Effective steps against smuggling are needed
Thursday, 10 December 2009
Amin Ahmed
Smuggled goods do not pay any duties or do not spend on quality control and other measures. Therefore, these are marketed substantially cheaper in comparison to their rival producers and smuggled products have been increasingly grabbing the market shares of legitimate local producers in Bangladesh.
Successive governments in this country showed a rather resigned attitude towards smuggling, citing the difficulties of watching over the vast and porous land and sea borders of the country. But other countries with even much bigger and easily penetrable borders are seen as quite successful in countering smuggling or limiting the same. Therefore, there can be no excuse on the part of the law enforcement machinery in Bangladesh not to take effective steps against smuggling.
Apart from improving the enforcement measures against smuggling, the proposal that all imported products must display on their bodies the names of their local importers with their full addresses, need to be considered immediately and seriously. Besides, the taking of appropriate tariff and non-tariff measures can also much benefit the local producers in their unfair competition against smuggled and imported products.
Creating disincentives for smuggling also involves making the production processes lean and efficient by the local producers to cut costs to the bone. Producers in Bangladesh need to look inward at their own establishments to find out whether they have been following modern production processes that eliminate waste, minimise stock holding, reduce production time or handling of production goods on process to bare minimum, etc., that can significantly reduce costs of production and can add to competitiveness of goods produced by them both in relation to genuinely imported items or the smuggled ones.
Smuggling also means outflow of precious resources brought into the country at high costs. For example, petroleum products and fertilizers are imported by Bangladesh incurring heavy expenditures. The expenditures soar further from marketing them at subsidized prices. But a great deal of such imported resources get smuggled out of the country where prices of these goods are found to be relatively higher from non-payment of subsidies. The smuggling out of these resources is a net vital loss to the country.
Smuggled goods do not pay any duties or do not spend on quality control and other measures. Therefore, these are marketed substantially cheaper in comparison to their rival producers and smuggled products have been increasingly grabbing the market shares of legitimate local producers in Bangladesh.
Successive governments in this country showed a rather resigned attitude towards smuggling, citing the difficulties of watching over the vast and porous land and sea borders of the country. But other countries with even much bigger and easily penetrable borders are seen as quite successful in countering smuggling or limiting the same. Therefore, there can be no excuse on the part of the law enforcement machinery in Bangladesh not to take effective steps against smuggling.
Apart from improving the enforcement measures against smuggling, the proposal that all imported products must display on their bodies the names of their local importers with their full addresses, need to be considered immediately and seriously. Besides, the taking of appropriate tariff and non-tariff measures can also much benefit the local producers in their unfair competition against smuggled and imported products.
Creating disincentives for smuggling also involves making the production processes lean and efficient by the local producers to cut costs to the bone. Producers in Bangladesh need to look inward at their own establishments to find out whether they have been following modern production processes that eliminate waste, minimise stock holding, reduce production time or handling of production goods on process to bare minimum, etc., that can significantly reduce costs of production and can add to competitiveness of goods produced by them both in relation to genuinely imported items or the smuggled ones.
Smuggling also means outflow of precious resources brought into the country at high costs. For example, petroleum products and fertilizers are imported by Bangladesh incurring heavy expenditures. The expenditures soar further from marketing them at subsidized prices. But a great deal of such imported resources get smuggled out of the country where prices of these goods are found to be relatively higher from non-payment of subsidies. The smuggling out of these resources is a net vital loss to the country.