Mozambique’s exports to other African countries, over the last year, reached 1.5 billion dollars.
According to António Grispos, Secretary of State for Trade, who was speaking on Thursday at the opening of MozExport, a platform which is taking place in the central province of Tete aimed at establishing trade agreements and opportunities for export diversification, the data indicate that trade is concentrated in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region through the Free Trade Area.
“For the government, it is clear that we have managed to establish economic partnership agreements that offer enormous potential to increase and diversify the base of our exports through the active participation of the entrepreneurial spirit of our sector, which is dominated by micro, small and medium-sized enterprises”, he said.
“Economic partnership agreements allow domestic production to access these markets free of customs duties and sometimes quotas, which makes the possibility of internationalizing our local production through exports more competitive and inclusive”, he added.
The preferential markets, he said, only absorbed 49 per cent of total exports.
“We continue to see consistent growth in agricultural exports of around 13 per cent, accounting for 12 per cent of total exports, with a level of diversification in new markets, but with little impact on business inclusion, as micro, small and medium-sized enterprises contributed only around 19 per cent of the total”, he said.
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Source: AIM