VOI - Voice of Indonesia | RRI - Radio Republik Indonesia

The Indonesian government, through the Ministry of Trade, continues to encourage increased exports of textile products to Turkey because the country is an important partner for the domestic textile industry to enter the global supply chain.

Secretary of the Directorate General of Foreign Trade of the Ministry of Trade, Marthin Kalit, in the webinar "Exporting Indonesian Textile Products to Turkey: Challenges and Opportunities" in Jakarta, Tuesday, said the Turkish market has considerable potential for the Indonesian textile industry for two reasons.

"First, Turkey's position stretches from southeastern Europe to West Asia so that this country becomes an important hub to penetrate the Middle East and even northern Africa markets," he said.

The second reason is that Turkey is the world's main textile and garment producer. The country is the sixth-largest supplier in the world and third in Europe.

"Thus, Indonesian exporters can become suppliers of raw materials or intermediate goods so they can enter the Turkish supply value chain," he said.

Marthin revealed that artificial staple fiber was one of Indonesia's largest export products to Turkey in 2019 with a value of 366 million US dollars.

In the January-August 2020 period, the export value of Indonesian textile products to Turkey decreased by 49.79 percent yoy with a value of 168.9 million US dollars.

Unfortunately, despite its bright potential, the Turkish market is quite a challenging market. Turkey only binding 50.5 import tariffs on its imports to the WTO. Of the total tariff posts of the country, 43 percent of them are industrial products.

"This means that 49.5 percent of Turkey's tariff posts have no import duty concessions to the WTO. Thus Turkey is free to increase or decrease the import duty according to its national interests without being sued by other WTO member countries," he explained.

Since 2014, Turkey has also raised tariffs by an average of 26 percent on furniture, medical equipment, tools, metal, steel, footwear, carpets, and textiles.

They did this to protect local products and increase state revenues.

"It is not surprising that during the pandemic, Turkey activated the tariff instrument as an extraordinary policy to save their domestic industry," he said.

Apart from the tariff instrument, Turkey also applies non-tariff instruments (Non-Tariff Measures / NTM). Turkey's NTM usage ratio covers 60.74 percent of Turkey's total imports and 24.16 percent of the country's exports.

For this reason, Turkey is also in the top 10 countries in the world that have implemented the instrument the most.

"The textile sector is also one sector affected by the application of this instrument because 792 textile tariff posts have been subject to NTMs," he said.

Turkey also uses trade remedies to protect domestic industries from losses due to unhealthy trading practices. Indonesia is also on the list of countries receiving the most anti-dumping investigations.

Despite facing many challenges, Marthin said the government is aware of the potential for exports to Turkey and continues to make efforts to continue to open up opportunities for export development to the country.

The Indonesian government has also taken several approaches, including negotiating a free trade agreement with Turkey within the framework of the Indonesia Turkey Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (IT-CEPA).

"In this negotiation, among others, Indonesia negotiated so that there would be no additional tariffs to be applied. Indonesia is also trying to have WTO plus treatment so that Turkey does not impose BMAD (anti-dumping duty) for too long on Indonesian export products," he explained.

Meanwhile, from the trade remedies investigation side, the Indonesian government continues to support exporters to take part and cooperate well in every investigation process.

"Although Turkey is strict in the investigation process, we are sure that if the defense effort is carried out synergistically and comprehensively at all levels, it will produce positive results," he said.

Marthin added that Indonesia had acquired paper products in 2015 and steel products in 2018 from allegations of Turkish safeguards. (antaranews)