TNAG-0134-FCO40-170-Tariff-preferences-for-developing-countries-1969 — Page 17

736

CONFIDENTIAL

५०

UNCIL FOR

"Dear Britten,

BOARD OF TRADE

1 VICTORIA STREET

LONDON S.W.1

17th July, 1969

Generalised Proferences: The UK Offer

You will recall that on 23rd April I circulated a paper discussing in a very tentative way how the UK submission might be modified in the light of the other submissions tabled in OECD on 1st March. You and most of the other recipients subsequently commented.

2.

I now attach a revised draft in the form of a paper intended to go to PCO. I should emphasize that this does not represent the considered view of the Board of Trade since the *paper has had no preliminary discussion within this department;

nor do those parts of the paper of primary concern to AFF and to Customs necessarily represent their views; they will wish to suggest amendments.

no doubt

3. However, as pointed out in the paper, the programme for work now adopted by OECD, largely following pressure from the EEC who are anxious to press ahead with implementing their offers, makes it necessary to reach a decision in principle within the next few weeks on what modifications we should mele to our offers in time for the new UK submission to be tabled in OECD early in September when substantive negotiations on the offers will be started. Given the summer break and the need to allow departments time to consider the issues we must also push ahead very quickly and we hope to be able to put the paper along the lines of this draft to PCO if possible before the summer breek.

4. The difficulty of this time-table is that it prevents us From taking into account the submissions still to be made by the USA and Japan. If these are received during the course of this month it will still take a little time to evaluate thom and to judge how they effect our position. The main argument of my draft is that we must now decide between the USA and the EBC and that the balance of advantage clearly lies in following the Community. Therefore the US and Japanese offers are in any case less significent than those of the mac although on certain issues, for example, the treatment of Hong Kong, agricultural products and textiles, the US and Japanese offers may be crucial. But on the main issue of how we should revise our submission for the next stage of 0DCD's work it seems to us already clear that we should prepare 2 submission based on duty quotas.

R. G. Dritten Esc.,

Trade Policy Department

Foreign and Commonwealth Office

Great George Street

London SW1

15.

CONFIDENTIAL