The United Arab Emirates (UAE) aims to finalize a free trade agreement with Türkiye in the coming weeks, the UAE's trade minister said on Thursday, roughly four months after negotiations were launched.
Emirati Minister of State for Foreign Trade Thani Ahmed Al Zeyoudi’s remarks on the deal that is expected to significantly lift bilateral trade between the two countries comes as the two countries seek to build economic bridges after a yearslong rift.
"We are aiming to finalize the #UAETurkiyeCEPA in the coming weeks, and build deeper, more meaningful trade and investment ties with one of the region’s most important economies," Al Zeyoudi wrote on Twitter, retweeting a post by his Turkish counterpart.
"We discussed the current state of the ongoing negotiations of Türkiye-UAE #CEPA and the steps to be taken to finalize the agreement," Türkiye’s Trade Minister Mehmet Muş said on Twitter
The UAE is pursuing several bilateral free trade deals, known as Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreements (CEPA), and has signed trade deals with India, Israel and Indonesia this year.
The agreement looks to remove trade barriers and promote the free movement of goods by cutting tariffs.
The deal will enable Türkiye and the UAE to achieve a bilateral trade volume of nearly $15 billion (TL 273.32 billion), Muş said in late April when the two countries officially launched talks on the CEPA, referring to the highest level ever recorded back in 2017, before declining as relations strained.
Al Zeyoudi also said the CEPA is expected to double trade between the two nations.
Ankara and Abu Dhabi have moved to put years of tense relations behind them, opening the doors to a new phase in bilateral relations marked by deeper economic cooperation after a yearslong dispute.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan paid a return visit to the UAE in mid-February, after a trip by UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (MBZ) to Ankara in late November that marked a significant move toward overcoming disputes.
Sheikh Mohammed, who had led the UAE for years as de facto ruler, became president this May.
The visit, which was Erdoğan’s first to the Gulf country since 2013, was marked by a score of agreements, including on trade, industry, defense, health and medical sciences, land and sea transportation and climate action.
The visit in November had yielded investment accords worth billions of dollars and was MBZ’s first official trip to Turkey since 2012 and the highest-level visit by an Emirati official since relations between the two countries hit a low.
The UAE is the largest trading partner of Türkiye in the Gulf region with a bilateral trade volume of around $8 billion.
The turnover had dropped to as much as $6.9 billion in 2018, before rebounding to nearly $7.9 billion in 2019, according to the official data. The volume rose further to $8.3 billion in 2020 despite the coronavirus pandemic, before slipping slightly to $7.6 billion last year.
The trade in the first seven months of this year totaled approximately $5.2 billion. Türkiye’s exports to the UAE totaled around $2.86 billion, down 13.2% year-over-year, while imports jumped 56.7% to nearly $2.34 billion.