BEIJING – Pakistan Ambassador to China, Moin Ul Haque has said that thesecond phase of China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) was people centricand this flagship project would directly benefit common people by creatingjobs, alleviating poverty and improvement in the livelihood.
“In the second stage of CPEC, we are going into agriculture cooperationwith China. Pakistan is an agricultural country and we need to modernizeour agriculture system, upgrade yield of our crops and new seedsdevelopment.”
“And all we can do under the CPEC projects which will be directly befittingpeople of Pakistan by job creation by alleviating poverty and improving thelivelihood of people,” he said while talking in ‘The Point’ a currentaffairs programme of China Global Television Network (CGTN).
Ambassador Haque said that CPEC since its launch in 2015 during PresidentXi’s visit to Pakistan had progressed very steadily. It was a verycomprehensive project in the areas of infrastructure development, energy,transport, and telecommunications.
He said that the CPEC was developing smoothly and mentioned the energysector had helped Pakistan overcome its critical needs in energy sector.
The infrastructure had improved while Gwadar was progressing well whichwould not only help socio-economic development in Pakistan but it wouldalso help regional integration.
“We had shortage of electricity in last few years but now we are reaching astage that we will have a surplus energy in Pakistan,” he added.
While dismissing an impression that the CPEC projects were progressingslow, he said that since he came here, he had been meeting with Chineseentrepreneurs and companies who were already working in Pakistan and liketo expand their footprints in Pakistan and get new projects and investment.
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“If there are problems with their projects, these companies would have notbeen keen to go to Pakistan,” he added.
He said that there were detractors of CPEC who didn’t like China’s rise andfriendship between Pakistan and China so they were always opposing it.
To a question about negative environmental impact, he pointed out thatPakistan and China being signatory to the Paris climate accord attachedgreat importance to international climate change.
“All these projects being completed under CPEC framework conformed to thethose international standards,” he added.
He said that the government attached great importance to the environmentand launched mega projects like 10 billion tree plantation, clean and greenPakistan and in that respect even in the CPEC, projects were very carefullyexecuted and it was ensured that it conformed to the internationalstandards.
On Pakistan and China relations, he said that both the countries had very aspecial relationship which had been nurtured over the years by thesuccessive governments and people of the two countries. “So, no wonder thatwe call each others as iron brothers.”
