Bangladesh and the European Union will form a business council to boost trade between the two partners. This was informed by Bangladesh Commerce Minister Tofail Ahmed after his meeting with a delegation of the European Parliament recently.
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“We’ll soon constitute a business council… The Netherlands will hold a seminar on EU-Bangladesh very soon in Dhaka,” Ahmed said, adding, “We will discuss different trade issues like tariffs in trade regularly after formation of the EU-Bangladesh business council. We are working for formation of this very important business measure for increasing the bilateral trade.”
The eight EU countries, having their missions in Dhaka, will be members of the council, which will comprise Bangladesh officials from different government agencies, including the Commerce Ministry, underlined the Bangladeshi Commerce Minister, who also informed that representatives from the private sector will also be included in the council to take business ties between the two partners to a new height. Ahmed also called upon EU entrepreneurs to invest in the Special Economic Zones (SEZ), as the government has been building 100 such special zones both for domestic and foreign investors.
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The European Union is the largest export destination for Bangladesh. Bangladesh reportedly exported products, worth about US $ 17.04 billion to the EU region in fiscal 2014-15, prominent among which were apparel products, a whopping 60 per cent of which have been imported to EU alone. Bangladesh, as a least developed country, has been enjoying a zero-duty benefit to the EU since 1971 under the EU’s ‘everything but arms’ scheme.
