Unilateral Tariff Concession to Pakistan given by European Union (EU) while securing a waiver of World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules is going to be oxygen for Pakistani textile exports, already going down for the last couple of months. The country’s textile exports which have already been decreased by 3.79 per cent during the first seven months of the current financial due to the reduction in cotton price in international market and severe energy crisis in the country, could regain their movement if the EU facility was availed at a maximum level. This was said by Ziad Bashir, Chairman Landhi Association of Trade and Industry (LATI), while appreciating the approval of EU’s waiver request in WTO on custom duties for 75 items, mostly textile related, from Pakistan to help the country recover from 2010 floods. It is worth mentioning here that EU had offered this one-time facility to Pakistan and approached WTO in October 2010 to seek a waiver on trade preferences to Islamabad on these products amounting to almost 900 million euros in import value, or 27 per cent of imports from Pakistan for a two-year period from January 2012 to December 2013.
