The Minister of Trade and Industry, Ekwow Spio-Garbrah, has called on fellow African Trade Ministers to place a higher emphasis on industrial development and manufacturing in their periodic consultations, so as to ensure that trade between and amongst African states and other regions of the world is more in manufactured exports than raw materials.
Mr. Spio-Garbrah was speaking at the recently-concluded 4th Indian-African Trade Ministers Conference in New Delhi, India, which preceded a Heads of State Summit taking place this week in India.
The Trade and Industry Minister wondered why African Ministers seem content to simply discuss the terms of trade with other regions of the world, when enough attention is not being paid to industrial development and manufacturing.
He proposed that future meetings of the group should deal with industry as well as trade, as without a solid industrial base African countries tend to trade mostly in primary goods.
Mr. Spio-Garbrah acknowledged the important contributions India is making in Africa, especially through numerous investments by private Indian industries — but also through various programmes of the Indian government in the areas of technology transfer and training, ICT and telecommunications, healthcare, power and other kinds of infrastructure.
He cited the support of India for a sugar factory in Ghana, and a number of other projects involving public and private sources.
He welcomes the Indian government’s proposals to make as much as 97% of exports from Africa enter duty-free to India, and hopes African exporters will take up this offer.
The Ministers, representing some 20 African countries, later had an opportunity to interact with Indian Prime Minister Mohdi.
In informal remarks, the Ghanaian Minister suggested to the Indian Prime Minister that to promote even greater Indo-African collaboration, India could consider modifying its national slogan: “Made in India” to Make in India with Africa”.
On an earlier, presentation made by the African Union on its Agenda 2063, Mr. Spio-Garbrah again emphasised that the new vision of Africa is one of an industrialising continent where value is added to all its exports.
This requires a lot of technology and India should therefore see its advances in engineering and machinery production as a natural partner for Africa in its industrialisation drive.
He considered that Africa’s plans to create a Continental Free Trade Area (CTFA) by 2017 provides both African countries and partners like India with a large geographic terrain and wide range of products and services in which to transact business.
Mr. Spio-Garbrah called for an improvement in the preparatory work leading to these conferences, as it seems that relevant documentation and review reports of what had transpired between the 3rd Forum of Indian and African Ministers and this 4th Forum were not available for comment.
He suggested that a virtual secretariat could be hosted between the AU and Indian government to see to implementation of decisions made at such forums.
He noted that the Ghana High Commission to India in Delhi has been offering its facilities for meetings of the African Group of Ambassadors in India, and with necessary support from the Indian government the office can provide some interim secretariat services to make meetings of the two sides more meaningful and results-oriented.