"Traditionally, throughout in its trade relations with China, Pakistan has had a chronic trade deficit. It is primarily because China is a competitor in most of the major sectors of Pakistan's potential export areas." This was stated by Danish Saeed, Chairman of the Special Committee on Regional Economic Affairs, while addressing the meeting of the sub-committee.
He added that after formal signing the Pakistan-China FTA, bilateral trade between the two countries surged by 44 percent over the previous fiscal year. He said that although the bilateral trade has increased but the balance remains overwhelming in China's favour, whose exports to Pakistan amounted to $2.7 billion, compared to Pakistan's exports $464 million in 2005-06, whilst was $525 million and $303 million respectively in 2000-01. This is a very critical situation, which depicts that Pakistan is increasingly becoming only an importing partner of China.
He said that enhancement and diversification of export items from Pakistan to China in the traditional and non-traditional items could lead to narrowing down the trade imbalance by utilising the border routs.
He also expressed grave concern that Pakistani business community is ignoring the exports potential to China and has remained content with their established export destinations ie, US and the Western Europe, and hardly made serious efforts either to diversify the export base or to explore other areas and regions for enhancing the exports volume. This fixed mind-set with the Western markets and non-innovative export approach has constantly been undermining country's export potential, he added.
The participants also noted that China offers huge market for Pakistani rice, fruits and herbal medicines that remain untapped because of inability to meet their standards. Pakistan exports eastern and herbal medicines to China in the raw form through northern land route but these fetch little foreign exchange while Chinese process these raw medicine, value add, package and market them around the world and earn 20 time more.