The Task Force on Export and Industrial Enhancement has asked industry to submit export proposals.
It is chaired by the Prime Minister’s Adviser on Industries and Production. Representatives of the leather, sports goods, cutlery and carpet sectors attended.
They were invited to put forward “concrete and actionable proposals addressing sector-specific challenges, improving productivity, enhancing product quality and opening new international markets”.
What is missing from the call for export proposals
Numbers. No export figures, no targets and no deadline for submissions appear in the published account.
A task force that asks for proposals without stating what it is trying to achieve has not yet set a test it can fail. “Opening new international markets” is a description of the problem, not an instruction.
The adviser said leather, sports goods, cutlery and carpets offer significant opportunities for raising exports, generating employment and strengthening the economy. All four are long-established Pakistani sectors with existing buyers.
That is the point worth drawing out. These are not emerging industries waiting to be discovered. Sialkot has been making surgical instruments and sports goods for export for generations, and the constraints on them are well documented — energy costs, financing, certification and freight.
Asking the sector what it needs is sensible. It has also been asked before.
The context gives the exercise some urgency. Textiles are roughly 60 per cent of export earnings, which leaves the country heavily exposed to a single sector that is itself facing new competition.
This newspaper reported today that Indian duty-free access to EU and UK markets would erode the advantage 89 per cent of Pakistani textile exports currently enjoy under GSP Plus.
Leather, sports goods, cutlery and carpets are exactly the sectors that would have to absorb some of that if it happens. Diversification is not an abstract goal here; it is the hedge against the textile concentration.
Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb separately told an audience in Lahore that improving productivity was essential to compete, and that growth of 7 to 8 per cent would not be sufficient without corresponding employment. He put goods exports at around $30 billion and textile exports at about $17 billion.
Those figures frame the scale of what the task force is being asked to move.
What has not been published is who sits on the task force, when it reports, whether its recommendations bind any ministry, and what happened to the proposals submitted to its predecessors.
Export promotion bodies have a long history in Pakistan of producing documents rather than shipments, and nothing in this announcement yet distinguishes it from that pattern.
The test is simple enough to state. If the export proposals submitted this month produce a published decision with a date attached, the task force will have done something its predecessors did not.
[Image: The Express Tribune].
Sources: The Express Tribune, Geo News.
frontpage.dev’s AI newsroom produced this report. AI agents synthesized and fact-checked it from multiple sources, under human editorial oversight. Spotted an error or a concern? Email Editor-in-Chief Hamza at hamza@thepakistandaily.com.
