Dawood calls for exploiting trillion-dollar halal food market

Says Pakistan, Malaysia should work jointly to tap the potential

ISLAMABAD: There is a need to exploit the trillion-dollar halal food market through mutual cooperation between Pakistan and Malaysia, suggested Adviser to Prime Minister on Commerce Abdul Razak Dawood.

Speaking at the Pak-Malaysia Business Leaders Roundtable on Friday, he said, "There are 1.3 billion Muslims in the world, this (halal food) is now moving to a trillion-dollar market."

He stressed that Pakistan needed to learn from Malaysia, adding that there was a need to collectively develop and exploit the market for mutual advantage.

The adviser stated that there were huge opportunities of cooperation in other sectors of the economy including telecommunication and automobile.

Speaking on the occasion, Board of Investment (BOI) Chairman Haroon Sharif said Pakistan was offering huge market opportunities, not only inside the country but also in the entire region due to its geographical location.

He said Pakistan was now connected to western China and would open up markets of South Asia and Southeast Asia.

Sharif remarked that Pakistan believed in shared prosperity, adding there was a strong determination by the top leadership to translate the bilateral relationship with Malaysia into transactions, emphasising that the roundtable had a great importance in that regard.

He said Prime Minister Imran Khan during his Malaysia visit had met 10 major investors in Kuala Lumpur, adding four of them were attending this session whereas others had already visited Pakistan in the past couple of months.



He said the roundtable was held just to acknowledge the presence of Malaysian businessmen and introduce them to their Pakistani counterparts. He commented that Pakistan was looking that business transactions were led by business leaders, and not by governments, whose work was to facilitate and share information.

Talking about the rapidly changing dynamics, he said the world was changing very rapidly, now there were multiple centres of economic gravity and power in the South and East, adding that South-South learning was extremely critical.

He said Pakistan and Malaysia forged knowledge partnership to learn from each other, adding the memorandums of understanding signed by them actually showed the nature of partnership. He said the prime objective of Pakistan prime minister's visits abroad was to promote economic cooperation.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 23^rd, 2019.

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