FAISALABAD: The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) will open new avenues for exports with start up of ASEAN Economic Community by the end of this year and Pakistan should make elaborate arrangements to fully en-cash these emerging opportunities, said Samsu Rizal, acting ambassador of Indonesia to Pakistan.
He was addressing the members of the Faisalabad Chamber of Commerce and Industry (FCCI) here.
He said that Preferential Trade Agreement (PTA) was inked between Pakistan and Indonesia in 2013. Indonesia has fully exploited it and successfully enhanced its exports to Pakistan. However, Pakistan is still lagging behind despite the fact that it could also export more than 200 items to the Indonesian markets.
Regarding decline in textile exports to Indonesia, he said that the purpose of his visit to Faisalabad was to apprise local exporters about the vast opportunities available in Indonesian markets for the export of textile related products. He said before signing of PTA between Pakistan and Indonesia, the export of Pakistani Kinno was only US$ 3 million that has now jumped to US$ 20 million. He said that Indonesia is a big country with population of 250 million people. The share of productive youth is 66.6 percent. He said that Indonesia has become one of the largest economies of the world with GDP growth rate of 5.9 percent per annum.
Responding to a question he said that decline in textile exports is also due to tough competition to Pakistan in Indonesia by its regional competitors like China, India and Taiwan. He said that India and Indonesia have already inked Free Trade Agreement (FTA) while Pakistan has yet to start a long negotiation process for FTA.
Earlier in his address acting president Nadeem Allahwala said that Pakistan and Indonesia having bondage of Islamic brotherhood enjoy cordial relations. There is a need to transform these relations into promoting bilateral trade, investment and joint ventures, he said and added that both the countries have bilateral trade volume of US$ 2.25 billion in the Year 2014. Pakistan’s export to Indonesia was US$ 138.17 million while Indonesian exports to Pakistan were US$ 2107.23 million with balance of trade in favor of Indonesia.
He said that Pakistan and Indonesia have signed a Preferential Trade Agreement and volume of bilateral trade between the two countries has no doubt, improved from $700 million in 2010 to $2.25 billion in 2015. However, there is plenty of scope to improve two way trades in many areas by providing better market access to each other’s private sectors, grant more tariff concessions and remove all non-tariff barriers that will help in promoting bilateral trade up to actual potential.
