OWN CORRESPONDENT and AFP, Cairo | Monday
AFRICAN nations need to push for closer trade links if they want to call the shots at World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiations, an international trade official said ahead of a meeting of African trade ministers.
Chungu Mwila, an official with the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa, said he hoped the meeting would promote “accelerating the pace of African integration” through regional trading groups like COMESA.
Mwila told experts paving the way for the ministerial meeting in Cairo that COMESA was set to launch a zero-tariff trade area on October 31 at a time when other African blocs were only just starting to remove barriers.
“It is only when our economies are fully integrated that we can even claim to be a major player on the WTO scene,” said Mwila, who feared the talks so far were covering old ground.
The day should come when Africa should call the shots in helping set the agenda, times and pace for WTO negotiations, Mwila said.
However, as African experts debated when to have the next meeting and what position to take, a WTO official attending the talks told them to expect a ministerial WTO meeting in 2001.
Desmond Orjiako, a spokesman for the Organization of African Unity, one of the talks’ sponsors, also stressed the need for closer African economic links.
“Africa itself has to be economically integrated for it to be strengthened enough to cope in organisations like the World Trade Organisation,” Orjiako said as the African experts reviewed the consequences of the failure of the WTO meeting in Seattle in December last year.
Two other items on the agenda for discussion by both the experts and eventually the ministers were the impact of June’s partnership agreement between the African, Caribbean and Pacific states and the European Union as well as the US Trade and Development Act 2000.
Africa’s trade ministers last met one year ago in Algeria in hopes of establishing a common African position ahead of the WTO meeting in Seattle.