Business Reporter
12 March 2002
AFRICAN countries will have to show greater resolve to dismantle internal barriers to integration if the African Union (AU) is to become effective and efficient.
This is according to the third African Development Forum Consensus Statement released at the close of the meeting in Addis Ababa.
The statement says there are powerful obstacles that stand in the way of integration and these needed to be overcome.
These include the small and disjointed nature of African economies and their common dependence on the export of primary commodities and their weak industrial and agricultural base.
Other obstacles include low levels of intra-regional trade, problems arising from the unequal distribution of benefits from integration schemes, vested interests in incomes from trade tariffs and weak capacities from implementing treaty commitments.
"In the coming years it was imperative that Africa takes rapid, sequenced, realistic and irreversible steps to realise these commitment and goals and turn economic integration from an aspiration into an effective reality," the statement reads.
It stressed the need for convergence of fiscal and monetary policies to serve as a foundation for a monetary union.
It noted however that to date this vital aspect of integration had been relatively neglected.
"For effective macro-economic convergence and integration, countries will have to cede some degree of sovereignty in economic policy making for collective interest," the statement reads.
The ADF was also concerned about the proliferation of Regional Economic Communities (REC) which had created problems including those associated with overlapping membership to multiple RECs and the financial burden of multiple subscriptions to different RECs.(ADF3)
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