Maravi

(HERALD) Africa must export finished goods

Africa must export finished goods

NATURAL resources in themselves are not necessarily wealth unless they are transformed into finished products. Countries that possess natural resources such as platinum, gold, copper, diamonds and timber among others may, therefore, not necessarily be rich. But what counts is the processing of these natural resources into semi-finished or finished consumer products, which are then exported.

Most African countries still follow the colonial trend of exporting their resources to Europe and North America in their raw form, largely because they do not have the processing industries.

While Zimbabwe has a relatively small processing industry, it still exports quite a number of resources in their raw form and loses the full value of such resources should they be processed into finished and semi-finished products.

The country has a lot of timber but the focus is still on the export of hard timber logs and not the actual furniture (tables, beds, chairs, roof trusses, etc), which we are capable of processing here.

What is positive for the country is the development of the domestic wood-processing industry, which should consume the large volumes of logs that we export.

It is quite sad that today some of our furniture shops are stocked with imported furniture, notably lounge suites, yet we have the raw materials to make these products here.

This is the same story with many other African countries. Zambia, for example, exports copper and not the finished copper tubing and copper wires. Ethiopia, Angola, Kenya and Uganda export coffee beans to Europe, North America and Japan.

As coffee producers they do not export finished products such as roast ground coffee.

Hardly will one see packaged finished cocoa products such cocoa powder, chocolate and other cocoa beverages as "Made in Uganda" products in Europe and America. Southern Africa has some of the largest gold mines in Africa.

Platinum, diamond, copper, gold, uranium and silver, among others, are exported to Europe and North America as ore or semi-finished products.

Indeed, 50 percent of the diamonds that are produced and consumed by the Western world comes from Southern Africa.

Yet the world’s biggest diamond firm, De Beers, has its headquarters in London, where rough diamond becomes gem and fetches high value.

The tragedy is that big European companies buy raw materials from Africa at prices fixed by them.

They make fantastic profits, which do not in any way benefit the source countries.

Our tobacco, gold, timber, diamond and platinum go to processing plants of companies in Europe and North America.

But at the end of it, Zimbabwe and all these other African countries will not enjoy the profits they would otherwise accrue from exporting finished products.

The present trade regime, under which Zimbabwe and other African countries offer only raw materials at very low prices, which are fixed by the developed countries and then import the finished products from them at exorbitant prices, is unacceptable.

What Zimbabwe and other developing countries, therefore need, is appropriate technology and know-how to process the countless resources into semi-finished and finished products.

Labels: MANUFACTURING, ZIMBABWE

posted by MrK @ 6:40 AM