2024-09-15 04:25:37
China has decided to provide 100% duty-free market facilities to Bangladesh and other least developed (LDC) countries.
China’s ambassador to Bangladesh Yao Wen said this when he came to meet Foreign Secretary Jasim Uddin at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Thursday (September 12).
Confirming the matter, the foreign secretary said that such a decision was made at the Sino-African summit held in the first week of September, the Chinese ambassador said.
Earlier in 2022, China introduced duty-free facilities on 98 percent of Bangladeshi products, including 383 new products, including leather and leather products. Besides, from 2020, 97 percent of the products exported by Bangladesh would get this facility.
Incidentally, China is the biggest trading partner of Bangladesh. Bangladesh imported goods worth 18.6 billion dollars from China in the financial year 2022-23. On the other hand, goods worth 676 million dollars were exported from Bangladesh to China.
Foreign Secretary Jasim Uddin said that after the formation of the interim government, the largest foreign direct investment came from China in the last one month, amounting to eight million dollars.
He said, we hope that the amount of exports to China will increase in the future. In the meantime, the process of exporting mangoes to China has been finalized. This export program will start from next year. Apart from this, other fruits like jackfruit and guava will also be exported.
In the fiscal year 2020, China imported goods worth 2.4 trillion dollars, of which Bangladesh’s share is only 0.05 percent. This data indicates that there is great potential for trade expansion with China.
Chairman of Research and Policy Integration for Development MA Razzak mentioned in a research paper, if even one percent of China’s import budget remains in Bangladesh, then we can earn 25 billion dollars a year.
However, according to economists, to enter the Chinese market in a big way, Bangladesh needs to diversify its export products. At this point it is largely dependent on the garment being made.