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The first World Trade Organisation (WTO) ministerial conference to be held in Africa opens in Nairobi today amid renewed hope that finished goods from the Common Market for East and Southern Africa (Comesa) will find a place in the global market. The conference will centre around agriculture, services and non-agriculture market access and trade related aspects of intellectual property among other topics.

The Minister of Industry and Trade Michael Bimha is leading a Zimbabwean delegation to the conference comprising officials from ZIMRA, Ministries of Agriculture, Finance, Industry and Commerce.

The President of Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta will open the conference which will also push for the continent’s greater access to international markets as equal partners.

Last week, the Comesa secretariat announced it had finalised a policy advocating value addition, which African goods have been lacking, to enable them compete in globally.

The trading bloc with close to a half a million people, now hopes to unlock the region’s trade potential through the new Industrial Policy, which forms a platform for value addition.

Zambia’s Deputy Minister for Commerce, Trade and Industry Raymond Mpundu said the bloc’s Industrial Policy holds the key to unlocking the trade potential through harnessing value addition.

“The policy focuses on commodity value addition as well as skills-based industrialisation, among others,” he said.

Besides the importance of agriculture to national Gross Domestic Product of countries in Comesa, agricultural commodities play a significant role in intra and inter-regional trade in Africa.

The region imports a larger share of agricultural-based commodities that countries in Comesa export, both as a total of merchandise trade and primary products. According to a World Bank Report (2011), Africa now earns 23 per cent of its income from farming.

However, the lack of value addition in the region’s products hurts its economic stability. Mpundu says value addition will address the challenge while empowering small enterprises leading to diversification of intra-Comesa exports, which in turn will spur intra-regional investment and job creation.

The development of the Industrial Policy was in compliance with the decision of the 33rd Council of Ministers that

met in Addis Ababa in March 2015.

However, member states have been facing a number of challenges in implementing some of the agreed Comesa programmes and in particular those that require policy and regulatory framework amendments such as the customs union. – Business Reporter/Wires.