Turkey looks to deepen trade ties with Netherlands

By Sevgi Ceren Gokkoyun and Zeynep Cetinkaya

ANKARA (AA) - Turkey foresees that trade and economic ties with the Netherlands will gain momentum in the coming days, the Turkish trade minister said on Monday.

Addressing the virtually held Turkish-Dutch Joint Economic and Trade Committee (JETCO) meeting, Ruhsar Pekcan said: "We aim to increase our bilateral trade volume to $15 billion from $9 billion in 2019 in a balanced way."

Also, Pekcan and Dutch Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation Minister Sigrid Kaag inked a memorandum of understanding during the meeting.

She said that participants discussed the obstacles in trade relations.

"We discussed various topics, from bilateral relations to mutual investments, contracting services, from trade to cooperation in industry, from technology to private sector cooperation, from transportation to the environment and women entrepreneurship," Pekcan said, adding that the MoU included all of them.

Pekcan underlined that mutual encouragement of investments is one of the concrete and important areas of cooperation.

The Netherlands' foreign direct investments (FDI) in Turkey have reached $25.7 billion so far, she said, explaining that the figure constitutes 15.9% of total FDI in Turkey.

Meanwhile, Turkish businesses have $14 billion of investments in the Netherlands, the highest overseas investments of the circle.

"We forecast intensive cooperation opportunities between Turkish and Dutch companies in the fields of port construction and management, contracting, maritime, advanced agricultural technologies, organic agricultural products, environment and waste management, chemicals, energy, renewable energy, logistics and health services," Pekcan added.