The government is going to revisit the existing trade-negotiation structure ahead of graduation from the poor-country club for ensuring efficient and time-bound agreements with other countries, officials said.
The planned review aims to strengthen the country's negotiation capacity to successfully face the looming challenges of the post-graduation trade regime, they added.
The planned negotiation setup would be given a permanent shape.
The ministry of commerce (MoC) will sit this week with the ministries, divisions, and departments concerned alongside the stakeholders, academicians, think tanks, and research organisations, among others, to get their views on revisiting the trade negotiating structure, officials said.
According to officials concerned, presently the foreign trade agreement (FTA) wing of the MoC is responsible for carrying out international trade-related issues of Bangladesh. In the case of other countries, the economy and trade-related ministries deal with the issues.
Once graduated from the least developed country status, slated for 2026, officials said the country will have to go through multiple challenges like losing duty-free and quota-free market access as well as other trade preferences.
Thus, they said, Bangladesh needs to prepare itself to offset all obstacles on its way to access to the global and regional markets for smooth and resilient LDC graduation.
A senior commerce ministry official told the FE on Sunday that the newer generation of regional trade agreements (RTAs) has been evolving with wide coverage like environment, labour and digital trade issues, which requires comprehensive understanding, resilient institutional memory and hands-on experiences in trade and investment.
He said the trade negotiation, whether it is multilateral or bilateral in nature, is a very complicated process and Bangladesh is relatively new in this arena.
The existing set up of the FTA negotiating, thus, requires it to be revisited so that it could meet the changing dynamic of newer RTA and the aftermaths of LDC graduation.
According to another official, the ministry of commerce studied the trade negotiation structures of countries like Japan, USA, United Kingdom, India, Singapore, and Sri Lanka to get knowledge on how they negotiate bilateral and multilateral trade issues in the modern days.
He said the MoC thinks that there should be a permanent shape for negotiating foreign trade-related issues by involving ministries and departments concerned, and building capacity of officials of the departments who remain at the same offices throughout their job tenure.
They also discussed whether there is a need to set up a separate entity like department or division under the MoC after necessary blending with experts/academia from concerned fields, or go forward with the existing setup.
They also discussed how to follow global best practices in this case.
The official said they will go forward with the inputs from this week's meeting scheduled for Tuesday.
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