Pakistan and Bangladesh should enter joint ventures

Islamabad: Pakistan and Bangladesh have tremendous opportunities of enhancing co-operation in Jute, IT, Energy, Tourism, Oil & Gas, Services and other sectors. However, to take full advantage of each others complementarities, Pakistan and Bangladesh should enter joint ventures and make investments in these sectors of economy of both the countries.

This was observed by High Commissioner of Bangladesh Yasmeen Murshed while addressing business community at Islamabad Chamber of Commerce and Industry during her visit to ICCI. She said Pakistani businessmen have shown much interest in Bangladeshi Jute sector while other areas of Bangladeshi economy also offer attractive trade and lucrative investment opportunities.

She said there was a need to enhance people-to-people and business-to-business level contacts to explore more areas of common interest in both the countries. She said experts of both countries involving public and private sectors should sit together to sort out the non-tariff trade barriers between the two countries.

Yasmeen Murshed said that new governments are in place in both the countries and they are very confident and interested to boost up trade and economic relations up to their full potential. Bangladesh has put in place number of institutions to handle business community problems, she added.

She said that a Joint Economic Committee meeting between Pakistan and Bangladesh was expected to be held in June 2009 to further enhance bilateral economic relations. She stressed for the need of governments interventions to settle the problems and issues which were proving bottlenecks in promoting bilateral trade.

She said both countries should revise shipping protocols to encourage and promote the role of private sector for establishing direct shipping lines between the two countries. She said Bangladesh desires immediate conclusion of Early Harvesting Program with Pakistan as a first step and its successful results would pave way for Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between the two countries.

In his welcome address, Mian Shaukat Masud, President, Islamabad Chamber of Commerce and Industry emphasised for enhanced exchange of trade delegations to explore business potential and hold B2B meetings which will eventually increase trade and investment between Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Highlighting issues being faced by Pakistan with Bangladesh, he said for Pre-shipment inspection of its goods, Pakistan should be waived off from inclusion in the block of countries for which the authorised agent was the Dubai based Bureau Veritas as it was discouraging Pakistani exporters and delaying shipments to Bangladesh.

He said Bangladesh should resolve Pakistani pharmaceutical companies problems regarding registration of their drugs in Bangladesh. He said both countries should open bank branches in each other to facilitate the business communities in promoting trade and investment while a Dispute Resolution Body should be formed at government level for speedy resolution of payment disputes.

He said that the two countries could also greatly benefit from each others experience in engineering, education, telecommunication and data communication sectors beside co-operation and collaboration in textile industry.