Minister of Foreign Trade and Economic Relations of BiH Mirko Šarović finds it positive that last month the FBiH defined the Draft Law on amendments to the Law on Internal Trade, whose purpose is, among other things, to remove obstacles for entering the World Trade Organization.
Thereby, the provision of the Article 13 of the Law which, according to the European Commission, distorts the consistent application of the principles of free trade from the Stabilization and Association Agreement and insists on removing protection measures in the field of trade.
“With this Law, we met one of the conditions for entering the WTO. Now we have the bilateral negotiations with Brazil, Russia and Ukraine,” Šarović said.
Negotiations will most probably be finalized with Brazil first. According to Šarović, BiH is discussing tariffs, i.e. eight tariff lines for chicken meat and some more tariff lines, with this country.
Šarović hopes that negotiations with one or two countries will be finalized this year.
In the opinion of the BiH negotiating team, requests of Ukraine are very broad and go beyond the interests of their economy, especially considering the modest trade exchange with BiH.
“The Russian party jointed the negotiations quite late by sending requests to us, the so-called ‘initial requests by the Russian Federation’. According to our assessment, their request is also too broad and far beyond the possibilities of traditional trade of the two parties. Among other things, their request includes reducing all custom rates to zero percent, which is not realistic,” Šarović concluded.
(Source: klix.ba)
