COLOMBO, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said on Monday that his country had lost high export earnings due to the withdrawal of EU trade concessions during the previous regime.
Wickremesinghe said without the Generalized Scheme of Preferences (GSP) plus trade concessions, the island country only earned 2.5 billion U.S. dollars from the export of ready-made garments while countries such as Bangladesh harvested 5.2 billion U.S. dollars.
In 2015, although Sri Lanka's apparel exports pocketed 4.8 billion U.S. dollars, Bangladesh, which had obtained the GSP Plus concessions, earned over 26.6 billion U.S. dollars in the same year, the prime minister said.
"Due to losing the GSP Plus concessions, we only managed to increase our revenue from 2.5 billion U.S. dollars to 4.8 billion U.S. dollars, not even a two-fold increase," Wickremesinghe said.
The GSP plus trade concessions were withdrawn from Sri Lanka in 2010 by the EU due to violations of human-rights agreements under the Mahinda Rajapakse regime.
The suspension resulted in Sri Lankan exporters losing duty-free access to EU markets and their shipments being charged an import duty.
However after discussions between the EU and the new government of President Maithripala Sirisena, the European Commission said last week that it had proposed to remove significant duties on Sri Lankan products after restoring its GSP Plus trade access to Europe's export market.
The European Parliament and the Council have now up to four months to raise potential objections before the measures become effective.
