Still, African leadership must take some culpability. Again, punishing EU standards require heavy investment in the value chain for African produce, which prevents African producers from improving their productive capabilities beyond raw exports. The impact on the farmers of what are already some of the poorest countries in the world is obvious. Africa imports a staggering 80% of its food, despite being a continent dominated by agriculture. Moreover, lopsided EU trade agreements see African countries flooded with cheap, subsidised goods while able to export little in return. African markets flooded with subsidised goods Yet Germany, a leading processor, earned nearly double that from re-exports. Indeed, all Africa earned just $1.5bn from the crop in 2014. In 2019 Uganda earned just $470m from over 250,000 tonnes of coffee exports Switzerland earned some $2.2bn from processing and re-exporting just 80,000 tonnes. To add insult to injury European countries can then process and re-export for great profit – and at great expense to poor African farmers. The EU slaps Africa with punishing tariff charges on processed, roasted coffee, but not unroasted, raw green beans. Naturally, this deters our coffee producers from investing in the technology to process the commodity while bullying them into exporting it raw. There are too many examples to list, but one of the most egregious that illustrates the issue is coffee. The most prominent offender in this regard is of course the most powerful trading bloc in the world: the European Union (EU). It is difficult to distinguish such relationships from the colonial-era protectorates of the past. But the deals African countries are forced into are unique in just how lopsided they are and more so in how they are prevented from making any progress to improve their lot. It is of course natural that any trading entity should seek terms most favourable to them. These policies keep Africa prisoner, while making the countries and blocs that implement them wealthier still. Restrictive trade policies from wealthy, western countries and blocs keep African countries chained to raw materials exports while hampering our efforts to move up the manufacturing value chain. However, the lingering economic impact of the pandemic is not the only hurdle to our efforts to industrialise. Restrictive trade policies keep Africa prisoner Making the shift from raw materials exports to agro-processing is critical therefore not only to our post-Covid economic recovery, but to bringing millions out of poverty in general. Many of these are small-holder farmers, who lack sufficient access to crucial services like finance and banking. Moreover, like most African economies, ours is dominated by agriculture, with some 70% of our near 50m population employed by the sector. The manufacturing and light assembly sectors hold the most promise of creating the kinds of jobs that can put our economy back on track. In Uganda, some two years of lockdown of the entertainment, tourism and night economies have exerted pressure on productivity. We are at last embarking on our respective, though interconnected, journeys to economic recovery.įor many of us, this means an urgent need to fast-track our industrialisation agendas, which have been slowed – or in some cases halted entirely – by the pandemic. After a period of economically damaging lockdowns – the only public health tool at most African governments’ disposal owing to a continent-wide dearth of vaccines – economies are now beginning to reopen. For many nations in Africa, the turn of the New Year was marked by a sense of hope.
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