Food security for Third World stressed: Experts for global economic mechanism
By Sher Baz Khan
ISLAMABAD, Jan 10: Speakers at a conference here on Monday stressed the need for a global economic mechanism, which what they said could encourage the trickling down of fruits of universal developments to the downtrodden
and ensure social, economic and food security to masses in the developing countries.
Those, who spoke on the first day of the three-day 20th annual general conference of Pakistan Society of Development Economists (PSDE) under the theme Regional Co-operation and Economic Growth, also expressed their concern over the worldwide material progress and degradation of humanity due to which people are faced with malnutrition, hunger and socio-economic vulnerability despite mind-boggling developments in various sectors.
Federal Minister for Privatisation Abdul Hafeez Sheikh, who presided over the first session of the conference, stressed the need for a balance between the public and private sectors.
PSDE President A R Kemal, in his speech on Exploring Pakistan's Regional Economic Cooperation Potential, said Pakistan was a part of both South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc) and Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) and the intra-regional trade in both the groups was about four per cent despite the South Asian Preferential Trade Agreement (Sapta) and Framework Agreement for Trade Cooperation (Fat) in ECO.
"These agreements have only been able to increase marginally the share of intra-regional trade due to a number of factors", he said. Elaborating, Mr Kemal said negotiations under Sapta and Fat had been conducted mainly on product-by-product basis, which was time consuming despite the fact that it allowed some flexibility to each member country. The depth of tariff cuts offered under the two agreements had not been very substantial.
"For example, India has offered the preferences on a large number of products and the margins have been the maximum but its Most Favoured Nation (MFN) rates have been higher than those of its partners, and as such concession has very little impact", Mr Kemal explained.
He said actual trade coverage of the preferences had been limited. "Most of the products to which concessions were given were not widely traded in the region." Confining solely to the tariffs and leaving para-tariff and non-tariff measures out of the purview of negotiations had also been one of the factors in constraining the growth of intra-regional trade, he added.
Shares of intra-regional imports were 33.2, 11.7, 10.1, 2.3 and 0.7 per cent of the total imports of Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and India respectively in 2000, he said.
Regional economic cooperation, he said, was increasingly being viewed as a vehicle for expediting the process of economic development through trade expansion, improvement in productivity, specialization in accordance with comparative advantage and improved quality of products.
In his lecture on Hayek's Road to Serfdom: Sixty Years Later, M. Ali Khan of Department of Economics, The Johns Hopkins University, USA, discussed from new angles the philosophy behind words like security, freedom, submission, impersonal forces, rules, rule of law, language, education, incomplete and dispersed information, theorising and theoretician and their importance in economy. Others who spoke included, Minister of State for Finance, Omar Ayub Khan, S M Naseem and Asad Zaman.
