Pakistan unanimously elected to chair key WTO body on trade

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan won laurels when it was unanimously elected to chair the Committee on Trade and Environment of World Trade Organization (WTO), in Geneva, it is reliably learnt.
Pakistan’s Permanent Representative to the WTO Dr Syed Tauqir Shah, who is an accomplished officer of the Pakistan Administrative Service, will head the important environment and trade body.
Pakistan was fielded for the prestigious position by the Asian Developing Countries group in WTO after intensive consultations and lobbying as a result of which 161 members of WTO developed consensus on its candidature.
All regional groups namely Arab, Africa, Asia Pacific, Caribbean, Mercosur (a trading block composed of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela, with associate members Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru; superseded in 2008 by the Union of South American Nations (Unasur or Unasul), by uniting with the Andean Community, and developed countries supported Pakistan and elected Ambassador Dr Tauqir Shah unopposed as chairperson of this key global body.
2015 is being called the year of environment with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agreed by world leaders in September in New York, and Global Climate Summit in Paris next week. Against this backdrop the work on environment and trade in WTO has gained added importance.
The Committee on Trade and Environment is very important from the perspective of developing countries. On the one hand, environment is gaining increasing importance and on the other developing and less developed countries fear that it may become a technical barrier to trade, thus hindering their development and increasing cost of production.
Complementarity between Multilateral Environmental Agreements and WTO agreements and rules, knowledge sharing on trade and environment issues and reducing tariff on environmental goods and services are key areas being debated in trade and environment committee of WTO. Environment and sustainable development is recognised as key area of concern by the Marrakesh Agreement and Doha Development Agenda.
Dr Shah is a fellow of LEAD International - a global sustainable development think tank. He has also served on the Board of Governors of LEAD Pakistan. He is Watson Environment Fellow from global programme of United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and Brown University Rhode Island, USA. He also holds Sustainability Challenge Foundation Fellowship in Netherlands specialising in negotiation skills for sustainable development.
The ambassador holds Fleishman Civil Society Fellowship from Duke University North Carolina, specialising in role of civil society in Global Governance.
A few weeks back, in a major development, the European Union (EU) withdrew the crippling Anti-Dumping Duty on Pakistan’s products of PET (Polyethylene terephthalate, a chemical used in making bottles for mineral water and beverages), imposed five years ago, due to aggressive ‘trade diplomacy’ of Pakistan.
The EU formally notified the WTO where Pakistan had filed a case of unfair trade practices in March this year, against the 28-country European economic giant.
The withdrawal was billed as a big economic diplomacy success of the trade experts of the Pakistan government. The unfair trade protection measure imposed by the EU in 2010 caused economic loss of approximately 300 million Euros to Pakistan’s nascent chemical industry in last five years as per conservative estimates by the commerce ministry.
PET popularly also called Resin is bottle grade polyester chip, which is used in production of disposable PET bottles for mineral water and beverages.
A consortium of European manufacturers Plastic Europe had lodged a complaint with the EU secretariat at Brussels in 2009 for initiation of anti-dumping investigation against imports of PET Resin from Pakistan, which they believed were causing harm to sales and prices of their production in European markets.
GATRON, Karachi, and Novatex, Karachi were two leading Pakistani companies exporting this non-traditional product to Europe. During the year when this trade restricting duty was imposed, exports of PET Resin to Europe had touched the figure of $70 million, which was expected to go to $90 million in the next year at that time more than 80 per cent of Pakistani PET was exported to EU member countries.
Immediate negative impact of levy of this 35.39 Euro per ton anti-dumping duty on Pakistani PET was that the country lost $90 million share in its exports of this non-traditional product because Pakistani producers could not compete against world scale producers due to heavy import duty by EU.