The need to speed up the operationalisation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), launched in January 2021, is particularly pressing in the current multi-crisis context.
Set up with the aim of exploiting the strong and diversified potential of Africa's economies, the AfCFTA is betting on expanding intra-African trade and eliminating economic fragmentation within the continent.
Promoting economic integration in Africa in line with Agenda 2063, creating a continental Customs Union, liberalising intra-African trade and fostering sustainable, integrated and inclusive socio-economic development - to name but a few - are the main objectives of this ambitious project.
The choice of collectively charting a new course towards a more developed, more innovative, more egalitarian and more sustainable continent establishes a protective shield against the contemporary shocks that Africa continues to suffer.
What, then, are the structural factors that determine the success of the AfCFTA integration programme, with a view to ensuring its convergence with the dynamics of each member country?
In the opinion of Larabi Jaïdi, economist and Senior Fellow at the Policy Center for the New South (PCNS), "the difficulty lies in finding common paths and policies to give a virtuous dynamic to this ambitious project, which brings together more than fifty countries, and to increase trade between African countries, which currently stands at less than 15% and could rise to 40% within 20 years."
In an interview with MAP, Mr. Jaidi stressed the need to meet a number of conditions to ensure the success of this major continental project.
According to the expert, once the agreement has been ratified by the relevant countries, which is a prerequisite for the AfCFTA to come into force, the first condition is the lifting of customs barriers.
According to Mr. Jaidi, this dismantling alone requires an agreement that takes into account the category of each product. "There are products that can benefit from a total elimination of customs duties, while others require a gradual transition by period," he maintains, stressing the need to consider the characteristics and degree of granularity of each product in the establishment of a single nomenclature, to avoid any conflict of interpretation.
Although complex, the completion of this process is not enough, emphasised Mr. Jaidi, highlighting the importance of eliminating non-tariff barriers as the next essential step in creating additional trade, employment and, above all, well-being.
Designed to indirectly discourage foreign trade, non-tariff barriers include technical barriers (transport, communication, etc.), regulatory barriers and barriers relating to rules of origin," explains the expert, adding that it is vital to resolve all the issues relating to this category of barriers, in order to accelerate the creation of a genuine virtuous dynamic for the liberalisation of intra-African trade, within the framework of the AfCFTA project.
Turning to the achievements of the Regional Economic Communities (RECs) as a key lever for this project, Mr. Jaidi points out that the AfCFTA is already supported by a number of advances made at the level of each of these communities, which have been engaged in a process of liberalising their trade for a number of years, albeit to varying degrees.
These RECs, like the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC), find themselves at different levels of progress compared with each other in terms of tariff dismantling.
"Some have already ensured their internal dismantling and have even gone further towards lifting some non-tariff barriers and introducing a Common External Tariff (CET). This is what is known as a customs union," he explains.
The transition from a free trade area to a customs union means that the countries are not limiting themselves to liberalising trade between themselves, but are defining themselves as countries sharing the same foreign trade policy vis-à-vis the rest of the world, expressed in the form of a CET.
AfCFTA must therefore build on the achievements of the RECs in order to make a success of trade expansion and liberalization, leading to a much more global project, emphasises Mr. Jaidi, asserting that the major challenge today is to "level out the evolution of these communities."
Credit: Menara