Sino-Africa trade volumes slump

The Commercial Counselor in the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, Department of Western Asia and African Affairs, Xie Yajing said lower resource prices coupled with  lesser market demand from China has seen trade volumes easing to US$37,07 billion in the first six months of the year from US$48 billion in the first half of 2008.
“Since 2000, average annual growth of China-Africa trade has averaged 3,5 percent. However, since  most of Chinese imports from Africa mainly consists of natural resources such as metals and oil, whose prices have weakened significantly since mid 2008, trade figures lowered in the first half of the year,” she said.
China imports tobacco from Zimbabwe, coffee from Uganda, wine from South Africa and olive oil from Tunisia.
In 2008 China-Africa trade reached US$106,8 billion twice as much that of 2006 and 10 times the figure for 2000.
Of the US$106,8 billion, US$50,8 billion was in the form of exports to Africa with US$56 billion consisting of imports from Africa.
Yajing said: “In the first half of 2009, Chinese foreign direct investment to Africa stood at US$552 billion up 81 percent from the same period last year. The direct investment covered areas that included trade, production, processing and resources.”
Responding to a question on substandard Chinese products flooding Africa, the Counselor appealed to African governments to help in ensuring that only products of good quality reach the continent, at the same time expressing concern at counterfeit products being dumped on the continent.
“We are aware of this problem and we are doing everything we can to maintain the highest standards in production of goods,” she said.
“It is not the intention of the Chinese government to encourage dumping of goods. However, since China is a very big country, we cannot do this alone and we would need the importing countries to help us in this regard through their respective standards associations.”
Yajing urged African countries to exploit the duty-free and other trade preferences put in place by the Chinese government.
China has since granted a duty free preference to 500 products from 31 African countries, but the uptake of this facility, meant to boost trade between China and other Africa countries, has been slow.
“In bid to further promote trade relations between us, we are also looking at increasing the number of products that can be exported to China duty free,” she added.
Since 1956 China has helped 53 African countries with over 900 projects that cover a wide range of areas.
China has also trained nearly 30 000 professionals from African countries to date and reduced or exempted parts of the matured debts for 33 heavily-indebted poor countries and the least developed countries on the continent.