SADC may form FTA

The 14 countries that make up the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) are on the verge of signing a free trade area (FTA) into existence.

While this would be eight months after the initial date decided after a trade protocol was signed in September 2000 with an eight-year timeline to create the union, South Africa’s Trade and Industry Minister Mandisi Mpahlwa said it would be launched in Johannesburg this weekend.

The summit meeting would be used to approve the planning required for a customs union between the SADC members with this hope of building a fully-fledged customs union, which could become a major building block of a “United States of Africa”.

Mpahlwa said that since a decision in 1996 in Maseru, Lesotho to work towards union, a study had shown that trade among SADC trade had been 85 percent liberalised, and would be tariff-free by 2012.

However, the minister added, “Regional economic integration is not only about the removal of tariff barriers ... the FTA is not an end in itself, but the beginning of a process we need to embark on to build both our productive and trade capacity, improve the competitiveness of our industries and address the supply side constraints that inhibit us from benefiting from better terms of trade in the region.”

Mpahlwa said that industrial and competition policies would need to be harmonised to facilitate this too.