A media report has said Bangladesh has called for adequate financing and material support to LDCs in their graduation process to the status of developing nations at a webinar in New York the last weekend hosted by Bangladesh Permanent Mission at the UN. It has called for targeted support to address critical issues such as improving physical infrastructure, capacity building and export diversification to help our access to new markets.
More important, Bangladesh has demanded help to fight back the pandemic which may cause serious setback in our efforts to a sustained transition to an elevated level of production and export. We also support the call for greater flow of investment from developed countries to the graduating countries to achieve smooth restructuring of the manufacturing and service sectors and enhancing skills development at par with the developed nations.
We know that Bangladesh will have to deal with an utterly new situation with the opening of the country to free trade to be reciprocated on both ends. But the withdrawal of duty-free and quota-free market access to the US, EU and such other countries may bring a big setback at least immediately. Bangladesh is set to make the graduation by 2024 and would cease getting quota-free and duty-free market access from 2027. The time is not far away and we must have a proper arrangement to deal with post- LDC challenges.
So speakers have rightly emphasized incentive-based and long-term package for graduating countries as there is ample high risk of sliding back instead of deriving immediate trade benefit. The Covid-19 impacts and the loss of market may cause a greater setback. Bangladesh like other graduating countries badly needs specific support measures to create a sizeable buffer to protect trade and insurance scheme against immediate shocks. Bangladesh should sign free trade and preferential trade deals with South Asian countries and other trading partners or trading blocs to create a level-playing trading field. But in no way opening to free trade should be a one-way street.
We are also right at the UN to demand suspension of Trips restrictions on the transfer of technology and know-how to countries such as ours which have covid vaccine production capacity. The Business community’s demand for extension of the graduation period up to 2030 merits consideration in view of the deceleration of economic activities caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
