Bangladesh Tuesday urged the G-8 Summit leaders to ensure special and differential treatment of the products of Least Developing Countries (LDCs) and developing countries in WTO dialogues.

Chief Advisor of interim caretaker government Dr Fakhruddin Ahmed made the appeal in separate letters to the G-8 leaders who will meet in Heiligendamn, Germany on June 6-8

Bangladesh Foreign Affairs Advisor Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury handed over the copies of the letter to the envoys of the G-8 countries of USA, Canada, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Japan and Russia stationed in Dhaka.

In his letter the chief advisor said the Doha Development Round started dialogue with a promise to ensure duty-free access of LDCs products to the markets of developed countries. This has not yet yielded any fruitful result. These developing and LDCs have opened up their markets for the developed countries, but they (developed nations) did not reciprocate in that way.

Referring to the WTO ministerial meeting in Hong Kong in 2005, the chief advisor said the last impediment to the duty-free access came from that meeting. Although the Hong Kong meeting provided duty-free and quota-free access of 97 percent products of the LDCs, but the remaining 3 percent has created obstacle for the poor countries to get duty-free access to their important products into the developed countries' markets.

He hoped that the request from Bangladesh would be reflected in the G-8 summit declaration.

German Ambassador to Bangladesh Frank Meyke, whose country will host the G-8 summit, appreciated the Bangladesh's move, saying that Dhaka has taken the opportunity to make G-8 aware about some particular interest during the deliberations of the G-8 countries.

Talking to reporters he said G-8 ambassadors have very much welcomed this initiative from Bangladesh and they are glad for that and confident that G-8 will take up this initiative in a positive way.

Source: Xinhua