Industrial cooperation: fourth ministerial meeting of D-8 countries from January 26th in Tehran

Fourth ministerial meeting of D-8 countries on industrial co-operation will take place from January 26 to 28 in Tehran. The meeting will be preceded by senior officials of member countries including of Deputy Ministers. Officials of member countries will hold meetings of Task Forces on industry in order to consider wide variety of issues at expert level and both segments of public and private stakeholders.
D-8 industrial production increased from seven percent in 2009 to 18 percent in the end of 2010 and it is expected that industrial activity would achieve a 25 percent annualised pace. D-8 held its first industrial ministerial meeting in 2010 in Tehran. One year later, the second industrial ministerial meeting was held in October 2011 in Istanbul, Turkey and the third industrial ministerial meeting was held from October 8-10, 2012 in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
At these meetings, D-8 has tried to utilise existing capacities in order to increase industrial co-operation within its ranks and improve its collective relative weight in the global industry. "Tehran Declaration", "Istanbul Declaration" and "Dhaka Declaration" provide quite a pragmatic approach to move in the direction of expanding industrial and technological co-operation amongst D-8 Member States.
The issues for co-operation under industry are categorised in 12 Task Forces of automotive industry, electronics and ICT, iron-steel, machinery, petrochemicals, cement, energy, food industries, standardisation, technology co-operation, SMEs, and textile and garments. In the context of the Dhaka ministerial meeting, senior officials meeting tried to consider all issues in one single day and drafted a set of proposals for adoption by the ministerial meeting.
The ministerial meeting subsequently endorsed, among other decisions, a proposal by the Minister of Industry, Mine and Trade of Iran to authorise next meeting of senior officials meeting to consider issues related to D-8 industrial co-operation and identify the bottlenecks and remedial approaches to the D-8 industrial co-operation. Iran maintains that it is imperative to work out and adopt a very objective and realistic approach to the future work of industrial ministerial meetings, including with respect to the current mechanism of the co-ordination of Task Forces shared between and among a number of countries - which, in certain cases, might have not proved conducive to achieving the desired pace of dynamism and progress.
The proposed amended Task Forces will be as follows: (i) manufacturing task force (merging task forces of automotive industry, machinery, cement, iron-steel, textile and garments, petrochemicals, food industries); and (ii) standardisation, assessment, accreditation and metrology; SMEs; energy; technology, electronics and ICT (previously electronics & ICT task force and technology co-operation task force)
After considerations by task forces, senior officials' meeting (at the level of Deputy Ministers of Industry) will be convened as preparatory body for the Ministerial Meeting, and will consider reports by Task Forces, and will endorse and submit proposals to the plenary of ministerial meeting on industry, for their review and decision.