The Minister of Trade and Investment, Dr. Olusegun Aganga, said on Thursday that Pakistan and Nigeria would work together to develop the sugar and textile sectors of the Nigerian economy.

Aganga disclosed this to newsmen on the sidelines of the ongoing summit of Eight Developing Nations (D-8) in Islamabad, Pakistan.

Aganga said that the Pakistani authorities also agreed to collaborate with Nigeria in the area of Small and Medium Scale Enterprise financing.

He said the agreement was reached at a meeting with his Pakistani counterpart, Mr Munir Qureshi and the deputy governor of the Pakistani Central Bank, Mr Kazi Muktadir.

Our correspondent reports that Aganga is part of the team led by President Goodluck Jonathan to the summit.

“There are four areas we have agreed to work together. One area is the financing of SMEs in the country.

“They have a system here which they use mobile phones and which has worked well and which they share risk and profit with SMEs of the country.

“That has proved to be successful in some areas. We are trying to look at that and see how that can be applied to Nigeria quickly because we have a very big SMEs sector.

“That is the sector that drives economic growth and job creation.

“The other area of collaboration is sugar. Recently, we approved the government policy on sugar. Pakistanis are exporters of sugar and it is sugarcane to sugar, the kind we are trying to encourage.

“As of today, we only produce two per cent of the sugar we consume in the country. 98 per cent of that is brown sugar that we import into the country and refine.

“The approach is going to be, going forward is sugarcane to sugar which actually creates a lot of jobs.

“They are doing it and in fact they actually manufactured their sugar mills being used in this country.

“98 per cent of their sugar mills in this country were manufactured locally, so we are going to collaborate in that sector, having joint venture with the major players with investors in Pakistan,’’ he said

According to the minister, Pakistan has been successful in the area of textiles and it will be beneficial for Nigeria to collaborate with it as it will learn from its experiences, especially because 78 per cent of Pakistan’s export is textile.

“That sector was once a big employer of labour in Nigeria. We have made some improvements in the last two years from about 25 per cent to 48 per cent in terms of capacity.

“We want to develop our textile sector right from cotton to fashion design and they have done that extremely well in Pakistan.

“This is an area we want to collaborate with them and have joint venture,’’ he said.

Aganga said a number of governors were in Pakistan recently to import agricultural tractors. He said the area of collaboration was for tractor manufacturers to come to Nigeria and set up assembly plant in the country,” Aganga stated.

The minister said the meeting agreed that a trade delegation from Pakistan should visit Nigeria in December to facilitate the partnership between the two countries.

On the importance of the D-8 summit, Aganga said the group accounted for one seventh of the world’s population.

“The population is about one billion, so it is a big market. They are about 13 per cent to 15 per cent of the world’s economy; so on its own, it is a very powerful group,” he said.

He noted that with commitment and cooperation, the D-8 could become another global economic power.