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products and footwear, raw silk and silk fabrics, plywood). On Chapters 1 24 the positive list of agricultural items had been extended to cover 59 items covering $29 million of imports from LDCs in 1967.
Canada Very few changes had been made in the Canadian offer. These were mostly new products added to the positive list in Chapters 1 - 24.
U.S. Cronk said that the U.S. had made five main changes compared with their illustrative ●ffer presented last autumn, namely,
4.
(a) they had dropped their insistence on a common scheme;
(b) countries granting reverse preferences would no longer
have to eliminate them immediately to qualify for U.S. preferences, but could give assurances to phase them out over a reasonable peried, i.e., up to 1975;
(c) three items were deleted from the exceptions list (these were all hand made rug and carpet items);
99,
(a) in the case of primary products in Chapters 25
although these were by definition excluded, a positive list of inclusions had been drawn up;
(e) they had added to their list of agricultural products
subject to preferences.
None of these countries, nor any of these reporting previously to the Ad Hoc Group, gave any indication to the Committee of their present position ●n beneficiary countries.
Report of the Ad Hoc Group
5. The Report of the Ad Hoc Group (to which was annexed the text of the covering note to present the revised country submissions to the UNCTAD) was then considered paragraph by paragraph. On the basis of this discussion a separate report was prepared for the Committee to report to the OECD Council. Although these processes were rather tedious, there is no need here to provide a blow by blow account. Copies of the two texts are enclosed.
Beneficiaries
6.
The question of beneficiaries was raised because the four developing OECD countries (Spain, Portugal, Greece and Turkey) were worried that the issue would eventually be settled by default and that they would be excluded by most doners. The Chairman (Herbst, Germany) tried to get agreement on the basis that a statement should go into the report to the Council that the Committee had not yet been able to settle this issue but that they would pursue it as a matter of urgency. He later put it that the Committee was not yet ready for a direct con- frontation on the issue, but that it would continue to be discussed behind the scenes.
7. The Chairman's proposals were generally agreed (although the Swiss pointed out that the beneficiaries question was an important aspect of burden-sharing and that the longer decisions an it were delayed, the more the implementation of the whole scheme would be delayed). The four developing countries also
/insisted
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