Iraq's Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan on Tuesday, April 3, opened a weeklong Egyptian trade fair showboating 182 companies mainly from industrial, food and automobile sectors.
The fair, the third since the 1991 Gulf War, coincides with the visit to Baghdad of a 200-strong delegation of Egyptian company officials and businessmen led by Public Enterprise Minister Mukhtar Khattab.
Iraqi Trade Minister Mohammad Mehdi Saleh has said that trade between Iraq and Egypt within the UN's oil-for-food program now stands at some two billion dollars a year.
Saleh said Egypt, with which Iraq enjoys a free-trade agreement, was currently Baghdad's third-largest trade partner behind France and Russia.
The oil-for-food program was introduced in 1996 to soften the Iraqi people's suffering under the economic embargo imposed since Baghdad's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. — (AFP, Baghdad)
© Agence France Presse 2001
© 2001 Mena Report (www.menareport.com)
