APROPOS your report ‘Is TDAP losing its relevance?’ (Dec 18). The Trade Development Authority of Pakistan has lost its relevance because of the country’s changing export base, says the report in the first paragraph. In the last paragraph, it says that the CE, TDAP, did not agree with the proposal to re-locate the TDAP headquarters to Islamabad.

Globally, only the cities that are commercial hubs qualify for having headquarters of organisations like TDAP.

In Germany, trade promotional activities are carried out not from its capital city, Bonn, but from Cologne, Frankfurt and Dusseldorf.

Similarly, the centre for business promotion in the US is not Washington, but New York. The same is true for China’s key cities: Beijing and Shanghai.

It should be agreed that the ministry of commerce, like other ministries, may be located in Islamabad, but our capital city has no routes in commerce and trade.

The argument that the TDAP is located in the south of the country, though most of its officers are from the north, and cannot be posted elsewhere is absurd and invalid. All federal government employees are bound to serve at any place in the country.

If (basmati) rice, kinno, etc, are grown and exported from Punjab, IRRI rice and dry chilies produced in Sindh are shipped from its capital city.

Date fruit, too, is cultivated in Sindh and Balochistan and its export originates from the south of the country.

The main reason for falling export from Pakistan is the poor attention, by those at the helm of affairs in Islamabad, to all regions producing products with export potential.

A glaring example of such uneven attention is the failure by the authorities concerned to take suitable measures for renovating a highly advance date-processing factory (now in ruins), set up at Turbat with technical and financial assistance from the US government in the middle of the last century. If renovated, dates processed in that factory could generate hundreds of new jobs for the youths of Kech Makran and earn millions of dollars in foreign exchange for the country.

Exports from Pakistan will increase only by according equal treatment to the people and produce of all regions.

M. Essa Jalbani

Karachi

Published in Dawn December 20th, 2016