Bilateral trade talks with neighbours from Oct

"We need to further develop our agriculture sector to ensure food security, alleviation of poverty and growth of agro-based industries," he said while he was speaking at a seminar on "Bangladesh in a globalised world: Choices and future challenges" here.

He laid emphasis on initiatives to increase bilateral trade. "Not only the multilateral trade, but regional and bilateral trading arrangements are becoming order of the day," he added.

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Bangladesh is going to start talks with the neighbouring countries on bilateral trading arrangements next month, he told the seminar.

Organised by Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS) at its auditorium, the seminar was also addressed by Commerce Secretary Suhel Ahmed Chowdhury and BIDS Research Director M Asaduzzaman. Director General of BIDS Quazi Shahabuddin was in the chair.

Ashok Gulati, Division Director of Markets, Trade and Institutions of IFPRI, also spoke on the occasion. The researchers of BIDS submitted three separate papers in the seminar.

M K Anwar said Bangladesh should devise its own policy to score progress in the agriculture sector as the recently concluded WTO ministerial meeting raised various questions regarding the future of world trade and development possibilities through globalistion in parts of Least Developed Countries (LDCs).

Referring to subsidy in the agriculture sector, he said his ministry had asked the government to raise subsidy in agriculture sector to Tk 700 crore from the existing Tk 300 crore as the sector is playing an important role for the overall economic development.

"According to WTO rules, Bangladesh can provide at least 10 per cent of product specific subsidy amounting to about Tk 19,000 crore for the agriculture sector at present day prices," he said.

M K Anwar said the agriculture sector was always kept outside the purview of the GATT negotiations until the Uruguay roundtable, which had a very long drawn out process of eight years mainly due to disagreement over the agriculture sector.

"This was so because agriculture in all developed countries have been heavily protected either behind tariff walls or through heavy subsidy both in the input and the output markets," he said.

He said all the signatories to the GATT negotiations had agreed to cut down not only tariffs but also the agricultural subsidies according to rule based formula.

"When there has been some progress in implementing the policy, subsidies gradually surfaced bypassing the rules. In the developed world in general, some trade distorting support has been re-categorised," he added.

The agriculture minister put special emphasis on increased trade and commerce between the developed and the developing countries side by side with special considerations for the LDCs to remove disparity between them.

"In today's world, trade and commerce have become the integral part of development and it is well recognised that fair and free trade could generate benefits for the trading partners," he said.