Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on Tuesday made a strong pitch for greater duty-free access of Bangladeshi goods to Indian market and invited Indian investment in her country. "It is urgent to promote trade between our two countries and to do so, we have to remove avoidable hindrances, initiate long-pending facilitation measures," she said.
The Japan Textile Products Quality and Technology Centre, which is called QTEC, will open a laboratory in Dhaka in February next year for inspection of Bangladeshi goods to be exported to Japan. After China and Korea, Bangladesh will be the third country to have a QTEC laboratory, which serves importers testing products following the strict Japanese standard requirements, said a top QTEC official. ‘We will open our Dhaka laboratory on the first day of February 2010,’ Hiroshi Okada, president of Tokyo-based QTEC, told New Age on Thursday.
Economists and businessmen believe that a strong diplomacy is a must to obtain support from African Least Developed Countries (LDCs) to get duty free access of Bangladeshi goods to the US market. A ministerial level meeting of World Trade Organisation (WTO) will be held at Geneva from November 29 to December 2 this year where Bangladesh will try to accelerate its efforts in this regard.
