Africa to Trade more with China

African trade flows may shift further away from the US after President Donald Trump announced a slew of new tariffs, the head of Citigroup’s regional office said. Trump unveiled a revised global plan on Thursday that imposed levies as high as 30 percent on imports from countries including South Africa, the continent’s biggest economy, and Algeria. Goods from other major economies including Nigeria and Ghana face US duties of 15 percent.The tariffs will encourage African governments to explore alternative trading partners, Citigroup’s Akin Dawodu said in an interview.

“China is already the biggest overall trading partner for Africa, and second is the EU as a collective, and this trend could be accelerated,” Dawodu said in an interview in Johannesburg. “Then there is also the Middle East that is increasingly coming into it, especially when it comes to food security.”Africa has about 60 percent of the world’s remaining arable land and a third of the globe’s minerals. That makes it an essential cog in growing food and providing the materials needed for rapidly evolving technologies such as artificial intelligence, even though the continent accounts for less than 2 percent of US trade, Dawodu said.

“There are global markets for those commodities, so they can be routed to other markets,” he said.It’s critical for African countries to trade more with each other in order to adjust the net balance of trade of the continent with the rest of the world, Dawodu said.

Nations need to address non-tariff barriers such as following the rule of law, customs unions, court processes, ease of travel, mobility of labour and logistics, he said. — Bloomberg