ISLAMABAD, April 21: The chairman of Parliamentarians Commission for Human Rights Riaz Fatyana has stressed the need to prepare for the challenges posed by the WTO regime.

He was speaking at the national consultation on ‘Consumer Protection in Emerging WTO Regimes: Challenges, Preparedness and Needs’. The consultation was organized by the Consumers Rights Commission of Pakistan at a local hotel on Monday.

Mr Fatyana said, however, there was also a need to benefit from the opportunities the regime offered.

He said: “We should be mindful of the risks because it was quite likely that our industry and service sector would not be able to compete with foreign companies and we might lose out.”

He feared that it was likely that many people would become unemployed. He said it was also not clear whether the international players would be willing to go to the rural markets where possibilities of profit-making could be low.

He called upon the regulators to increase their capacity and improve quality of their regulatory processes to ensure competition in the market as well as consumer protection.

Dr Wajid Pirzada, Dr Abid Sulehri and Dr Fasihuddin, however, stressed the consumers to become proactive and engage with the relevant government departments and regulatory bodies to ensure that consumers’ interests were protected in the WTO negotiations.

They said the government should consult consumers and other groups in the society before making any commitments.

Shehnaz Wazir Ali presided over the session on the potential impacts of General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) for the education sector in Pakistan.

Though she welcomed the fact that barriers on the movement of knowledge would be reduced, she said it was equally disappointing that education would become a tradable service under the WTO regime.

Mukhtar Ahmad Ali and Ashfaq Bukhari spoke about the weaknesses of regulation for private schools and institutions in Pakistan at different sessions.

They argued that this situation would create serious problems when international educational institutions started operations in Pakistan.

They said though quality of competition would improve, there was a risk that quality education would become more inaccessible to the poor.

It would also raise questions of ideology, as the foreign institutions operating in Pakistan were not expected to teach our values, culture and history, they said.

Talking about the power sector, Barrister Ijaz Ishaq said it was facing serious challenges not because of WTO or GATS, but because Nepra was failing to play a dynamic role by ensuring competition through unbundling of Wapda.