Council of Arab Economic Unity - Greater Arab Free Trade Area

The Greater Arab Free Trade Area (GAFTA) is a pan-Arab free trade area that came into existence in 1997. It was founded by 14 countries (Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates). The establishment of GAFTA followed the adoption of the Agreement to Facilitate and Develop Trade Among Arab Countries (1981) by the Arab League's Economic and Social Council (ESC) and the approval by 17 Arab League member-states at a summit in Amman, Jordan of the Greater Arab Free Trade Area Agreement (1997). In 2009, Algeria joined GAFTA as the eighteenth member-state. GAFTA is supervised and run by the ESC. GAFTA has a high income, population, and area and has significant resources available.

The members participate in 96% of the total internal Arab trade, and 95% with the rest of the world by applying the following conditions:

1. Instruct the inter-customs fees:

   To reduce the Customs on Arab products by 10% annually, the 14 Arab states reported their custom tariff programs to the Security Council of the Arab League to coordinate them with each others, except for Syria that is still using the Brussels tariffs system.

2. Applying the locality of the Arab products:

   All members have shared their standards and specifications to help their products move smoothly from one country to another.

   The League also created a project to apply the Arab Agriculture Pact:

   which is to share the standards of the agricultural sector and inject several more restrictions and specifications where all members have involved in them.

   The Arab League granted exceptions, which allow a customs rate for certain goods, to six members for several goods, however rejected requests by Morocco, Lebanon and Jordan for additional exceptions.

3. Private sectors:

   The League created a database and a service to inform and promote for the private's sectors benefits, and how their work would be in the GAFTA treaty is needed.

4. Communication:

   The Economic and Social Council in its sixty-fifth meeting agreed on pointing a base for communication to ease communication between member states, and also to work to ease communication between the Private and public sectors to apply the Greater Arab Free Trade Area between members.

5. Customs Duties:

   In the sixty-seventh meeting the Economic and Social Council agreed that the 40% decrease on customs on goods in the past 4 years of the GAFTA will continue and following the decisions of the Amman summit, the members will put more efforts to eliminate all customs duties on local Arab goods.