The Export Promotion Bureau (EPB), like a broken record stuck on pin in a gramophone of the olden days, regularly brings out one issue in the media to embarrass the Bangladesh embassies abroad. The issue is a report card on performance of the embassies in meeting export targets it sets. The Financial Express carried such a news in its online edition on April 24. The news said that 31 foreign missions have failed to achieve their July to March targets. Since these EPB report cards were introduced during the Ershad days, the overwhelming majority of the embassies have always failed in meeting export targets.
Such news made sense at another time that has long gone by. In the Cold War days, the world was divided into free and command economies. The command economies carried a lot of their international trade under the barter system where an embassy was a significant player in international trade. With the end of the Cold War and the advent of globalisation, goods and services move across national boundaries these days easily without the need of an embassy in between. The parties involved in actual international trade now are the exporters and the importers and the financial institutions that facilitate such trade. To imagine a role for an embassy in this system in terms of export targets would be imagining something that has become redundant decades ago. This does not mean that an embassy has no role in the system of international trade these days. In fact, its role has become more important and many times more difficult than it used to be during the Cold War days.
The embassy these days is an integral part of a country's international trade regime acting hand in glove with its Ministry/Department dealing with international trade and all other departments/branches that deal with any aspect of international trade. The objective of this international trade regime, universal to all countries in varying degrees, is to coordinate international trade issues among all the stakeholders, public and private, with the state taking the lead role so that the country's international traders can compete in the best ways possible with their foreign competitors.
So where does a Bangladesh embassy knock these days to facilitate Bangladesh's international trade in particular its exports? It should, like the embassy of any other country, follow the entire international trade regime in the host country to find out the items that the host country could import from Bangladesh and disseminate the information to the Bangladesh exporters taking advantage of the revolution that has occurred in information technology since the end of the Cold War. In other words, in the post-Cold War era, the embassy has become a crucial facilitator in international trade. It is no longer a seller of Bangladesh exports in the host country because the last place importers in a host country would come to buy anything from Bangladesh would be a Bangladesh embassy because these days, they get such information from a variety of other sources, most of all, through the Internet, international trade fairs, etc.
The embassy's role from a seller of the Cold War days has now moved to other more challenging areas. Apart from keeping Bangladeshi exporters up-to-date about what goods they would be able to sell in the host country, the embassy must also ensure the importers in the host country are also up-to-date about the goods and services they could import from Bangladesh profitably.
To do this, the embassy must be in constant touch with the importers, trade organisations, particularly the chambers of commerce. It must also organise trade-related seminars and introduce Bangladeshi traders and trade delegations to the hosts. Most importantly, a Bangladesh embassy must ensure that Bangladeshi exporters participate in international trade fairs in the host country because such fairs are crucial to enhancing Bangladesh's exports.
Thus it is the embassy that must tell the government about the trade prospects in the host country and not the other way around. Is the Bangladesh Government in darkness about the fundamental changes in international trade as its strategy of setting export targets for the embassy underlines? Two examples from my own experience as an Ambassador would explain this point. I was then posted in Cairo. A Southeast Asian Ambassador had told me that at the beginning of the year his embassy provided the market information about Egypt to his government to set the ball rolling. Thereafter his government's ministry of international trade and other related government departments would sit with the exporters and other stakeholders to determine the export strategy (not targets in figures) to Egypt. The relationship between the embassy and the stakeholders at home led by the Minister responsible for international trade was hand in glove where the embassy was also given instructions in developing the export strategy.
When I was an Ambassador in Tokyo, a South Asian Ambassador had raised an interesting issue when I made my courtesy call on him upon assuming my position. He told me that the Economic Minister in my Embassy while in charge of the Embassy before my arrival, had met him and confided in him the fact that the Bangladesh Ministry of Commerce had chided the Mission for its "failure" to meet export targets. The Ambassador failed to understand why and how the embassy could be held responsible for meeting export targets when international trade is 100 per cent the function of the private sector worldwide. This Ambassador asked me if what he had heard from the Economic Minister was something that he had cooked up for he could not believe that the embassy could be set an export target and chided for not meeting it when the idea of an embassy as a seller of goods and commodities is non-existent in post-Cold War changes in international trade.
International trade is now synonymous with economic diplomacy. A country these days negotiates in international and bilateral forums the rules and framework for conducting international trade. These negotiations are complex and intellectually very demanding but places where a country fights for its exporters. It is the successes of such negotiations or economic diplomacy where governments worldwide achieve their export objectives. In fact, the Bangladesh government perhaps stands alone in believing that the embassy can really reach the export set for it by the EPB while the embassy does not even see the items it is asked to sell. The EBP just jots down the items led invariably by the RMG and sets the target without even the courtesy of any communication with the embassy and embarrasses it when it fails to reach the target by media trial by releasing the names of the "defaulting" embassy.
That international trade today is much more complex than the Bangladesh Ministry of Commerce or the EPB realises is borne out by another simple fact. The US has withdrawn our favoured status in trading by tying it with labour conditions. The EU could do so on issues of human rights. These are matters critical to our exports. Instead of harassing the embassies with export target, it is high time the Bangladesh government followed the international trade regime of any country in South Asia and recast its own international trade regime where. It should consider the embassy as an important part of the system rather than one to be humiliated and embarrassed as if it and the government of Bangladesh are on opposite sides!
HM Ershad, who disliked the Foreign Ministry and the career diplomats, introduced this system of export target and used to embarrass both the embassy and the EPB by releasing the EPB's report card to the media. But even he had a point because when he had introduced it, the embassy was involved in international trade as seller (and also buyer) that has long since become history. The Bangladesh embassy is in a mess in playing the type of role the embassy of other countries play in international trade these days where setting trade export target for it is not just a fallacy but totally unrealistic. That is, however, a different story.
The writer is a former Ambassador.
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