"We have decided to implement prevalent laws in letter and spirit and frame new laws both at national and provincial level to fulfil requirements of EU to qualify for the GSP plus package," said Abbas Khan Afridi, the Minister for State for Commerce. During the meeting, it was emphasised that for Pakistan's GSP Plus application to succeed, it would be essential to ensure that specified seven international conventions were being effectively implemented. These conventions relate to human rights, labour rights, environment and narcotics. Pakistan is to file an application for the GSP-Plus scheme in January or February next year.
The Prime Minister urged the task force to ensure timely fulfilment of procedural EU formalities. During the meeting, the Prime Minister was informed that Pakistan had been elected President of the Montreal Protocol. Representatives of provincial governments supported the federal government's efforts to obtain GSP Plus and assured of all possible cooperation.
The EU is Pakistan's single largest trading partner accounting for 25 per cent of Pakistan's total exports and 16 per cent of total imports. Despite being the beneficiary of the EU's General GSP scheme, products of export interest of Pakistan such as textile and clothing face high tariffs in the EU market. For textiles, average GSP tariff is 6.4 per cent and for clothing average GSP tariff is 9.6 per cent.
Pakistan argued that these high tariffs constitute a serious obstacle to Pakistan's market access to the EU, especially when many of Pakistan's competitors already have duty-free access to the EU market and India was likely to finalise a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the EU. Pakistan has officially welcomed the new GSP plus scheme in which the import vulnerability threshold for GSP-plus has been raised from 1 per cent to 2 per cent. Pakistan's total GSP covered exports to EU are 1.2 per cent of its total GSP covered imports.
Some analysts point out that Pakistan is unlikely to benefit from European Union's (EU) GSP-Plus scheme until it complies with 27 mandatory international conventions to become eligible for duty access to EU market. Pakistan has already withdrawn its reservations against two conventions ie International Convention on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and Convention against Torture (CAT).