RIYADH, 17 January — Saudi Arabia yesterday called for measures to halt the decline in trade with Iran over the past five years, at the opening of the Saudi-Iran Joint Commission meeting at the Saudi capital.
Commerce Minister Osama Faqeeh regretted "the sharp fall in the volume of trade between the two countries" over the past five years despite the improvement in Riyadh-Tehran relations.
Two-way trade plunged 30 percent in 1999 to SR355 million ($95 million), compared with the previous year, and was down 51 percent last year from the level of 1997, said Faqeeh.
The Saudi minister called for "a serious examination of the causes of this fall" and urged the private sectors in both countries to exert more efforts to increase trade exchange.
An Iranian industrial fair will be held in Jeddah in February and a Saudi exhibition will be held in Tehran next May on services for the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Makkah, said the commerce minister.
Iran's Commerce Minister Muhammad Shariat Madari said his country wanted "to consolidate its cooperation with Islamic countries" including Saudi Arabia. Muslim countries account for more than 66 percent of Iran's non-oil exports, he added.
Madari said Saudi Arabia and Iran imported products worth $45 billion annually. He added that the share of the two countries in this fabulous figure was very small.
Faqeeh invited Iranian businessmen and entrepreneurs to invest in the Kingdom, and said the new foreign investment law offered a lot of incentives and encouraged joint investment projects.
The third meeting of the commission is aimed at enhancing cooperation between the two countries in economic, commercial, investment, scientific, technical and other areas. The two countries recently signed an agreement on transportation of pilgrims.
The meeting will also explore prospects of conducting joint research in agriculture, livestock and water and exchanging information on botanical diseases and management of endowments.
Most of Saudi exports reach Iran indirectly either through the UAE free port of Jabal Ali or Bahrain and this amount will not appear in the trade balance between the two countries. So, it is difficult to get an exact figure of the trade exchange.
Economic sources told Arab News that commercial brokers in Dubai and Bahrain were playing a positive role at this stage of economic cooperation between Saudi Arabia and Iran as they removed the obstacles facing trade between the two countries. Consumer products accounted for 59 percent of Iranian exports to the Kingdom in 1996.
Madari later held talks with Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal on ways of strengthening economic and trade cooperation.
