As part of Mozambique’s Tariff Offer for the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), the CTA is proposing the creation of a Competitiveness Fund for strategic goods.
Speaking at the Consultation Seminar on Mozambique’s Tariff Offer for the AfCFTA, CTA President Agostinho Vuma argued that the Fund aims to subsidize primary production factors and respective services for certain products such as cereals, vegetables and chicken, which the country has favourable conditions to be competitive.
Thus, he stressed: “The Fund would speed up the process of the country achieving self-sufficiency in these strategic products, by 2030 or sooner.” To finance the Fund, CTA proposes changing the tariff disarmament schedule for strategic products.
“To capitalize the Fund, we propose applying the amount resulting from the difference between the current proposal and our proposal, which consists of moving goods from category A to C, assumed to be lost in the current fiscal scenario of the tariff disarmament period,” said Agostinho Vuma.
As a private sector, CTA will continue to advocate for the effective implementation of the Agreements to which the country is a signatory, in the expectation that they will have positive effects on the Mozambican economy and, consequently, increase the profitability of the national private sector.
Likewise, the CTA has argued that the Tariff Offer should take into account the aspect of local processing in order to add value to products.
By opting for this strategy, intra-African trade could increase from less than 20% today to more than 50% by 2045, as well as increasing Africa’s share of global trade from two percent to 12%. A quick projection shows that the value of trade could triple in just one year.
CTA also defended the need to improve payment systems, the transport infrastructure network and logistics to support intra-African trade, because even if tariff barriers are eliminated, as long as high transaction costs prevail, the private sector will benefit little from the elimination or reduction of customs tariffs.
