A government panel sits with stakeholders today for a review of the country's trade-facilitation issues under the draft Comprehensive Trade Policy (CTP) suiting global business regimes, officials said.
Various trade barriers have been identified in the field of trade by consultants from the European Union (EU) who have prepared the draft CTP.
The barriers are mainly related to customs procedures, and hurdles in communications and trade finance, they said.
In their recommendations the consultants have shown the way of resolving the issues. They suggested amending the existing customs act, improving the fragile highways concerned and reducing interests on bank loans for facilitation of the country's overall trade operations.
The ministry of commerce (MoC) sources said representatives of the finance division, and bank and financial institutions division of the ministry of finance (MoF), MoC, the ministry of industries, shipping ministry, the export promotion bureau (EPB), Bangladesh Export Processing Zones Authority (BEPZA), Chittagong port and other authorities concerned will attend the meeting.
Amitabh Chakravarty, additional secretary of the MoC and director-general of its World Trade Centre (WTO) Cell and also head of the official subcommittee, will preside over the meeting.
Under the subcommittee, four working committees are working on the related trade issues with the objective of clearing the way for faster trade.
A source at the MoC said, "We have identified some important obstacles in the country's overall trade facilitation and consultants of the CTP also identified various difficulties in this connection.
"We will sit the stakeholders concerned Wednesday (today) to review our recommendations in the field of facilitation of domestic trade that we identified with the draft CTP."
The major principles of the CTP are promotion of diversified, export-led industrialisation, strengthening production network of existing and export-oriented products, increasing the country's international competitiveness, creating favourable market-access conditions, and trade contribution towards poverty reduction by increasing and diversifying exports.
Besides, making trade regime contributable towards sustainable development by ensuring its consistency with development objectives and existing international trade commitments is another major principle laid down in the policy.
The draft CTP is prepared under the Bangladesh Trade Policy Support Programme (BTPSP), jointly funded by the European Union (EU) and the Government of Bangladesh.
The policy will be finalized soon. MoC is the implementing authority for the trade recipe tuned to the needs of present times.
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