Commerce ministry’s clarification

The commerce ministry has sent a clarification to the report "Bangladesh decides to join largest trade bloc" published in The Business Standard on 8 September 2021. The following is the clarification sent by the ministry's Senior Information Officer and Public Relations Officer M Abdul Latif Bakshi:

"Although a meeting was convened on 5 September 2021 for academic purpose to analyze and discuss the salient features of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) from Bangladesh perspective, but [sic] no such specific decision was taken to send any formal proposal to any authority or to the RCEP Headquarters. At the request of the Ministry the Bangladesh Trade and Tariff Commission conducted some preliminary studies on some of the aspects of RCEP which were presented in the meeting. The RCEP Agreement is a very comprehensive one and a complete study of the issues, specially WTO plus and WTO extra provisions, will require much more time to come to any decision of becoming a party to it. It is also not practicable to comment on joining the RTA because of the time required for accession. The Ministry has decided to conduct an in-depth feasibility study on the opportunities and threats of the Agreement and identify the products and sectors for the interest of Bangladesh."Therefore, the Ministry opines that such reports may impact the ongoing actions the Ministry has undertaken with regards to Foreign Trade Agreement to face the challenges of preferential market access once the country graduates from LDC status."