Egypt is seeking to increase its trade with Africa by 20% in five years with the start of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA), to reach $7.4 billion, according to Egyptian Trade Representative Yahya El-Waqt Bey in an interview with Al-Sharq.
The AfCFTA is a trade agreement between 49 member states of the African Union that aims to create a single market, followed by freedom of movement and a single currency.
El-Waqt Bey added that “the agreement was launched in March 2018 and entered into force a year later. The agreement will start operating by the end of 2024.”
In July last year, the Information and Decision Support Center at the Egyptian Cabinet said that despite the vast resources of the African continent and its large number of countries, it is characterized by a low level of intra-regional trade, which reached a rate of less than 18%, compared to the rate of intra-regional trade between Asian and European countries, which reached about 50% and 70%, respectively.
El-Waqt Bey told Al-Sharq that 47 countries have so far ratified the agreement, including Egypt, expecting the remaining countries to ratify it during the second half of this year, after which the full implementation of the agreement will be completed.
Egypt aspires to raise the growth rate of the value of Egyptian exports by at least 20% annually during the next six years, so that it reaches $145 billion in 2030, according to a government document from the Cabinet.
To achieve this goal, work will be done to establish 10 specialized export zones in a number of Egyptian governorates, and to develop 10 export clusters, in parallel with targeting 10 promising export markets to increase the levels of access of Egyptian goods to them.
Egyptian goods that have been exported have relied heavily on imported production inputs, which require hard currency, which was evident in the stoppage of production in many factories in the country with the accumulation of goods arriving at Egyptian ports due to the lack of dollar credits to release them.
Egypt’s commodity exports had declined by 3% in the first nine months of last year to $26.2 billion, according to a government document that Al-Sharq had previously reviewed.
