FAISALABAD. Increasing gap between imports and exports is detrimental to the national economy and government must take immediate and necessary measures to curtail the unnecessary imports by encouraging their local substitutes, said Shabbir Hussain Chawla president Faisalabad Chamber Of Commerce & Industry (FCCI).
In a statement issue here, he said that our imports are soaring at $53.02 billion where as the exports are dwindling at 20.4 billion dollars. He said that the gap between imports and exports has crossed the limit of $32 billion and in this condition we would be unable to achieve our ultimate economic targets of progress and prosperity.
He further said that predominantly Pakistan is an agrarian country but it is very disturbing that the production of cotton crop has reduced from 13 million bales to 10 million bales. He future told that Pakistan is actually a blessed country and has nine different ecological zones from in which we could cultivate all types of exotic and high value fruits, vegetables, cereals, pulses and spices etc. he lamented that despite of this inherent edge, we are importing a large quantity of edible oil , tea and other agricultural commodities. He said that our policy makers have totally ignored the high-value crops which are one of the major causes of rural poverty and migration from rural to urban areas.
He further said that due to ill conceived policies, the cost of production has increased manifold and hence we are unable to export surplus wheat in international markets even at minimum purchase price. “Per acre yield in Pakistan is also very low as compared to the other neighboring countries”, he said and added that our agriculturists as well as successive governments failed to initiate the process of value edition in Agriculture produce.
He said that government must ban or impose heavy import regulatory duties on unnecessary imports in addition to encouraging the local substitutes of the major imports. However, he requested the government to consult leading chambers including FCCI to identify the import items which are unnecessary and are liable to be subjected to regulatory duty. He further said that we should take care while identifying unnecessary import items so that it could not affect our domestic industrial or business activities.
