The Lahore Chamber of Commerce and Industry and Turkish Embassy Wednesday decided to establish a new mechanism to expedite trade between the two countries. The decision was made at a meeting between the Turkish Ambassador S Babur Girgin and LCCI President Engineer Sohail Lashari. LCCI Vice President Kashif Anwar also spoke on the occasion.
The Ambassador said the very objective of putting in place a new mechanism was to translate the potential between the two countries, and urged the LCCI President to establish a Turkey desk at the LCCI so that the trade-related information could be passed on to the Pakistan's business community. He also invited the LCCI President to sign MoU with Istanbul CCI.
He said that a direct flight between Lahore and Istanbul would start in month's time that would prove a giant leap towards enhancing bilateral trade relations. "Turkey believes in Pakistan as it is the country of future," he added. The diplomat expressed the optimism that Pakistan energy crisis would be over soon as it had a lot of potential and its people were very hard working. He hinted at more investment in transport sector in coming years.
Speaking on the occasion, LCCI President Engineer Sohail Lashari said Turkey was an inspiring example for the world as far as its economic progress was concerned. He said Turkey had always helped Pakistani people generously in every hour of trial. He said Metro bus project was a shining example of Pakistan-Turkey friendship, adding that the project had been completed in a short period with the co-operation of Turkey and about one hundred and seventy five thousand people are travelling by metro buses every day. He said that he had no words to describe Pak-Turk friendship as both the countries had strong brotherly relations, adding the modern cleanliness system launched with the co-operation of Turkey in Lahore was continuing successfully and now its scope was being expanded to other big cities of Punjab.
He said the Punjab government was providing very conducive atmosphere to foreign investors and incentives were being provided to them on priority basis. He said that both the sides need to make all out efforts to develop closer trade and investment ties between us practically involving all the concerned individuals. He said that although the bilateral trade between Pakistan and Turkey has been gradually growing but it still leaves much to be desired. In the same period of time, Pak exports to Turkey have shown considerable improvement.
However, the current level of trade between Pakistan and Turkey has least relevance to the size of the markets of the two countries. In terms of GDP, Turkey ranked at 17th place is way ahead of Pakistan which is at 47th place. The LCCI is ready to play its due role in exploring the available opportunities. Turkey imports semi-finished goods from various countries in bulk for value addition and Pakistan can be the best case for that. Pakistani businessmen were capable of exporting semi-finished goods to Turkey from textiles to dairy products, from fresh fruits and vegetables to precious and semi-precious gems and many more, he added.
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