aGENCIES
NEW DELHI: The progress of talks for the review of the India-ASEAN Free Trade Agreement in goods will figure during the visit of Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal to Laos, an official statement said on Friday.
The two-day visit of Goyal to Vientiane, Laos, started from Friday.
He is there to participate in the 21st ASEAN-India Economic Ministers (AEM-India) meeting and the 12th East Asia Summit Economic Ministers Meeting (EAS EMM).
These annual meetings of ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) with their dialogue partners are being hosted by Laos, the ASEAN Chair for this year.
“In the AEM-India meeting, the ministers will review the progress in negotiations for review of ASEAN-India Trade in Goods Agreement (AITIGA), the ministry said.
The review is high on India's priority to make it more user-friendly, simple and trade facilitative for businesses, it said.
It added that Goyal will have a number of bilateral meetings with his counterparts from participating countries on the sidelines of two institutional meetings.
Meetings have been scheduled with the minister of the host country Laos and visiting ministers from Korea, Malaysia, Switzerland and Myanmar.
India joined ASEAN in 1992 and became its Comprehensive Strategic Partner in 2022.
For the last two consecutive years, ASEAN has been India's second largest trading partner.
The next round of talks for the ongoing review meeting of the India-Asean free trade agreement in goods will be held in November. The third round of the negotiations was concluded on August 1 in Jakarta, Indonesia.
The pact was signed in 2009. ASEAN is an important trade partner of India with about 11 per cent share in India's global trade.
India's exports to the 10-nation bloc ASEAN were USD 41.2 billion in 2023-24, while imports aggregated at USD 80 billion in the last fiscal.
