(IRNA) - The preliminary session of the 19th Joint Commission on Economic, Trade, and Technical Cooperation between Iran and Turkey opened here on Monday in the presence of Iranian-Turkish delegates to review the agenda and date of the joint commission meeting and also the procedures for holding it.
Director General of the Cooperation Department in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mahdi Mir-Abutalebi is heading the Iranian delegation at the talks, reports Trend.
Director of the Planning and Contracts Department in the Ministry of Commerce and officials of other ministries and organizations are also included in the delegation.
Mutual talks between the two delegations began in the Turkish Foreign Trade Organization premises and will be continued tomorrow (Tuesday).
The 18th meeting of Iran-Turkey Economic Cooperation Commission was held in August 2004 in Tehran with the participation of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who headed a high-ranking delegation.
Turkish state minister for foreign trade and customs affairs and head of the Turkish side in the joint cooperation commission meeting, Kursad Tuzmen, also attended the meeting.
Figures released by the Turkish State Statistics Organization show that the value of trade exchanges between Iran and Turkey in the first nine months of 2006, stood at 5.123 billion dollars, showing a 66-percent increase compared to the figure for the same period last year.
During this period in 2005, Iran-Turkey trade exchanges reached dlrs 3.84 billion.
In the first nine months in 2006, Turkey's exports to Iran exceeded 696 million dollars, indicating 2.6 percent growth in contrast to the amount for the same period last year, while its imports were 4.4 billion dollars, a growth of 84.1 percent.
The total volume of trade exchanges between the two states surpassed five billion dollars in the period.
In the same period, Iran's share in Turkey's total export and import were 1.1 and 4.4 percent, respectively.
The value of Turkish foreign trade in the first nine months of the current year exceeded 161 billion dollars, showing more than 16.12 percent rise with regard to the period the year before.