ISLAMABAD, July 8: Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz on Saturday directed the Planning Commission to come up with a plan to increase country's exports from the current 13 per cent of the GDP to 15 per cent.

Chairing a meeting of the newly-constituted Export Promotion Board (EPB), the premier reiterated government's resolve to facilitate the private sector to enhance and diversify the export base.

Mr Aziz emphasised the need to take further steps to increase the volume of exports and said the Planning Commission should interact with all the relevant government ministries, departments and the private sector. “It needs to study the best international practices and do benchmarking with other countries to achieve best results.”

Commerce Minister Humayun Akhtar Khan gave a detail presentation on the salient features of the board functioning and its objectives to the premier. The board includes representatives both from public as well as private sectors. Commerce Secretary Syed Asif Shah made a presentation on export performance during the outgoing fiscal year.

The prime minister said the government was also in the process of finalising reconstruction opportunity zones (ROZs) to provide access for the goods produced in the commercially depressed areas to the United States on preferential basis.

Mr Aziz said exports were a major mechanism to drive the economy, earn foreign exchange and generate employment and the government wanted serious input from the private sector with a view to enhancing country's exports.

He said it was gratifying to note that the export of both rice and leather and leather goods had crossed the $1 billion mark. He congratulated the exporters of rice and leather and engineering goods.

The premier emphasised the need to tap the vast potential for export available in agri-business, leather goods, rice and engineering goods.

He said the government was making all-out efforts to arrange maximum market access for exporters to enable them to enhance and diversify their exports all over the world. "The government's job is to open access as exports are done by the private sector," he added.

“The government has signed preferential trade agreements (PTAs) and free trade agreements (FTAs) with several countries and many more are in the pipeline to provide new markets for exports.”

The premier said the finalisation of FTA was a time-consuming process and the government had therefore signed early harvest agreements with several countries, covering a limited number of items on which the agreement existed. This, he said, had been done to provide exporters immediate access to foreign markets.

Mr Aziz informed the meeting about the efforts being made by the government at the Doha round and the WTO to obtain better market access for exporters.

He called upon the private sector to increase its competitiveness and productivity and ensure quality and standardisation of products without which a quantum jump in exports was not possible.Similarly, the private sector needed to improve foreign market research and analysis capability to increase exports. "We believe in public-private partnership to establish Pakistan Inc," he added.

The government would be guided by the feedback from the private sector, which would enable it to devise a long-term policy to increase exports, he said and added: "We have totally revamped our visa policy by allowing issuance of visas to businessperson at airports."

Pakistan, he said, had the potential to become a regional hub for the export of agri-business, especially livestock, dairy products and horticulture.