A senior Pakistani minister has admitted that the country could not derive any benefit from the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). The minister also said that there were attempts to defame Chinese investment in the previous government, due to which Chinese investors were forced to leave the country.
Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal told ‘Express Tribune’ newspaper, Pakistan’s economy has missed the opportunity to take off several times. We also missed the opportunity of CPEC which could prove to be a ‘game changer’.
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CPEC, costing about $60 billion, connects China’s Xinjiang province to Pakistan’s Gwadar port in Balochistan. It is considered a major project of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s multi-billion dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which aims to increase China’s global influence.
Ahsan Iqbal said in the inaugural session of the two-day conference organized by Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) that the country could not benefit from CPEC. Giving an example in the language of cricket, he said that Pakistan lost this opportunity. He blamed former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) for this.
Iqbal said that China helped Pakistan in difficult times. But opponents tried to defame Chinese investment by dragging it into controversies, due to which investors left Pakistan. The newspaper wrote that this was perhaps the first time that a sitting senior minister admitted that the objectives of CPEC could not be achieved.
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According to the report, there has been little progress on CPEC since 2018. The CPEC Joint Cooperation Committee (JCC) has held 14 meetings so far, the newspaper said. But it was officially acknowledged that real progress had been made only by the seventh JCC meeting, which was held in late 2017. Pakistan did get some short-term benefits from CPEC, but the long-term objectives have not been achieved yet.
The second phase of CPEC was aimed at relocating sugar industries to Pakistan and increasing the country’s exports through rapid industrialization, but this phase never took off, the report said. The newspaper wrote that even after more than 10 years have passed since CPEC started, both the countries agreed in their last JCC meeting that there is a need to improve the supporting infrastructure and facilities required for Special Economic Zones, so that more companies are attracted to invest there.
