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``We need to ask why France and India, as major international trade players, have not yet managed to find ways of developing their trade," Mr Raffarin said.

BANGALORE, Feb. 6

FRANCE and India can make a positive contribution in achieving their objectives of creating wealth for equitable distribution through meaningful investment in upgrading technologies, the French Prime Minister, Mr Jean-Pierre Raffarin, today said.

Addressing members of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) here, Mr Raffarin said France, with a rich background of science and technology and good educational heritage, could find an ideal partner in India carrying forward the goal of providing a human face to industrialisation.

Answering a question posed by Mr N.R. Narayanamurthy, Chairman and Chief Mentor of Infosys Technologies, the French Prime Minister reflected his country's policy to reach the benefits of the industrialisation and said "we do have a strategy to encourage investment that underlines the need for knowledge-based activity that will keep people as the focus and not giving prominence to only large projects".

Mr Raffarin said that while France was committed to the World Trade Organisation's regulations on subsidy it would be open to negotiation on the question of reducing it only on equitable terms.

In this regard, he pointed out farm subsidy in France was very low much lower than that of the US.

Mr Raffarin lamented the slow growth of trade between India and France. ``We need to ask why France and India, as major international trade players, have not yet managed to find ways of developing their trade'', the visiting French premier said.

Trade between the two countries was equal to neither the potential of the two economies nor the political closeness of their relations, Mr Raffarin, who is accompanied by a large delegation, said.

India exported only some 1.5 billion euros worth to France, accounting for just two per cent of its total exports, and France, the number four economy in the world, accounted for only 1.5 per cent or one billion euros of India's total imports, he said.

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