Former Pakistan Readymade Garments Manufacturers and Exporter Association (Prgmea) president Ijaz A Khokar has said that the textile industry needs sound policies and urgent reforms to increase the export and boost the value-added segment of the textile sector.
He congratulated Ahmad Mukthar Chaudhry for holding additional charge of the Ministry of Textile and urged that he must chalk out a comprehensive textile policy after consulting with the stakeholders, because in the previous regime, stakeholders were not taken into confidence while making the textile policy, he added.
He said the textile exports in February 2008 decreased to 48.6 percent from 64.5 percent in February 2007. The export target for 2007-08 was 19.2 billion dollars, whereas the declining trend of the share of textile exports was indicative of the fact that the country might miss the set target. He suggested the minister to give time to industrialists and have first-hand information regarding the problems of the textile sector.
He told Business Recorder on Wednesday that this figure shows a decrease of four percent. The export of synthetic fibre for July-February 2007-08 was 0.3 billion dollars as compared to 0.2 billion dollars in the same period of the last fiscal year. He said that according to a rough estimate, the cost of production in Pakistan is 12 percent higher than the regional competitors.
"The government structure in Pakistan is not helping the textile sector as other governments in the region are," he said. "The ministry of textile has not been able to deliver a good policy, because it has not followed the correct process for policy development. It is unfortunate that our planning department has been stuck with command-and-control paradigm for such a long time that they cannot shake themselves out of it."
He said the planning department should adopt a participatory development approach for its planning purposes. This would be a relatively harder and probably even more time consuming as compared to the design approach, traditionally adopted, but policies developed with this approach would be more realistic and would have a better chance for success. The participatory approach would ensure that stakeholders representing beneficiaries' vision owned policies. It would be difficult to attach correct weight to the stakeholders' priorities, their needs and conflicting interests but this was where professionalism showed its worth.
He said that a policy developed in isolation never delivered much. Therefore, the need of time is to develop a policy based on a matrix approach rather than a single policy. It would be useless to announce a textile policy without ensuring that our power generation policy will support our textile policy.
He said that in the present economic paradigm, the textile industry is the most important sector in Pakistan's economy. He said a substantial investment had been done in the sector, which should not be wasted and secondly other sectors or our economy are not matured enough to provide us the necessary economic support.
He appealed to Ahmad Mukthar to focus on providing the textile sector a well-deliberated development policy on an urgent basis. The textile sector needs a policy, which should not focus on one or two stakeholders but a policy that should be aimed at developing the entire sector. It should support all stakeholders from growers to retailers viewing textiles as a value-added chain in the economy.
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