Working team meets to finalise draft

Member states of the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) began a parley in the city on Sunday to finalise the draft of the trade facilitation agreement (TFA) document for the seven-nation grouping.

Finalisation of the TFA is important to pave the way for free trade agreement within the BIMSTEC, a platform of seven countries -- Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Bhutan and Nepal, officials said.

Inaugurating the event, BIMSTEC Secretary General M Shahidul Islam said this meeting was crucial to spur the momentum for desired trade promotion in the BIMSTEC region.

This is the second meeting of the trade facilitation working group. The first one was also held in Dhaka in November last year on the sidelines of the trade negotiations committee meeting.

The Dhaka meeting made substantial progress in free trade agreement (FTA) negotiations. It was felt that finalisation of the trade facilitation agreement will help accelerate the FTA process, a senior official of the commerce ministry told the FE.

Initially, the FTA framework agreement was devised without separate trade facilitation mechanism, as it was thought that the trade facilitation rules of the WTO will be the basis of the BIMSTEC FTA.

But at the BIMSTEC meeting in Goa, drafting of a separate trade facilitation instrument was stressed and Bangladesh was given the role in drafting the document, officials said. The intra-regional trade in the BIMSTEC region is very low -- 6.0 per cent -- compared to the 24 per cent of the ASEAN grouping.

Having a population of 1.7 billion and a combined GDP of $3.7 trillion, the true potential of the BIMSTEC can be exploited after the implementation of the FTA, Secretary General Shahidul Islam said.

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