Dhaka is likely to seek more US investment and its support for implementing Bali package adopted in the last WTO ministerial conference during a follow-up meeting on Trade and Investment Cooperation Framework Agreement scheduled for November 23-24 in Washington DC. A six-member delegation led by commerce secretary Hedayet Ullah Al Mamun left Dhaka on Saturday to attend the meeting in the US capital. The delegation includes the foreign secretary and the labour and employment secretary. ‘We need active support from the US government for the implementation of the Bali package that offered duty-free and quota-free market access and waiver in the service sector for least developed countries like Bangladesh to industrialised nations,’ a secretary of the government, also a member of the delegation, told New Age on Saturday. The secretary said that issue of Bali package would top the agenda at the upcoming World Trade Organisation ministerial meeting in Nairobi. The delegation would also ask the US authorities to enhance their investment in Bangladesh, as the largest world economy has their investment largely limited in energy sector, another delegation member said. ‘We will highlight investment issue in the meeting,’ the delegation member said, adding that Dhaka would urge their counterpart to hold regular meeting between the two countries on promoting investment. Bilateral agreement for promotion and protection of investment between Bangladesh and the United States was signed in 1986. The 9th WTO ministerial meeting, held in Bali in December 3-7, 2013, in its LDCs package, decided that the developed nations would increase their tariff coverage beyond 97 per cent of their respective tariff lines for least developed countries by 2015. However, trade officials in the commerce ministry said that industrialised nations were yet to notify their product lists in line with the Bali package. Dhaka would press the US administration at the meeting for their active role in the upcoming WTO ministerial meeting to implement the pledged ‘service sector waiver’ for LDCs. WTO ministerial conference in 2011 adopted a services waiver for the LDCs which made way for preferential treatment of the services to be exported from the LDCs. The first meeting on trade and investment cooperation framework agreement was held in April, 2014 in Dhaka, after the much-talked-about bilateral trade pact was signed between Bangladesh and the United States in November 2013. The US is the single largest export market for products originating from Bangladesh. The GSP used to bring negligible benefits to Bangladesh in terms of export earnings, as only 5 per cent of the country’s exports to the US market were covered by the zero-duty facility under the GSP. The scheme is, however, tantamount to country’s image, trade officials believe.
