DNA

LAHORE, MAY 26  – Pakistan Businesses Forum (PBF) urged United States Administration to provide complete market access to Pakistan entrepreneurs on favourable duty slaps in order to enhance bilateral trade between two countries; as Pakistan was the United States’ 55th largest supplier of goods imports in 2019.

U.S. goods imports from Pakistan totaled $3.9 billion in 2019, up 5.7% ($213 million) from 2018, and up 24.0% from 2009.

The top import categories (2-digit HS) in 2019 were: miscellaneous textile articles ($1.3 billion), knit apparel ($880 million), woven apparel ($607 million), cotton ($161 million), and leather products ($140 million).

U.S. total imports of agricultural products from Pakistan totaled $125 million in 2019. Leading categories include: rice ($38 million), sugars, sweeteners, beverage bases ($29 million), spices ($18 million), snack foods ($8 million), and processed fruit & vegetables ($7 million).

Talking to media, PBF Vice President Ahmad Jawad said US Senators introduced the Economic Development Act before US Senate for Pak Afghan boarder area for the period of next 10 years, If senate approved this bill, country textile exports to US increase tenfold. However there must be an incentive package for rest of the country too in this bill for being a front-line state in combating terrorism with the US.

He said Pakistan has been hosting 2.7 million Afghan refugees for over the last four decades besides laying down the highest number human lives against war on terror and entire world widely acknowledged Pakistan’s historic sacrifices.

The entire business community hoped that in principle, under new era, Pakistan will be provided free market access to United States at zero duty and the US private sector will further enter into joint ventures in economic sphere.

“What we need expansion of the scope of new US Senate Bill to whole of territory of Pakistan and to opt the model of joint ventures”. Jawad said and added we also expect that the new US leadership should remove the bottlenecks in bilateral investment treaty and efforts be made on priority to better Trade and Investment Framework Agreement (TIFA) agreement and it equally imperative that US should offer same package and incentives which it offers to Bangladesh and Sri Lanka in textile exports. Yet Pak-US trade of volume is only touching $7 billion.

Jawad further told we saw various arrangements in the form of FTA/PTA’s made by the previous governments and evolved a mechanism to achieve best of the results for trade promotion, but could not succeed to enhance its exports, which are backbone of the economy in any country of the world. Pakistan’s total trade volume is accounted for more than $75 billion out of which our exports are hardly touching $24 billion mark which should be reviewed in detail where we did wrong.=DNA

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