Zimbabwean exporters have been granted duty-free acess to the lucrative UK market through the United Kingdom’s Eastern and Southern Africa Economic Partnership Agreement (UK ESA EPA), reported The Independent.
Zimbabwe is among the ESA countries, which also include Mauritius, Seychelles and Madagascar, that have signed the EPA with the UK.
The EPA is an economic arrangement aimed at removing barriers to the free movement of goods, services and investment between countries.
Speaking at a Zimbabwe-UK Business Forum hosted by ZimTrade in Harare on Thursday, Natasha Stotesbury, head of trade policy at the British High Commission in South Africa said:
The UK has signed 33 agreements in the Pacific, Caribbean and African countries, including with Zimbabwe.
The agreements show the countries that are eligible for the UK developing countries trading scheme.
Our economic partnership is a development-focused free trade agreement that stimulates investment, supply chains, productivity and competition.
Our agreement provides immediate, permanent and duty-free access to the UK market for all developing countries. It provides certainty and is a positive signal to foreign investors.
We have the exclusion of certain goods from liberalisation in Zimbabwe, which helps protect the local industry from imports.
She said the agreement’s rules of origin are more flexible than standard trade agreements. Said Stotesbury:
The rules of origin help prevent inter-digital trade. The committee that our agreement sets up helps create a living agreement that benefits businesses and other stakeholders in the region.
To sell a product, you need to have a cause of origin, which means there are rules about where a product is manufactured.
Our trade agreement has more flexible rules of origin than standard trade agreements, which provides flexibility for businesses in Zimbabwe to source inputs or conduct processing in other countries and still qualify for duty-free access to the UK market.
We have already discussed improvements to the rules of origin, and we are looking to deepen some of the chapters, such as services and investment, to further support trade and investment.
ZimTrade CEO Allan Majuru said there is a huge opportunity for local producers of coffee, flowers, vegetables, nuts, rock melons, and fruits such as mangoes, guavas, and avocados.
Reports indicate that Zimbabwe was the UK’s 102nd largest trading partner in the year leading up to March 2024, accounting for less than 0,1 per cent of the total UK trade.
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