A senior Zambian government official said African countries should increase agricultural exports to the United States if the countries were to benefit from the market preference under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), the Zambia Daily Mail reported on Friday.

Felix Mutati, the Zambian Minister of Commerce, Trade and Industry, said that meeting the huge demand in the U.S. market was a challenge for many countries, adding that the agro-producing countries should consider consolidating their products.

“Countries need to put their products in one basket so that they can export as a group and meet the demand. We do not need a situation where individual countries fail to meet the demand because they cannot export more,” the Zambian minister was quoted as saying by the paper.

According to him, agriculture products from sub-Saharan African only accounted for 1 percent of the total 89 billion U.S. dollars worth of exports to the United States last year, adding that only oil-producing countries were fully benefiting from the U. S. market hence the need for agriculture-producing countries to put in place measures that will make them compete favorably.

He said agriculture export from Africa to the United States should be increased to 10 percent of the total export volume.

The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), he said, had been engaged to identify the problems each African country was facing to enter the AGOA market so that a common platform and issues of substance could be formulated.

The AGOA initiative came into effect in 2000 and provides an opportunity for some 38 eligible sub-Saharan African nations, including Zambia , to export about 6,000 products into the U.S. market duty free.

Zambia will in June hold an AGOA forum, which will bring together businesses from both the United States and Africa to discuss trade and investment between the two continents. The AGOA forum, which was slated for June 7-8, 2011 , will instead be held from June 9-10 due to unforeseen circumstances.

Latest AGOA Trade Data currently available on AGOA.info


Click here to view a sector profile of Zambia's bilateral trade with the United States, disaggregated by total exports and imports, AGOA exports and GSP exports.

Other regularly updated trade statistics on AGOA.info include: (click each link to view)