DHAKA, Aug 3: Bangladesh’s foreign minister M Morshed Khan said on Wednesday the South Asian Free Trade Area (Safta) agreement was unlikely to take effect from January, 2006, as negotiations for the resolution of some disputed issues might not end within the stipulated timeframe.

“I am not hopeful that we will be able to conclude the negotiations in due time (mid-October),” the minister told a regional seminar in Dhaka. “The postponement of the Saarc (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) twice has created some impediments.”

Morshed Khan hoped that the Dhaka summit of the seven-nation group in November would mark the next decade as an era of implementation and stressed removal of non-tariff barriers to trade, agreement on mutual recognition of standards testing facilities and finalization of sensitive list of items to push regional cooperation forward.

As trade liberalisation begins, the member states will have to ensure that the free trade area agreement does not suffer the same fate as the preferential trade agreement, he said. The South Asia Centre for Policy Studies, a civil society initiative of regional think-tanks, organized the seminar on ‘Promoting Regional Cooperation in South Asia’ here.

Muchkund Dubey, a former foreign secretary of India, called for a ‘greater role of Bangladesh to resurrect Saarc’ when heads of state and government meet on November 12-13.

He suggested ‘determination of governments’ as alternative to making of negative list, which he termed a thoughtless approach that affects trade cooperation. The foreign affairs adviser, Reaz Rahman, said ‘predominance of politics over economics’ left most of the Saarc commitments and conventions ‘largely unimplemented’. “We have to mobilize political support and change the mindset.”

He added that the 13th Saarc summit would focus on the review of the group’s progress in the past two decades so as to make it an effective regional organization. The framework Safta agreement signed at the 12th Saarc summit in Islamabad in 2004 left rules of origin, sensitive lists, revenue loss compensation for least developed countries and trade-related technical assistance to LDCs outstanding.

The chairman of the centre, Arjun K Sengupta, expressed his conviction that “politics cannot dominate over economics for long” and stressed logical inter-dependence that could benefit Saarc countries.

Sengupta, also a member of parliament from India’s ruling alliance, expressed New Delhi’s ‘total commitment’ to improving relations with all its neighbours, including Bangladesh, and said if the bureaucrats had a political decision, an agreement could be reached within 24 hours. “If political decision is not there, the bureaucrats know one million ways to delay the process.”

Slightly differing with the views on the lack of political commitment in the Saarc process, the executive director-designate of the centre, Professor Sridhar K Khatri, observed that the Safta framework agreement had not worked out the political architecture of Saarc in implementing the political will.

He found major flaws in dealing with bureaucrats who, sitting in foreign ministries of seven countries, want their own ‘strong representation’ in making decisions on matters relating to the regional grouping.

AMA Muhith, a former finance minister and leader of the opposition Awami League, proposed formation of an executive board, comprising politicians, economists and bureaucrats, to identify 40-50 tradable items to work with initially for two years so as to make Safta effective.