Bangladesh Tariff Commission has primarily selected a list of 365 products for excluding them from the country’s sensitive list under the South Asian Free Trade Area agreement, officials said.
The draft list has been prepared considering total duty incidence of the products, amount of revenue that comes as import duty from the SAARC countries from the products, domestic production and the types of the products, they said.
A meeting of the committee on the sensitive list held on Wednesday decided to conduct a series of consultation meetings with the stakeholders including the National Board of Revenue and private sector representatives to finalise the list.
BTC member Mostafa Abid Khan, also head of the committee, told New Age that basically the exclusion list would be finalised on the basis of opinion of the stakeholders.
‘We have just determined a set of criteria such as revenue impact and domestic production status of the products for preparing the sensitive list for third phase. It will be finalised in line with the suggestion from NBR and private sector, he said.
Officials said that NBR would assess revenue impact of the product if it is excluded from the list while private sector will measure its impact on local industry.
BTC has listed mainly those products which the country usually does not produce and even if any industry produces the items, it will not be affected due to exclusion from the list, they said.
‘The list contains only a few products from apparel, leather, jute, pharmaceuticals, frozen foods, agro-
processed sectors, which are the country’s main export sectors,’ a BTC official said.
Representatives of the commerce ministry, industries ministry, NBR and Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce and Industry were present at the meeting.
Earlier, the commerce ministry asked the BTC to update its sensitive list under SAFTA by reducing at least 30 per cent of the products from the existing sensitive list for implementation of the third phase of the agreement.
Meeting sources said that BTC had measured that Bangladesh might lose around Tk 1,700 crore annually if its sensitive list is reduced by 30 per cent or to 365 products.
Considering the revenue impact, NBR representative opined to limit the reduction to 15 per cent to 20 per cent, sources said.
Local businessmen do not also want to make the list further reduced, they said.
By excluding a product from the sensitive list means that a country is ready to reduce import duty for the product and gradually the duty will be trimmed at zero or minimum level.
Currently, Bangladesh has 987 products on the sensitive list for the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and 993 goods for non-LDCs which will be subjected to duty payment in import.
On the other hand, India reduced its sensitive list to 25 for LDCs and 695 for non-LDCs, Nepal to 998 for LDCs and 1036 for non-LDCs, Sri Lanka to 845 for LDCs and 906 for non-LDCs.
Pakistan, the Maldives and Afghanistan have reduced to 936, 152 and 850 respectively for both LDCs and non-LDCs.
The SAFTA committee of experts is scheduled to meet on July 30 at Kathmandu in Nepal to discuss the revision of the list for the third phase of SAFTA implementation, BTC officials said.
The tariff arrangement under the third phase of the SAFTA is expected to be announced by January 2014.
At the meeting, the committee members will discuss the preparation of the countries on the issue and the sensitive list will be approved at SAFTA Ministerial Council’s meeting at the end of the year.
SAFTA was formed on January 6, 2004 with the objective of gradually eliminating most of the tariff and other trade barriers on products and services in trade among the SAARC member countries.
The non-LDCs are committed to implement the SAFTA by 2015 and LDCs by 2020.
Officials said that all the member countries had reduced sensitive lists by 20 per cent in phase-II in 2011 from the original list when trade started in 2007 under the SAFTA agreement.
-With New Age input
