The New Nation - Internet Edition

BSS, Dhaka

The government is taking renewed interest in signing bilateral free trade agreements with some neighbours at a time when the SAFTA is facing snags and the WTO negotiations have just collapsed.

Senior government officials, trade policy analysts and leaders of different chamber bodies and trade associations on Sunday discussed fresh moves at a meeting at the Ministry of Commerce and agreed to take preparatory exercise towards opening discussions with some neighbours.

Adviser for Commerce Dr Hossain Zillur Rahman was in the chair, official sources here said on Sunday.

Commerce Secretary Feroz Ahmed, BGMEA president Anwarul Alam Chowdhury, MCCI president Latifur Rahman, CPD executive director Dr Mustafizur Rahman, among others, were present.

The move has been essentially focused to India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. But some participants in the meeting also stressed on the need for similar move with Nepal and Bhutan to overcome snags to trade promotion under the SAFTA framework with them.

They also laid emphasis on bilateral free trade with Turkey and Russia saying, the latest collapse of the WTO negotiations in Geneva is indicative a further long journey to benefit from global free trade.

So Bangladesh should better enter into more bilateral free trade agreements to exploit more trade creation opportunities on individual country basis. Free trade agreements both on bilateral and regional level is also allowed under the SAFTA and WTO framework, participants argued.

Hossain Zillur made it clear that any move towards signing bilateral free trade agreement should be the outcome of joint home work to be carried out by public-private partnership.

"The private sector should contribute the major inputs while the government will take on such negotiation," he said.

Referring to SAFTA, participants sounded frustration in the slow pace of opening up of new markets within South Asia. They said the high negative list of products, prevalence of huge non- tariff barriers and above all the exclusion of the service sector are responsible for the difficulties.

It can be said, by and large, except the permission of duty free export of eight million pieces of garments from here to India. Investment within the region is also not picking up under the SAFTA regime although it has been included in the list of free trade a few years ago.

Bilateral free trade approach may be thus the other option, the meeting agreed and suggested measures how to move towards the goal. The meeting decided to formulate a plan of action and to ask Bangladesh Foreign Trade Institute to set up a core group within a week to work as facilitator to chart out a framework of negotiation.

They will also develop the term of reference (TOR) for such negotiations. Bangladesh High Commissions in the South Asian countries will also be asked to open preliminary discussion with the host governments in this respect, sources said.