ISLAMABAD Nov 4: Islamabad Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ICCI) President Zubair Ahmad Malik has stressed the need for improving quality control, marketing and price mechanisms to boost the economy.

He said there had been serious lapses in the recent past in ensuring quality of goods and commodities exported to several countries. Citing an example, he said Basmati and IRRI rice varieties were among the top ten commodities exported to more than 70 countries.

Pakistan has been losing Basmati rice market to India, which has entered the Middle Eastern markets with aggressive marketing and quality control strategies, he added.

In the early eighties, Saudi Arabia was the largest Pakistani Basmati rice market, constituting 82 per cent of the total Saudi rice market. Pakistan’s share of the market has declined to 11 per cent and India’s has gone up to 81 per cent, he added.

In a well-documented rice market study prepared recently by Pakistan Embassy in Jeddah, several reasons have been pointed out for the regression and failure in the rice market. Among the reasons, it has been pointed out that quality control had been seriously lacking.

For example, Saudi law requires that each packet/container of rice must show type, grade and broken percentage of rice but in the most cases Pakistani packets of rice when unpacked lacked this standard.—PPI