Kathmandu, February 25:

The two-day long SAFTA committee of experts (CoE) meeting concluded here today after agreeing to forward the unresolved agenda for the ministerial council meeting scheduled for Monday.

Although the CoE, a commerce joint-secretary level technical group, couldn’t make any breakthrough on the unresolved issues, the participating delegates agreed to forward the agenda for ministerial level meeting to get a go-ahead, said a participant of the meeting. According to him, the issues include removal of non-tariff and para-tariff barriers, fine-tuning the dispute settlement mechanism and finalising the list of sensitive items for each of the seven members.

The launching of the South Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA) agreement took place in

July last year and the phasing out of the tariff and non-tariff and para-tariff barriers

remained on sharp watch from all quarters.

Implementation of SAFTA’s Trade Liberation Programme (TLP), elimination of quantitative restrictions and how

to notify WTO regarding the SAFTA agreement were discussed and sub-committees have been set up to hammer out the said issues.

The meeting welcomed Afghanistan as a new member of SAFTA as a least developed country (LDC) and decided to forward the proposal to the ministerial council meeting. Afghanistan is formally joining the seven-member regional bloc South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) through its 14th summit due in April this year in New Delhi.

At the meeting, India raised strong concerns at Pakistan’s attempt at selective implementation of SAFTA. According to a member of the Indian delegation, while Pakistan had ratified the SAFTA agreement and had hastened to implement it with the other six countries, it has failed to grant those privileges to India. The counter argument presented by Pakistan is that this has happened primarily because India too had put a lot of non-tariff barriers on its exports.

“This is like calling the chalk and cheese the same,” quipped the Indian official delegation, “Having non-tariff barriers and non-compliance of SAFTA are not one and the same thing. Every country has a number of these non-tariff barriers for different reasons which needs to reduced over the course of time.”

According to India, Pakistan has provided it a positive list comprising of items in which it can trade. But, the SAFTA agreement entails provisions of only a negative list or a list of sensitive items, which are subject to maximum ceiling to be mutually agreed among contracting states.

SAFTA envisions zero duty trading by 2012, following a series of annual cuts. Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and the Maldives, regarded as the least developing countries in the regional bloc, will get an additional three years to acquire zero duty status.

High-level SAFTA meet in town

Himalayan News Service

Kathmandu, February 25: The stage for the meeting of SAFTA Ministerial Council (SMC), which happens to be the highest decision-making body for SAFTA, is all clear, as all high-level dignitaries have already arrived in Kathmandu.

The SMC meeting is expected to discuss and clear intra-regional free trade issues for the forthcoming 14th SAARC summit scheduled for April in New Delhi.

The first SMC meeting and the CoE meeting took place in Dhaka in April 2006. This round of the meeting is the second such meeting. Besides review of the free trade area pact implementation, SAARC ministers will be discussing a report forwarded by the expert group on better implementation of the SAFTA agreement in a bid to promote and enhance mutual trade and economic cooperation among the contracting states.

Sources say that removal of non-tariff and para-tariff barriers will also be on the agenda of the meeting as well as inclusion of Afghanistan in SAFTA.

Afghanistan will formally become a SAARC member during the forthcoming summit.

For the meeting, about 55-high level delegates representing member countries have already arrived in the capital. They include the Indian commerce minister Kamal Nath, Dr A B Mirza Azizul Islam, adviser for finance and commerce of Bangladesh, G L Peiris, minister for exports, development and international trade of Sri Lanka and Humayun Akhtar Khan, minister of commerce of Pakistan.