Pakistan-Australia trade needs to be enhanced, says envoy

Australian High Commissioner Margaret Adamson says her
country wants to see trade that is more evenly balanced

Karachi

The present volume of trade between Pakistan and Australia is to the tune of a 100 million Australian dollars and is in Australia’s favour. We would like to see a quantitative increase in this volume and a trade that is more evenly balanced.

These views were expressed by Margaret Adamson, high commissioner of Australia in Pakistan, who was visiting Karachi at the invitation of the Pakistan-Australia Business Forum (PABF).

She was addressing the members of the PABF and business circles, notably the Karachi Chamber of Commerce & Industry (KCC&I), at a hotel on Thursday evening.

“There’s been a broad link between the two countries, but there’s still room for greater investment between them,” she said.

Pakistan, she said, had a vast pool of resources and much of that resource lay in the talent of the business community, she said.

Among some of the fields in which there could be fruitful cooperation were agriculture, livestock, mining and the dairies sector, she said.

Australia, Margaret Adamson said, had made vast progress in irrigation and could certainly help Pakistan make irrigation “more contemporary”. The two countries could have collaborative education and research, she said.

“Pakistan’s human capital is massive but needs to be trained up,” she said.

She talked of Pakistan’s reliance on remittances from overseas and said that they could be a potent factor given what the young people working in Australia would be remitting back home.

She said that currently, there were 16,000 Pakistani students in Australia.“The Australian approach is cost-effective,” she said.

Earlier, welcoming the high commissioner, Parvaiz Madraswala, chairman of the PABF, said that Pakistani manufacturers could certainly partake of Australian expertise in agriculture and dairy farming, and boat building. 

He said Australian imports were far cheaper than the European ones. Pakistan, he said, was a large market and could be a lucrative market for Australia.

Among some of the fields he mentioned were meat products and education in and travel to Australia.