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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Read more about this topic: Council Of Arab Economic Unity
Famous quotes containing the words greater, arab, free, trade and/or area:
“We Americans have the chance to become someday a nation in which all radical stocks and classes can exist in their own selfhoods, but meet on a basis of respect and equality and live together, socially, economically, and politically. We can become a dynamic equilibrium, a harmony of many different elements, in which the whole will be greater than all its parts and greater than any society the world has seen before. It can still happen.”
—Shirley Chisholm (b. 1924)
“As the Arab proverb says, “The dog barks and the caravan passes”. After having dropped this quotation, Mr. Norpois stopped to judge the effect it had on us. It was great; the proverb was known to us: it had been replaced that year among men of high worth by this other: “Whoever sows the wind reaps the storm”, which had needed some rest since it was not as indefatigable and hardy as, “Working for the King of Prussia”.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“And trade is art, and art’s philosophy,
In Paris.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)
“If you meet a sectary, or a hostile partisan, never recognize the dividing lines; but meet on what common ground remains,—if only that the sun shines, and the rain rains for both; the area will widen very fast, and ere you know it the boundary mountains, on which the eye had fastened, have melted into air.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)