President John Mahama says he will push for the Caribbean to be part of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCTA) when he assumes office as the African Union Chairman.
Speaking at a joint press conference with the Jamaican Prime Minister, Andrews Holness, as part of his state visit to the Caribbean country, he noted that there is readiness for trade between the continent and the Caribbean.
“With regards to trade, we don’t kid ourselves that you snap your finger and suddenly our trade volumes will go up. We need to work at it. And that’s why I said one way of working at it is one, to put in the infrastructure and the logistics. But the second is to expand the trade area.
And that’s why I said as chair of the AU, I’m going to push for the inclusion of the Caribbean into the African Continental Free Trade Area,” the President assured on August 3.
He explained that, “The way the African Continental Free Trade Area works is that we harmonize our standards. And once you get approval from your standards authority that your product is of the standard that you can export, then they put you on a register.
And if you go on, you can see which commodities qualify. They can be electrical cables. They can be transformers. They can be iron and steel products. They can be processed food products. I mean, there’s so many pharmaceutical products. And so once you go in there and you decide to trade, you go on the platform. It will get you in touch with the producer in whichever country.”
President Mahama set the African Union is now setting up the platform so that payment can be made in the trading countries’ currencies.
“And once that is done, it will make it easier because we don’t need to exchange our currencies into somebody else’s currency before we buy tea from Kenya or Morocco buys mangoes from Ghana. We’ll just use our own currencies to pay for and the settlement will be done digitally. And so that will all enhance trade volumes, “he said.
He added that, “Already, we’re beginning to see an uptick since the African Continental Free Trade Area came. We’re beginning to see an uptick in trading between African countries. I believe that now that we have activated the Permanent Joint Commission for Cooperation to give us a framework and give us a measurable tool for looking at the progress we are making, we’ve agreed we’ll meet every two years, vice versa in Kingston and then in Accra. So, if we meet, we can tell what progress we’ve made and if we need to make any adjustments, we can do so.”
The African Continental Free Trade Area is a massive free trade zone linking almost all African nations. Signed in March 2018 and launched in January 2021, it unites 55 member states into a single market of 1.4 billion people with a combined GDP of $3.4 trillion. Its headquarters and the AfCFTA Secretariat are located in Accra, Ghana.
