eBusiness Weekly
Tawanda Musarurwa
South African retailers have made a commitment to remove non-tariff barriers on Zimbabwe.
Non-tariff barriers (NTBs) refer to restrictions that result from prohibitions, conditions, or specific market requirements that make importation or exportation of products difficult and/or costly.
Economies can put in place several types of alternative barriers in lieu of standard tariffs. Some of these non-tariff barrier include licences, quotas, embargoes, sanctions and voluntary export restraints.
Indications are that the move by the South African retailers could be a strategy to wheedle Zimbabwe to drop its import management programme.
Trade Development & Investment Promotion Standing Committee chairman Henry Nemaire told the Business Weekly that the commitment by South African retailers to remove non-tariff barriers on Zimbabwean products is a direct upshot of Statutory Instrument 64 of 2016.
“The whole idea of protection was a clear response to some of our regional trading partners who were not open, or had placed non-tariff barriers in their economies.
“South African retailers have made a commitment to our Government, after SI-64, to allow Zimbabwean products on their shelves. What does that tell you? It tells you that they were not allowing Zimbabwean products on their shelves until after SI-64.
“SI-64 came as a blessing, the (South African) retailers had put NTBs on our products,” he said.
Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Enterprise Development permanent secretary Abigail Shonhiwa confirmed the commitment by South African retailers.
Zimbabwe’s import management programme entails a number of interim measures aimed at resuscitating the local industry whose performance had been immensely affected by the influx of imported products, notably the removal of a number of products from the Open General Import Licence through the gazetting several Statutory Instruments such as SI-64 of 2016 and SI-122 of 2017.
Regional integration efforts in the Southern Africa region, such as Southern Africa Development Community (SADC), Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), and Southern African Customs Union (SACU) have all sought to liberalise trade between countries so as to increase bilateral trade flows, diversify exports by overcoming the limits of small markets
However trade experts maintain that many non-tariff barriers remain in place.
The World Bank has noted the considerable impact of non-tariff barriers in the region.
“While efforts to reduce tariffs have largely been met with success, other forms of trade restriction remain widespread. These barriers affect considerably more than one-fifth of regional goods trade, and are hindering the competitiveness of domestic firms and their ability to export to regional and global markets…,” it in a study.
Notwithstanding the implementation of the import management programme, Zimbabwe has been shown commitment to open trade.
As recently as last month, the country launched a five-year Trade Facilitation Roadmap which seeks to simplify, harmonise and modernise export and import processes, among other things.
The road-map is expected to also help Zimbabwe implement the Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA), which came into force in February 2017 following ratification by two-thirds of World Trade Organisation (WTO) members.
Zimbabwe is a member of the WTO and is taking steps to ratify the TFA.
