India, China pledge to deepen economic ties during 11th trade summit

NewsBharati    28-Mar-2018
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New Delhi, March 28: Union Commerce Minister Suresh Prabhu and his Chinese counterpart Zhong Shan on Tuesday signed the Agreed Minutes of the 11th Session of India-China Joint Group on Economic Relations, Trade, Science and Technology.

The two Ministers while reaffirming and reiterating their commitments to promote a balanced and sustainable bilateral trade, agreed to continue to take forward the initiatives identified in the Five Year Development Programme for Economic and Trade Cooperation between the People’s Republic of China and India signed in September 2014.

The Chinese side noted India’s concern regarding the long existing trade imbalance and requests for market access of Indian products and services and expressed its commitment to address these concerns through the broad framework provided by successive JEGs and the Five Year Development Programme for Economic and Trade Cooperation between the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of India.

The eleventh session of the China-India joint-group on Economic Relations, Trade, Science & Technology was held on Monday.

The Chinese side reaffirmed their commitment to accelerating the provision of market access for Indian agricultural products pertaining to non-basmati rice, rape-seed meals, soya-meals, pomegranate and pomegranate arils, okra, banana and other fruits and vegetables and bovine meat expeditiously.

Both Countries reaffirmed their aim to promote bilateral trade in the field of pharmaceuticals including resolution of issues of Indian pharma products exports to Chinese markets.

The Ministers agreed to draw-up a medium and long term roadmap with action points and timelines for increasing bilateral trade between the two countries in a balanced and sustainable manner, as the two countries are the largest emerging economies of the world with 35% of the world’s population and around 20% of the world’s GDP but the relative volume of bilateral trade is less than 1% of global trade.

The two sides agreed to strengthen cooperation within WTO, and other multilateral and regional frameworks, to maintain their common interest. Both the sides reiterated their commitment to rules based multilateral global trade.