The final three-day long negotiations to conclude a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between the members of the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) will begin tomorrow in Thailand, foreign ministry officials said. Such an agreement, they added, will give a boost to Bangladesh trade as well as the other BIMSTEC member states – Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand. “It is long due. This initiative is going to give a boost to regional trade,” Foreign Secretary Shahidul Haque told The Independent.“Bangladesh has already achieved preferential market access to India, and subject to the completion of the negotiations, we will get preferential market access to Thailand, Sri Lanka and other member countries,” he said. “Thailand and Sri Lanka are big markets. When Bangladeshi products will get preferential market access under zero or reduced tariff, the export of the country will increase”, he added.Under the South Asian Free Trade Agreement (SAFTA), India provided Bangladesh with duty-free market access for all the products barring 25 items in 2011. “We will discuss as to when the FTA will be signed and from when tariff elimination and reduction will take place,” said a foreign ministry official on the final negotiations. There is a consensus, more or less, among the member states that the FTA would come into effect from early next year and possibly from February, he said. About the tariff elimination and reduction, the official said, “All BIMSTEC member states agreed in 2011 to make it effective from July, 2012. But it did not happen due to some procedural issues.” For the last four years, the official said, a member country did not provide negative list, an essential component of the agreement. “We could not move forward due to this,” he said. “That member has now submitted the negative list and all the member states agreed to implement the FTA as soon as possible,” he added, There are about 5,600 products under six-digit harmonized system (HS) code and the tariff for the goods would be eliminated under four modalities, according to officials. The member countries agreed in 2011 that India, Sri Lanka and Thailand would eliminate tariff of 10 per cent of the total products by June 2015 and another 48 per cent by June 2018, they said. These countries also agreed to reduce tariff for 19 per cent products by June 2018 and the remaining 23 per cent products will be included in the negative list, they added. Since it could not be materialised, the officials said that a new deadline to implement the modalities will be fixed during the final negotiations. The member states will need to sign four instruments to implement the BIMSTEC FTA, they said. The instruments are Framework Agreement on Free Trade Area, Protocol to Amend the Framework Agreement, Agreement on Dispute Settlement and Agreement on Cooperation and Mutual Assistance in Customs Matters, said the officials.
