAL