If implemented, Africa’s new free trade agreement would enable an additional 30m people to escape extreme poverty. Trade negotiators need to get their skates on
this. This ambitious pact has been ratified by 41 of Africa’s 55 countries. Making it easier for them to trade with one another should boost manufacturing, incomes and growth. The World Bank estimates that, if implemented, by 2035 thewould enable an additional 30m people to escape extreme poverty, increase intra-African exports by 81% and boost wages by 10%.
The biggest prize, however, will come not from lower tariffs but from lower “non-tariff barriers”—by pulling down more of the other obstacles that make it hard for, say, a Ugandan farmer to export chickens to Kenya or for a Beninese weaver to sell fabric to Nigeria. These barriers include corruption, shoddy infrastructure, red tape at border crossings, sloth-like customs bureaucracies and expensive logistics.
Yet all this is easier said than done. One obstacle is that vested interests, such as trucking cartels and customs bureaucracies, profit from inefficiency. Ghana has shown that these can be weakened. Another problem is that for all their homilies about free trade, many African politicians are protectionists at heart. No country seems to want to move first in ongoing talks about implementing the free-trade deal.
A third political challenge relates to outsiders, including America, China and the European Union. Though they say they want to support the, they often undermine it by signing bilateral deals which then complicate Africa’s efforts to harmonise its own trade rules. Each of these problems requires the sort of leadership that has so far been in scant supply. But if politicians seize the opportunity, thecan help the continent climb out of the economic slump it has been pushed into by the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. It would also send a message to the rest of the world. At a time when protectionist noises are growing louder, Africa has a chance to be an inspiring outlier.