KARACHI, Dec 10: The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad) and International Trade Centre (ITC) have joined hands to provide technical assistance to the developing countries including Pakistan for complying with the World Trade Organization's (WTO) trade related requirements.

This was stated by Laurent Matile of ITC who along with Luca Monge of Unctad held a meeting with FPCCI Vice-Presidents Engr. M.A. Jabbar and Haroon Rashid, at Federation House, said a press release issued here on Friday.

Mr Matile said that Unctad-ITC have drawn up training programme with the objective to create awareness about WTO's requirements about Intellectual Property Rights and Industrial Standards. Their visit to Pakistan was to find specific needs of the country in terms of training.

Mr Jabbar said that the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) were of serious concern to FPCCI and it was ready to extend all assistance in the implementation of the Unctad-ITC training programme.

He said that TRIPs were important for conducting future trade world-wide but in Pakistan the TRIPs laws were split among different Ministries like Ministry of Commerce, Ministry of Industry and Ministry of Science and Technology.

In 2000, a single umbrella for handling TRIPs affairs was announced in the trade policy but it was yet to be created. He said that it was time to liberalize the import of raw materials at the lowest rate of duty against higher slabs for import of finished goods and added that steel, plastic, paper and chemicals were some of the raw materials, which needed to be imported at minimum possible tariff.

He said that the National Tariff Commission required complete restructuring so that it becomes capable of taking measures for the imposition of anti-dumping, countervailing duties and safeguard measures to protect the domestic industry.

He suggested that NTC chief should be taken from judiciary to ensure fair play to the industry sector. Haroon Rashid maintained that there was no effective regulatory authority to protect domestic industry, which had to confront dumping of goods from various countries.