Finally hard work and constant efforts of President of Pakistan, Ministry of Commerce/Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Textile aided by the natural flood disaster the 27 EU heads of states agreed to provide some concessions to Pakistan on export in EU Summit on September 16, 2010.
A lot of hard work could go waste in case the negotiations are not properly handled at this stage. Although the competency of the negotiating team could not be challenged but it's imperative that we should be very clear on our agenda. What is the point giving us a favour or duty concession on products where Pakistan is the number 1 supplier.
This, itself, indicates that they are bound to buy these products from us and any advantage given to this sector would hardly give 40 to 50 million dollars boost in export, which would hardly give any advantage in export numbers or create employment which is the key purpose of asking this concession.
Definitely the duty concession on Apparel should be on our agenda 1 and without this any concession given would not give any significant advantage resulting in absolute failure to all the efforts done. If the duty concession is given to the entire textile imports it could increase an export by about $500 million resulting in creating few hundred thousand jobs.
Already EU is contributing a lot as aid to Pakistan because of this flood disaster but these aids go from Government-to-Government, which is not significant for a common man. However, any kind of job creation would bring a lot of respect for EU in the heart of the people.
The end purpose of EU is to provide job security to people. On the other hand it won't be a big revenue loss by EU countries in terms of revenues and also there would be no disadvantage to consumer. Secondly the advantage given would hardly increase export by 10 to 15 percent since we don't have any infrastructure to make any substantial increase in our export.
The Pakistan government must insist on Apparel and do not give up on negotiations now that it has been approved in the EU Summit. The EU has talked about time limited duty reduction. We must insist on granting this permission up to end of GSP Regime (2013) after which the EU has agreed to consider Pakistan in the new GSP Plus Scheme from 2014.
There may a pressure on government to accept only few categories not including Apparel which is our biggest source of employment and need of an hour. We must be on unified platform and need to be firm. The government just cannot accept anything less and take promises for more at later stage by the EU. We need to stick to our stand.-PR
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