Trade between India, Pak around USD 2 billion: Bhutto

Thiruvananthapuram. Ms Fatima Bhutto, grand-daughter of former Pakistan Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and niece of slain former Prime Minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto, said trade between India and Pakistan is around USD two billion.

Ms Fatima Bhutto, who is in the city as part of the fourth edition of the Kovalam Literary Festival at Kanakakunnu palace here, said ”out of USD two billion, our volume of trade is a fraction, a single digit of the business that we do with strangers.” ”Described as ‘grim’ ‘unnaturally small’, we account for less than 0.5 per cent of your trade and you account for a little more than one per cent of ours as of 2010,” she said.

”This wasn’t always the case – in 1948-49, 70 per cent of our transactions were with you and 63 per cent of your exports were to us,” he added.

”Lazy economists casually float that trade could rise to USD ten billion in five years, or may be six. Or really may be 15 years. That’s just not fast enough. Especially if you consider that studies have shown potential for formal trade is 20 times greater than what we have – we should be hitting 40 billion. You don’t fight when 40-42 billion is in the way,” she observed.

”Our destinies are inexorably linked, just as our pasts were, and as they were largely peacefully. It is this that we must insist upon that for the course of our future. Justice is not outside ours border, it is within them collectively, we have to find a way to bring it out and guard it, protectively, fiercely. Our generations depend on it,” she noted. Agency

Source: http://jaipur.co/trade-between-india-pak-around-usd-2-billion-bhutto/