COMESA mulls creation of customs union
Nov 15, 2006 (DJIBOUTI) — Leaders from Africa’s largest trading bloc have mulled ways to form a unified customs system for its 21 member states at a summit overshadowed by simmering regional and intra-state unrest.
As six presidents and a prime minister opened the 11th summit of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), the union’s outgoing chairman called on members to tackle the conflicts threatening to scupper envisioned economic integration.
“Instability in the region and the civil or inter-member states’ conflicts … are threats to our regional integration, and COMESA leaders have to play their role in solving these crises,” Rwandan President Paul Kagame, the bloc’s outgoing chief, said at the opening session Wednesday.
COMESA plans to set up the customs union for their markets by 2008.
Key among the flash points is the volatile situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is still awaiting the outcome of its first democratic elections in more than four decades, and the increasingly fragile Somalia whose internal conflict threatens to escalate into a regional war.
The Somali crisis, which has festered for nearly 16 years, is expected to top the agenda as well as the border row between arch-foes Ethiopia and Eritrea.
While Somalia is not in COMESA itself, foreign involvement could fuel an all-out war there that threatens to engulf the whole region, notably Ethiopia and Eritrea, which have been accused of fighting a proxy war in the lawless African nation.
But the trade bloc’s incoming leader, Djibouti’s President Ismail Omar Guelleh, called for cooperation to spur growth in Africa’s largest trading bloc.
“During the year of our chairmanship, Djibouti’s focus shall be to further maximise elements of cooperation, institutional refinement and increased membership involvement, essential to our growth and prosperity oraganisation,” Guelleh said.
“COMESA is Africa’s richest region, with huge potential in electric power generation, oil reserves, phosphates, precious minerals and enormous under-utilized areas of arable land,” he added.
The leaders will also thrash out technical details, notably legislation needed to establish the common market among countries home to 400 million people representing half the continent’s population, with a total gross domestic product of 170 billion dollars (132 billion euros).
To boost external trade, the bloc is also looking to enhance ties with the European Union, its main economic partner, which currently accounts for 22 billion dollars in two-way trade.
Present at the opening were Presidents Bingu wa Mutharika of Malawi, Sudan’s Omar el-Beshir, Rwanda’s Kagame, Zimbambwe’s Robert Mugabe, Djibouti’s Guelleh, Eritrea’s Issaias Afeworki and Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.
When it was founded in 1993 as an off-shoot of the Preferential Trade Area for Eastern and Southern Africa (PTA), COMESA was envisaged as a free-trade zone encompassing all its members by 2000, evolving into a customs union by 2004 and a monetary union by 2025. But it has fallen short of its plans.
The COMESA secretariat hopes that the creation of the customs union, if successful, will mark another milestone in efforts to restore stability by using trade and investments.
However, at the moment, only 11 COMESA members participate in the free trade zone. At a June meeting in Kigali in 2005, the remaining 10 countries outside the zone were urged to join as soon as possible.
The bloc was founded to integrate member economies through strong trade and investment links.
COMESA groups Angola, Burundi, Comoros, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Namibia, Rwanda, Seychelles, Sudan, Swaziland, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Tanzania withdrew from COMESA in September 2000.
(AFP)