Chissano stresses quality for Africa to win international markets

Former Mozambican President Joaquim Chissano says that Africa and other developing countries need to enhance the quality of their products to earn a place in the international market.

Speaking exclusively with The Guardian Tuesday in Dar es Salaam after a two-day high-level dialogue of mobilizing aid for trade, Chissano said low quality products were one of the reasons that barred African countries from shining in the world market.

``Trade can propel economic growth and make millions of people step up from the poverty line.

However, African countries are going through a formidable range of external and domestic barriers that hinder their efforts to reap benefits from the global trading system,`` he said.

He said external barriers such as tariffs and non-tariffs were under negotiations within the framework of the Doha Round. ``African people hope that barriers would either be eliminated altogether or significantly reduced to give them access to world markets.

Countries must enhance the quality of their products, strengthen infrastructure, improve market access and establish market channels for their products to reap the benefits of trade and development,`` said Chissano.

He called upon African countries to focus not only on international business but also to boost trade within African countries themselves.

``African countries can easily benefit people of other nations. They can also boost their own economies, and for this to happen it is important that both the recipient and donor countries build mutual agreement and agenda to ensure that aid for trade dialogue benefits both parties,`` he said.

For his part, Chinese Vice-Minister for Commerce Yi Xiaozhun said the multilateral trading system that existed in the past few decades was unbalanced and favoured the interests of developed over those of developing countries.

``This fact resulted in the marginalization of some developing countries, especially the least developed ones, in the course of globalization,`` he said.

He said the Doha Round launched in 2001 had given prominence to development as its core issue and ultimate goal which was unprecedented in the 60 years of the history of the multilateral trading system.

However, the Chinese added that since the commencement of the WTO Doha Round of negations, there had been only modest increase in trade-related technical assistance and capacity building for developing countries.

He said at this time African countries did not enjoy neither a reasonable share of world trade or benefit sufficiently from globalization.

He said developed countries were in a better position to shoulder greater responsibilities to overcome difficulties.

They have the capacity and obligation to do more to help developing countries. They should increase official development aid and the flow of FDI to African countries, alleviate their debt burden and fight against protectionism,? he said.

In addition he said there was a need to give an active role to multilateral aid programmes initiated by international organisations such as WTO, the World Bank, UNDP and regional development banks.

The two-day meeting endeavored to highlight the importance of African countries to integrate in the global trading system and benefit from it in order to achieve economic well-being and uplift the standard of life on the continent.

The meeting attracted participants from Africa and donor countries from Europe and Asia.