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Businessmen fume as Pakistan refuses India MFN status
Monday, 08 September 2003, 19:30 IST
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has decided not to grant most favoured nation (MFN) status to India for the time being, leaving businessmen fuming.
"This has become an emotional issue for Pakistanis and we don't want to take any hasty decisions that hurt our people," a commerce ministry official told IANS on condition of anonymity.
But businessmen here seem to be in favour of granting MFN status to India. Such a status eases qualitative and quantitative restrictions on the flow of goods between the two countries.
India gave Pakistan MFN status in 1996. Since then New Delhi has urged Pakistan from time to time to accord such a status to India to increase their trade.
Much has happened between the two countries since 1996, including the deployment of troops on their border in 2002. Pakistan has in the past linked the grant of MFN status to India to the Kashmir dispute.
A commerce ministry official said: "Pakistan has been increasing the number of items open for trading with India step by step and has added 78 items to the list though not the ones mentioned by India."
Commerce Minister Humayun Akhtar had earlier said that granting MFN status was no different from the most ordinary status given by one country to another nation with which it is trading.
"But it has now become an emotional issue and hence the minister has also stepped back and linked the granting of MFN status to serious discussions with India on political disputes," Khalid Mahmood, a research fellow at Islamabad's Institute of Policy Studies, told IANS.
Parliamentarian and leading businessman Illyas Bilour says the choice for the two countries is to either have normal trade with each other or to let smuggling between the two countries of goods worth $1.5 billion a year to continue.
Indian goods come to Pakistan either directly from across the border or through places like Singapore and Dubai.
The All Pakistan Textile Mills Association (APTMA) has been demanding for long that its members be enabled to import textile machinery parts from India that are made there with licences from German, Swiss or other companies.
The products there are far cheaper than the same parts manufactured in European countries. But Islamabad has been indifferent to their appeals.
"After 2004 when the textile quota agreement expires, Pakistan would find it difficult to defend its refusal to give MFN status to India," says APTMA spokesman Hafeez Abid.
Source: IANS
Source: IANS