Trade Africa Organization

 Trade is the key to long-term, sustainable economic growth and development in sub-Saharan Africa, says Florizelle Liser, assistant U.S. trade representative for Africa.....

Because trade is vital to sub-Saharan Africa's economic future and to improving lives and livelihoods, the 8th Annual African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) Forum, to be held in Nairobi, Kenya, August 4-6, is an important venue for cultivation of trade opportunities, Liser said in a July 21 interview with America.gov.

"Trade is critically important to economic development. Right now, Africa has about 2 percent of all world trade, which is hard to believe when you think about all of the tremendous resources that they have - oil, diamonds, gold ... not to mention all the agricultural products such as coffee, tea, cocoa - and to think that Africa still only has 2 percent of world trade is really incredible. 

But the power of trade is that if the Africans were able to increase their share of world trade from 2 to 3 percent, that 1 percentage increase would actually generate about $70 billion of additional income annually for Africa," or about three times the total development assistance Africa gets from the entire world, Liser said.

Many countries in Asia and Latin America, she said, "don't have even one smidgen of Africa's natural resources - a country like South Korea, for example - yet they are huge players in the global trading system.

 This is why having AGOA as one initiative aimed at expanding the U.S. aspect of our economic relationship with the Africans" is so important.

And Africans must begin trading more with each other. "Africans trade the least with each other than all the other continents. It is improving. 

We are seeing a greater increase in intra-African trade, but," she emphasized, "the reason that that is important is that you are unlikely to be competitive globally if you are not competitive regionally. 

So until they open their borders with each other and trade with each other, you are not going to get the level of competition that will allow them to be major providers of any product globally

You look at the products you have, and you determine the three or four particular products or sectors [where] you have a comparative advantage,"

she explained. "Then you look carefully at what are the challenges that face those three or four products or sectors and what would the country have to do to make them more competitive.

" Some countries are employing this strategy and bringing together their trade, finance, transport and energy ministers and investment promotion experts. "You sit all of these people around the table and you have them ... determine, step by step, what they have to do to advance the competitiveness of those three or four products or sectors.