In rare admission, Pakistani minister admits his country could not benefit from CPEC

Islamabad, Nov 13 (PTI) In a rare admission, a senior minister has acknowledged that Pakistan could not benefit from the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and Chinese investors were forced to flee due to attempts by the previous government to scandalise their investments.

Pakistan's economy missed many opportunities to take off, and "we also have dropped the catch of game changer CPEC," Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal was quoted as saying by The Express Tribune newspaper.

The USD 60 billion CPEC connecting China's Xinjiang with Pakistan's Gwadar port in Balochistan is regarded as the flagship project of the multi-billion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the pet scheme of Chinese President Xi Jinping, aimed at furthering China's influence globally with Chinese-funded infrastructure projects.

Speaking at the inaugural session of the two-day DataFest Conference, organised by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS), Iqbal on Tuesday used a cricket analogy to explain that the country had not been able to benefit from the CPEC and blamed the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party of former prime minister Imran Khan for the failure.

Iqbal said that China helped Pakistan in difficult times, but the opponents tried to scandalise the Chinese investment and forced it to leave Pakistan.

It was probably rare that a sitting senior cabinet minister admitted that the CPEC objectives could not be achieved, the newspaper said.

According to the paper, there has been little progress on CPEC since 2018.

"Fourteen meetings of the CPEC Joint Cooperation Committee (JCC) -- the highest decision-making body -- have been held since both countries launched the strategic initiative. But official circles acknowledge that the productive work had been done till the seventh JCC, which met in the fall of 2017," it added.

Pakistan has reaped short-term benefits from the CPEC, but long-term objectives have remained largely unachievable, the paper said.

"The second phase of CPEC, aimed at shifting Chinese industries to Pakistan and increasing the country's exports through rapid industrialisation, could not kick off," it said.

The paper reported that even more than 10 years after the implementation of CPEC began, both sides in the last JCC believed that it was necessary to implement support measures for Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and improve supporting facilities and services to attract enterprises to settle in the SEZs.

The Pakistani side assured them that it would continue to improve the business environment, continuously take facilitation measures, and support and attract foreign enterprises, including Chinese enterprises, to invest and operate in the SEZs, it added. PTI ZH ZH ZH