Caglayan: "Turkey hopes to soon sign a fre trade pact with India"

A free trade agreement between Turkey and India should be signed as soon as possible to make the most of the "tremendous trade potential" between the two emerging economies, Foreign Trade Minister Zafer Caglayan said on Tuesday. "We should sign a free trade pact as soon as possible," he told the Turkey-India Business Forum in New Delhi. "The problems encountered as a result of visa requirements present obstacles to trade." Turkey currently has free trade agreements with 14 nations as well as with members of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), a free trade organization of four non-European Union member states. Caglayan lamented the paltry size of trade between Turkey and India last year compared to the size of both economies and their respective trade volumes. "We're particularly working on the Indian market," he added. "When you analyze India's imports and Turkey's exports, we see a 45 percent match. This is excellent; only a handful of countries have such a similarity. In fact, we're selling the very goods you're buying, but we haven't taken advantage of this because we don't know each other as well as we should."