KARACHI – Pakistan Businesses Forum (PBF) on Friday urged the US Administration to provide complete market access to Pakistan entrepreneurs on favorable duty slaps in order to enhance bilateral trade between two countries through US-Pak TIFA. It is the primary mechanism for both countries to discuss trade and investment issues and focus on ways to strengthen the bilateral relationship.
PBF Vice President. Ahmad Jawad said the United States continues to be Pakistan’s largest market for exports. “we need to move away from geo-strategic to geo-economics”.
Unfolding the figures, he said US goods imports from Pakistan totaled $3.9 billion in 2019, up 5.7% ($213 million) from 2018, and up 24.0% from 2009.
Jawad also stated the Proposed Economic Development Act by the US Senate for Pak-Afghan border areas for the period of the next 10 years was well required and If the senate approved this bill, country textile exports to the US increase tenfold. However, there must be an incentive package for the rest of the country too in this bill for being a front-line state in combating terrorism with the US.
He said Pakistan has been hosting 2.7 million Afghan refugees for over the last four decades now we hoped that in principle, Pakistan will be provided free market access to United States and the US private sector will further enter into joint ventures in economic sphere.
“What we need expansion of the scope of new US Senate Bill to whole of territory of Pakistan and to opt the model of joint ventures”. Jawad said and added we also expect that the new US leadership should remove the bottlenecks in bilateral investment treaty and efforts be made on priority to better Trade and Investment Framework Agreement (TIFA) agreement and it equally imperative that US should offer same package and incentives which it offers to Bangladesh and Sri Lanka in textile exports. Yet Pak-US bilateral trade of volume is only touching $7 billion.
PBF however recommends a Preferential Trade Agreement (PTA) which allows U.S. soybean and certain grades of cotton preferential access while providing Pakistan access to the U.S. textile markets – especially for apparel made from both cotton and man-made fiber in the first stage.
Jawad further told we saw various arrangements in the form of FTA/PTA’s made by the previous governments and evolved a mechanism to achieve best of the results for trade promotion, but could not succeed to enhance its exports, which are backbone of the economy in any country of the world. Pakistan’s total trade volume is accounted for more than $75 billion out of which our exports are hardly touching $24 billion mark which should be reviewed in detail where we did wrong.
