TNAG-0135-FCO40-171-Tariff-preferences-for-developing-countries-1969 — Page 149

MR. DIXON said that on agricultural products also cur first offer

The revised offer was more generous than the offers of other countries,

in Annex B of the paper reduced the scale of our offer in terms of beneficiary country trade in 1967 from 108 to 37 million dollars and should go some way towards meeting the interests of developed Commonwealth countries. If all items of interest to these countries were excluded

It was the offer would be reduced to a derisory 12 million dollars. therefore necessary to strike some balance between the conflicting interests of the former and the non-Commonwealth developing countries. If the Committee agreed the basis of the revised offer, consultations with the developed Commonwealth countries and South Africa would be necessary before it could be tabled. The offer was broadly in line with that put forward by the EC and the Scandinavians but slightly more generous and might be further reduced in the light of the consultations with the

Commonwealth.

In discussion the following Lain points were made

(a) There was general agreement with the scope of the revised offer on agricultural products and that the Board of Trade and Ministry of Agriculture should now begin consultations with Commonwealth developed

countries.

(3) It was suggested that there would be advantage in adopting a duty quota system for industrial products; the EEC were committed to it and The DEC Australia was already operating it for developing countries. had decided on duty quotas because they avoided the problem of how to select cxceptions and gave an automatio safeguard to domestic industry, especially on sensitive items. This approach might be easier for other Commonwealth countries to accept because they would still retain some advantage in our markets when the duty free ceiling was reached. Moreover, it had previously been accepted that decalage and duty quotas would have to be applied to imports of industrial products from the Commonwealth if we joined the EEC. We could not, therefore, claim that duty quotas were impracticable and if we succeeded in joining the EEC we would have to

adopt them anyway.

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CONFIDENTIAL