Turkey, EU chambers team up to collabroate

ISTANBUL

Turkey’s Customs and Trade Minister Hayati Yazıcı (C) has attended the press meeting of the project with TOBB Chairman Rifat Hisarcıklıoğlu (R).

Chambers in Turkey and the European Union have partnered up, as part of a 5 million euro cooperation and capacity-building project between the Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges of Turkey (TOBB) and Eurochambers.

The project brings together 41 Turkish chambers and bourses with 34 counterparts, in 21 partnership projects aimed at contributing to mutual cooperation and also to promote the integration of EU and Turkish business institutions. “The objective of the EU-Turkey Chambers Forum Project is to prepare chambers and bourses for EU membership, to contribute to civil society dialogue between the EU and Turkey, and to raise awareness about the opportunities that Turkey’s membership [of the EU] would provide,” said Rifat Hisarcıkoğlu, the chairman of TOBB.

The partnership projects will be diverse in terms of geography and sectors, he added. “From textiles to agriculture, from innovation to the development of occupational training, there is a wide scale of projects. ,” he said.The partnership projects will be completed by the end of this year.

Hisarcıkoğlu also praised the progress of chambers in Turkey, saying that in 2001 they struggled to find even 10 chambers with the capacity to conduct business in foreign languages, but that as of 2011 the chambers and bourses had conducted around 440 projects, using around 350 million euros supplied by various institutions including the European Union as a result of our trainings.