Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said yesterday that his country had lost high export earnings due to the withdrawal of EU trade concessions during the previous regime.
Wickremesinghe said without the generalised scheme of preferences (GSP) plus trade concessions, the island country only earned $2.5bn from the export of readymade garments while countries such as Bangladesh harvested $5.2b.
In 2015, although Sri Lanka’s apparel exports pocketed $4.8bn, Bangladesh, which had obtained the GSP Plus concessions, earned over $26.6bn in the same year, the prime minister said.
“Due to losing the GSP Plus concessions, we only managed to increase our revenue from $2.5bn to $4.8bn, not even a two-fold increase,”
Wickremesinghe said.
The GSP Plus trade concessions were withdrawn from Sri Lanka in 2010 by the EU due to violations of human-rights agreements under the Mahinda Rajapakse regime.
The suspension resulted in Sri Lankan exporters losing duty-free access to EU markets and their shipments being charged an import duty.
However, after discussions between the EU and the new government of President Maithripala Sirisena, the European Commission said last week that it had proposed to remove significant duties on Sri Lankan products after restoring its GSP Plus trade access to Europe’s export
market.
The European Parliament and the Council have now up to four months to raise potential objections before the measures become effective.

Related Story