ISLAMABAD: A delegation of senior Pakistani diplomats met with top Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) officials in Riyadh this week to discuss the modalities of a free trade agreement between the two sides, said the foreign office in Islamabad on Friday.

The two sides signed a framework agreement to discuss the issue in August 2004, although only a few rounds of negotiations were held in the subsequent years. However, the GCC and Pakistan resumed the conversation over the subject in 2021 after a significantly long period.

Last year, they held technical-level talks to examine the possibility of signing the free trade agreement that could help Pakistan boost its exports to the six-country bloc, which includes Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, and Kuwait.

“The first meeting of the Joint Working Group on Political Cooperation under the framework of Pakistan-GCC Strategic Dialogue was held on 21 March in Riyadh,” the foreign office spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch said during her weekly news briefing.

“The Dialogue was co-chaired by Additional Foreign Secretary for the Middle East, Ambassador Rizwan Sheikh and Assistant Secretary General for Political Affairs and Negotiations at the GCC General Secretariat, Dr. Abdulaziz Alwaisheg,” she added. “The two sides discussed the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between Pakistan and GCC and exchanged views on regional and global security, counter-terrorism, and Islamophobia.”

Pakistan has been facing major economic challenges amid dwindling foreign exchange reserves and fast-depreciating national currency. While the country has been striving to secure external financing by negotiating with global lenders like the International Monetary Fund, it needs to increase its exports as a long-term solution to its financial problems.

Pakistani industrialists and economists believe the free trade agreement is vital for the country to increase multilateral trade volumes.

“The FTA with GCC should have been signed much earlier because these are major economies, especially the UAE is our major trading partner, as our high-end imports are mostly coming from UAE,” Dr. Vaqar Ahmed, joint executive director at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), told Arab News last year in July.

Currently, Pakistan has free trade agreements with China, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka, though it also wants to export more to other trade destinations.