The Minister for Commerce and Textile, Pervaiz Malik, has strongly emphasized the importance of creating a level playing field for developing countries, particularly in the area of agriculture and trade.
The Minister for Commerce and Textiles is on a 3 day visit to Geneva in connection with various engagements at the WTO and other international organisations. He is due to make speeches at the WTO Public Forum and meet other officials in the UNCTAD and ITC in the coming days.
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The Minister stressed this point in his meetings with Ambassadors of various Agriculture related coalition groups in the WTO and in his meeting with the WTO’s Director General and Deputy Director General.
Pervaiz Malik underscored the point that trade distorting subsidies of the developed countries were tilting the market in their favour and drastically against the poor farmers of the developing countries.
He also informed that huge amounts of domestic support in large agriculture producing countries and their Public stockholding also affected the small farmers by taking away the market share and depressing prices for their products.
Struggling Agri Economy
After 70 years of independence, Pakistan is still largely an agricultural economy. Even after all these years, the agricultural industry in Pakistan is still inefficient, is largely unstructured and lacks access to certain services.
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We’re still suffering from salinity and water logging and are losing an estimated Rs. 55 billion to these problems every year. All is not lost as most of it can be reclaimed by choosing the right crops, proper site preparation and developing better planting techniques.
