ISLAMABAD, Feb 28: The government will soon formulate a comprehensive market access strategy for increasing the share of non-agriculture export in the total exports of the country, an official source told Dawn on Friday.

The strategy will be finalized in meetings with the stakeholders to formulate the strategy involving inputs from all stakeholders with the objective to enhance the export competitiveness of non-agriculture products. The strategy was expected to be finalized by end of March 2003.

According to the official, director research programmes, University of New Castle, Callaghan, Australia, Dr Amir Mehmood, had carried out an analytical study on competitiveness and the market access of Pakistan’s non-agriculture production sectors.

To discuss the report with the stakeholders, the official said the Ministry of Commerce had arranged a meeting of the research scholar with the relevant stakeholders on March 5.

The successful conclusion of the Uruguay Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations has led to an improvement in the market access of developing countries’ non-agriculture exports to major regional markets such as the EU, North America, Japan, the Middle East and South East Asia. This development provides both opportunities as well as challenges for Pakistan’s non-agriculture production sectors, said the official.

The official said the strategy would focus to review the nature and pace of Pakistan’s industrial restructuring and its impact on export structure — assess the readiness of the non- agriculture production sectors to contest the high growth world markets by participating in dynamic segments of the world trade.

It would also evaluate Pakistan’s current non-agriculture export structure by identifying key export markets/products, and analyse competitive environment in major national and regional markets; undertake market access analysis for Pakistan.

The meeting would also analyse Pakistan’s market access regime and its impact on non-agriculture import competing production sectors.

The official said to assist and strengthen Pakistan’s relative position in multilateral trade negotiations, the study would provide an in-depth investigation of the export specialization and comparative advantage/disadvantage of Pakistan’s non-agriculture production sectors by using the revealed comparative advantage approach and propose realistic and time-bound set of recommendations for the future improvement.

The strategy would be listing the critical tariff and non- tariff barriers Pakistani products face in foreign markets so that they might be targeted during the negotiation process. The official said during the exercise, a detail negotiation strategy and a set of recommendations would be developed in terms of specific products and the market access.