Safta to help attract more investment to South Asia
Foreign minister tells CJA function
Star Business Report
The economic integration of South Asian nations through implementing Safta (South Asian Free Trade Area) will help them attract more foreign investment to the region, Foreign Minister M Morshed Khan said yesterday."The region is itself a big market with a population of 1.3 billion. If a person buys a product worth one dollar, it's a market of 1.3 billion dollars. So the economic integration will bring in substantial foreign investment in South Asia," he said. The foreign minister was speaking as chief guest at the certificate awarding ceremony of a four-day training workshop on 'Budget Reporting' organised by Commonwealth Journalists Association (CJA) at the National Press Club in Dhaka. In a bid to turn South Asia into a free trade zone, all the seven members of Saarc (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) struck the Safta agreement on Tuesday in Islamabad during the 12th Saarc Summit. According to the landmark deal signed by the foreign ministers of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, Safta will come into effect from January 1, 2006. "Safta is a reality today, and it is something more than what we are seeing today," Morshed said. "There has to be a common platform where there will be lot of complementarities instead of unnecessary, uneconomic competition, and we want to have a planned growth for the region rather than think about only one country." He said for the first time the leaders of South Asia have realised they will have to unite and integrate, otherwise they will perish. Turning to Bangladesh's efforts to woo foreign direct investment, the minister said a congenial atmosphere has already been created for foreign investors. About the ongoing reforms in many sectors within the country, he said reforms are meaningless if their fruits cannot reach consumers. "Reforms must be designed to alleviate poverty and benefit commoners." Morshed Khan said the level of corruption in Bangladesh is "insignificant" compared to that of multinationals like Worldcom and Enron. "The corruption of one Worldcom or Enron is larger than cumulative corruption of Bangladesh." CJA President Hassan Shahriar, its Vice-president and Senior Correspondent of the London-based Financial Times Martin Mulligan and Bangladesh Chapter President Farid Hossain also spoke at the function.
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