BRICS trade ministers' meet: Goyal expresses concern over under-invoicing, non-tariff barriers

New Delhi: India has expressed concerns over mis-pricing, under-invoicing, and imposition of non-tariff barriers by certain countries as it impacts international trade.

These issues were flagged by Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal during the 13th BRICS Trade Ministers' Meeting held on Monday. "... the minister expressed his concern about the negative impact trade mis-pricing and under-invoicing has on the economies," the commerce ministry said in a statement.

BRICS is a grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. In the meeting, Goyal stressed upon building trust among each other and expressed strong belief in small, achievable, incremental steps towards WTO (World Trade Organisation) reform. He said collective efforts of all the member countries are required to work in a trust-based open atmosphere through transparency and sharing information. "In this context, he expressed disappointment that even within BRICS membership, a few members had expressed concerns on transparency," the statement said.

According to the statement, there are concerted efforts to bring in non-tariff barriers through the use of non-science-based sanitary and phyto-sanitary measures to stall the collective efforts of the BRICS countries, which is the core of collaborative efforts for trade. "Our efforts to get the agreement amongst the members to be fair under the prevailing system, unfortunately did not bring in the desired result," it said. He made it clear that unless trade and investment activities are carried out cooperatively in a transparent manner, it would not yield the desired results.

On supply chains, Goyal said that trust and transparency are important factors for resilient and robust supply chains. On digital economy, the minister expressed "deep" concerns over deprivation of the access to virtual platforms, tele-medicine, distance education and e-payments.