MCCI slates regulatory duty on 731 items -Malik Asrar Awan

MULTAN, Oct 24th: Multan Chamber of Commerce & Industry (MCCI) President Malik Asrar Ahmed Awan, while slamming the recent imposition of Regulatory Duty (RD) on import of 713 items, has demanded immediate withdrawal of the unjust Regulatory Duty imposed on essential items and industrial inputs.The MCCI president said that although the step has been taken to plug the rapid decline on foreign exchange reserves but it was likely to have an adverse impact on the overall industrial performance and the economy, as it will clearly trigger the inflation, promote smuggling and raise the cost of many products being produced locally.
“FBR will lose a significant amount of tax revenue due to smuggling, under-invoicing, miss-declaration and pilferage through Afghan Transit Trade”, he said. Malik elaborated that Regulatory Duty in between 10 to 50 percent has been imposed on a wide range of products including essential food items Particularly baby-milk and pampers etc  and other items used by average consumer or by domestic industry as raw material for producing various consumer products, FMCG and exportable items, which means that this move will not only escalate prices of many products being supplied to the local markets but will also make Pakistan’s exports uncompetitive due to additional costs.
He said that most of these products were either not produced in Pakistan at all or produced in insufficient quantities, leaving no other choice but to go for importing them in order to meet the demand. Malik was of the view that the novel idea of using the tool of Regulatory Duty is indeed an attempt to cover up the blunders of policy-makers during the last few years, whereby the government has signed Free Trade Agreements (FTA) with China, Indonesia, Malaysia and Sri Lanka, without consulting the affected stakeholders and representatives of trade and industry, which has resulted in historically high trade deficit and depleted the forex reserves.“Since the government cannot walk-out of the FTAs and PTAs, it has resorted to control the damages through unconventional means and imposed RD on a large number of importable items”, President KCCI said this action is not going to have any positive impact on balance of payments because the items subjected to RD do not have a very large share in total volume of imports in Pakistan.