In line with Prime Minister's vision to substantiate efforts across the board to improve economic parameters, Pakistan Afghanistan Joint Chamber of Commerce and Industry (PAJCCI) is trying to help facilitate policy advocacy by involving diverse stakeholders to suggest a business oriented framework.
Both transit and trade regime with Afghanistan is receiving immense focus across the border. In this context, a draft proposal from Afghan Ministry pertinent to APTTA and PTA revision set the momentum for further deliberations; hence PAJCCI took the initiative to conduct comprehensive stakeholders review to incorporate perspective of Pakistani business community.
The exercise emphasized greatly on proposing resolutions for the major bottlenecks that hampered ease of doing business, create procedural hindrances, effects quality of services and raises cost of doing business.
This endeavour was conducted right after high level delegation visited to Afghanistan under leadership of Chairman PAJCCI, Zubair Motiwala met with Ministry of Commerce, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Customs & Revenue Department in Afghanistan and highlighted the need of strengthening common grounds across the border for regional peace and prosperity.
The stakeholders unanimously established that in case of both transit and bilateral trade the revisions must be undertaken on reciprocal basis for mutually beneficial relationship.
The high shipping charges and security deposits should be replaced with insurance guarantee or by providing cross stuffing option (with appropriate mechanism in place).
Alternatives like Relief memo, as prevalent in past, can also be utilized to save importers from uncalled risks and losses. Most importantly, foreign shipping lines should be regulated to an extent that it is reasonably priced keeping in view that in last three years, no container was either damaged or lost while transacting in Pakistan (including transit to Afghan).
It was further mentioned that bundle of alternatives must be provided to recipients so that they can opt as per their requirement, like monopoly of bonded carriers must be balanced by operationalizing Railway and incorporating NLC as options.
Similarly recent activation of Gwadar port and establishing TIR regime can also provide significant edge. The participants also raise the issues of accession to Central Asia as part of bilateral APTTA agreement, as currently the goods destined to Central Asia are handled fully by Afghanistan side, taking leverage from Pakistani businesses.
They also focused on issue pertinent to pilferage of goods while transit and established that after such stern measures like tracking, insurance guarantee, scanning and utilization of bonded carriers it is practically impossible that leakages can be done. Also transit via Pakistan is only 30% and remaining 70% is through other routes which imply that strict vigilance and security should be ensured at adjoining borders to stop re-entering of transit goods once it crosses the border by enhancing border management system.