Over the past several years, global trade has been subdued – both because of weak overall demand in high-income countries, but also because of changes in the composition of demand away from import sensitive categories of demand like investment goods and toward less trade creating government spending. 

With this in mind, the D-8 Organization held its Third Meeting of the Supervisory Committee of the Preferential Trade Agreement on 9-10 April 2014 in Ankara-Turkey. The motive behind this meeting was that Contracting Parties should take necessary actions, as a matter of priority, in order to implement the D-8 PTA in concrete terms. 

In was worth to mention that it is estimated that the D-8 total trade volume would slightly decrease from US$ 1.8 trillion in 2012 to US$ 1.7 trillion in 2013. As a percentage share of the world trade, D-8 total trade would decrease from 5% in 2012 to 4.4% in 2013. In addition, it is also estimated that D-8 intra-trade volume would slightly decrease from US$ 148 billion in 2012 to US$ 131 billion in 2013. This signifies a decrease from 8.2% in 2012 to 7.4% in 2013. Taking into account these important figures and the target set by the D-8 Roadmap in our mind; Member States should do their best and take necessary measures to compensate the D-8 intra-trade’s deficit in coming years.  

There was a number of specific issues to address in the Meeting, such as the current state of cut-off date implementation for the first installment of tariff reduction, discussion of the consolidated draft “Dispute Settlement” Document, consideration of the Proposal of Bangladesh regarding their request to have 30% Local Value Addition Criteria for LDCs, election of the new Chairman of the Supervisory Committee and finally, the possibility to have new arrangement for hosting the Supervisory Committee back-to-back with the Trade Ministers Council in the future.