BUYING LOCAL SHOULD BE EVERYONE’S BUSINESS – MINISTER DAVIES

South Africa's Minister of Trade and Industry, Dr Rob Davies says the positive impact and success of the Buy Local Campaign is dependent on the private sector and consumers throwing their weight behind the initiative aimed at adding impetus to the country’s economy’s growth. Minister Davies was speaking at the 3^rd Buy Local Summit and Expo that is hosted by Proudly South African at the Emperors Place in Ekurhuleni today.

“In line with the theme of the Summit, which is “Buy Local – Make it Your Business”, it is incumbent upon the business sector and consumers to join the government and commit themselves to supporting our localisation efforts by making it their business to promote and buy locally-produced goods. If all of us can take decision to buy locally-manufacture products, we can create a more positive future for our country in terms of employment opportunities,” said Minister Davies.

He added that government was committed to ensuring that public entities took steps to ensure that there was a progressive and incremental movement towards fulfilling the aspirational target of 75% local content in procurement, which was agreed upon by all stakeholders in the formulation of the Localisation Procurement Accord.

Minister Davies stated local procurement was one of the tools that government was putting in place to promote and strengthen industrialisation. Others include amendments to the Preferential Procurement Policy Framework Act and designation of locally-manufactured goods for procurement by government.

“We cannot expect to grow, develop and increase employment as a country if we simply continue to be located in a world economy as producers and exporters of primary products and importers of finished goods.  Part of efforts to bring transformation in our economy such that it could create sustainable, decent work and address poverty and equality, which are our major challenges, required that we bring a structural change. That is the reason why industrialisation has become the imperative of our government, “ said Davies.

Speaking at the same event, the Minister of Public Enterprise, Malusi Gigaba said Eskom has set itself a target of spending over R24-billion a year to businesses owned by black youth by 2017.

He stated that it is critical to use state owned companies to open up opportunities for emerging black miners.

“Eskom has negotiated an export capacity allocation at Richards Bay which will be used to provide emerging miners with access to global markets. We have also established a task team involving Transnet and the Chamber of mines to determine how the expansion of the Richards Bay coal terminal can be leveraged to enable access to more capacity for emerging miners,” added Minister Gigaba.

Minister Davies cutting the ribbon to open the Buy Local Summit

WORLD BANK RECOMMENDATIONS ON REGIONAL INTEGRATION AND BUILDING OF VALUE CHAINS IN LINE WITH SA GOVERNMENT POLICY

World Bank recommendations that South Africa should deepen regional integration and build regional value chains are broadly aligned to South African government policy and work programmes. This was said by the Chief Director of Policy and Research in the Department of Trade and Industry (the dti), Dr Brendan Vickers. Dr Vickers was speaking at the South African Economic Update report-back on export competitiveness presented by the World Bank at the dti.

The World Bank report focused on South Africa’s export competitiveness and examined the performance of 20 000 companies that were involved in exports between the year 2001 to 2012. According to the report, sub-Saharan Africa had surpassed Europe as the biggest export destination for non-mineral export from South Africa in the past decade. -For South Africa to achieve export growth it needed to take advantage of three opportunities of increased competitiveness, lower trade and input cost, and also greater regional achievement.

Vickers indicated that the update provided a useful overview of recent economic developments in South Africa.

“The recommendation related to deepening regional integration in Africa is fully recognised and being addressed in the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) and now under the Tripartite Free Trade Area (FTA). Negotiations on trade in services in SADC are beginning to gain traction and there is work underway to address Non-Tariff Barriers and trade facilitation,” he said.

Vickers added that work is also underway to begin building regional value chains.

“The argument that South Africa is overly protected against imports is hard to sustain as South Africa’s trade weighted average tariff is 7.4%, while 54% of tariffs are set at zero. We are extremely open to many of our largest imports partners from the European Union (EU), the European Free Trade Area and SADC countries,” he emphasised.

He said there are already 2000 firms from the EU that are plying their trade in South Africa, 600 from the United States and many others.

Vickers explained that South Africa’s economic history demonstrates that the country’s relative success in exports of medium level technology goods has not been a result of import liberalisation but of prior and ongoing industrial policy.

“In assessing South Africa’s export performance, we also need to consider demand conditions in our export markets,” he said.