Outgoing EU trade commissioner Pascal Lamy said that the new EU trade preferences for 2006-2008 would create "a clearer, more transparent and more predictable" system for the European Union's trading partners.

The new Generalised System of Preferences (GSP) would for example deprive China, which provided over 30 percent of the EU's imported textiles in 2002, of its current right to pay only a 3.0-percent tarrif, against the usual 12 percent.

"The EU is already the world's largest provider of trade preferences in favour of developing countries -- enabling us to import more than all other major developed countries put together," said Lamy.

"But we want to do even better, by focusing on the poorest and most vulnerable developing countries who most need trade preferences to access the EU market," he added.

Lamy, who stands down as EU trade chief at the end of October, has sought to reassure textile-exporting developing countries who fear the end of EU textile import quotas in 2005 will open the floodgates from China,

In August he said there was no question of renegotiating the end of the quotas from January 1, 2005, agreed under the last, so-called Uruguay Round of global trade talks in the 1990s.

Countries such as Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are concerned that the end of the quotas removes the relative protection for their exports to the European Union, and that they will be squeezed out by massive Chinese exports.

"There are a lot of worries at home, among businesses and unions, but also elsewhere, in developing countries, given the Chinese competition," said Lamy at the time.

Lamy's new GSP proposals will have to be approved by EU governments and the European Parliament, but the Commission said it hopes the new system can enter force on July 1, 1005, as requested by the WTO.