AfricaPress-mozambique: Mozambique’s minister for industry and trade, Carlos Mesquita, said on Wednesday that the country should stop being an exporter of primary products and start selling processed products through a focus on the industrialisation of the economy.
“We have the challenge of breaking the paradigm based on the export of raw materials and becoming an exporter of transformed products,” Mesquita said.
He was speaking on the “Domestication of the SADC Industrialisation Strategy and Roadmap” as part of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) first business forum, which is being held in the Mozambican capital.
The focus on industrialisation, he said, would allow raw products to be processed in Mozambique and exported at competitive prices, generating added value for the country.
“I give the example of graphite: we have a lot of graphite in Mozambique, which is the raw material for pencil production, but it is all exported raw because the country does not produce pencils. Mozambique buys its graphite in the form of pencils,” the Industry and Trade Minister said.
Mesquita pointed out some of the aspects that he considers fundamental for the country’s industrialisation: strengthening the productive capacity of the national business fabric, training human resources with skills to work in industries, creating a favourable tax environment and establishing links between the raw materials extraction sector and the transformation area.
“We have all the elements to promote the industrialisation of Mozambique, as long as the challenges to the leap that the country must take are overcome,” he said.
According to the minister, the availability of energy, mineral and forestry resources, and agricultural and fishing potential give Mozambique the basis to transform the economy.
“We want the value added to products and finished goods to stay in Mozambique,” he stressed.
Mesquita pointed out that the recent opening of a factory in the country that produces cement and its raw material – clinker – and the resulting reduction in price on the domestic market shows that the development of the local manufacturing industry is not a utopia.
Mozambique’s trade balance deficit worsened by 43% between 2018 and 2019, to US$2.7 billion (€2.2 billion) according to the latest yearbook of the National Statistics Institute (INE), with the value of exports falling by 6.8% in the period and imports growing by 6.9%
