14 Jun.
African Grand Free Trade Area.
Negotiations on two of the three phases of the proposed African Grand Free Trade Area must be completed within 36 months, counting from the day of the agreement, according to Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies.
Countries from the Common Market for East and Southern Africa (Comesa), East African Community (EAC) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) met on Sunday, June 12 at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg for the second tripartite summit of heads of state and government to formally launch the tripartite free trade area negotiations.
At a press briefing on Monday, Davies said the first phases of the agreement would be to address tariff barriers between the three regional economic communities.
“The heads of state agreed that free trade agreements had already been reached within their respective regional economic communities and while they had thought an inordinate amount of time was needed to do this, they still allocated 36 months to do so from Sunday, June 12,” he said.
The second phase of the agreement, which Davies said would run concurrently with the first, had the same time frame as the first, related to making the movement of legitimate business people easier.
“I know the movement of people is always a sensitive issue. But we know there are people with nefarious agendas trying to get into SA, but even so, we need to take the movement of legitimate business people easier,” he said.
The final phase related to trade support and this would deal with issues such as intellectual property protection and competition. This phase had no time frame allocated to it, Davies said.
Source: Business Report
Discussion
Comments are closed.