French firm Bureau Veritas, a leader in testing, inspection and certification., said in an interview last week it considers the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) as a game changer in the continent to foster intra-continental trade.
AfCFTA came into force on May 30, 2019.
Bertrand Martin, Bureau Veritas's senior vice-president for Africa, told a recent media briefing that Bureau Veritas played a key role in creating a sustainable trade environment.
The company’s ambition was to boost Intra-Africa trade, he said, which is currently low in comparison to international trade.
For example, he explained that in 2021 Africa to Africa exports were $86 billion (R1.5 trillion), whereas African exports to the world were at $557bn and African imports from the word amounted to R609bn as reported on the Trade May.
Bureau Veritas, with a history dating back to 1828, said currently 27% of its revenue came from the Americas, 34% Europe, 30% Asia Pacific, 9% Latin America and 9% from Africa and the Middle East.
And in Africa, the company operates in 45 countries with 35 offices and laboratories.
AfCFTA will feed into Bureau Veritas’s strengths, which is trade facilitation through cooperation on standards, technical regulation, conformity assessment, accreditation and metrology.
Its Verification of Conformity (VoC) programme aims to protect consumers, the local industry as well as the environment and by default assists local public authorities to fight against counterfeit products and limit sub-standard products’ importation.
Currently Bureau Veritas operates around 20 VoC contracts in the world with more than half in Africa.
“We are not working on anti-dumping framework that is specific to institutional regulations, but on limiting sub-standard goods’ importation. While submitting a VoC programme the country controls this trade community and enhances the normative surrounding. International standards such as ISO, Codex, IEC and United Nations Economic Commission for Europe shall apply, immediately raising the conformity of imported goods.
“However, where there are deviations between international standards and national standards, national standards shall apply to allow the country to protect the local Industry,” the company said.
Facilitating trade, the company is rolling out a centralised trading digital solution to simplify imports and exports as complicated regulation costs time and money.
Martin said the company had built a Single Window digital platform, which centralised all information and procedures related to the import, export and transit of goods in a country.
It is creating a new Trade Community around a unique payment platform concept mobilising and securing public revenues. It is considered as an ease of trade with full processes’ integration of trade and logistics.
The principle was to facilitate, faster, trace and secure all the trade operations through a declarative framework.
“Basically, it is deployed in a country at the border post depending on the specific area that is supposed to cover (Maritime Single Window, Port Community System, Trade Single Window, National Single Window). We have a robust expertise and experience in all domains with a great example in Democratic Republic of the Congo where the World Bank has declared our National Single Window (all related modules for pre- and post-customs in every logistics) a state-of-the-art illustration of a successful project,” it said.
And Bureau Veritas with both VoC and the trade platform can assess risks and provide trust between AfCFTA trade parties.
“AfCFTA will definitely be supporting our growth in Africa,” it said.
Martin sees pharmaceuticals as a key growth area in Africa for Bureau Veritas.
“Africa is paying more and more attention to the populations’ health. We have developed a specific service with a partner (Optel) to track and trace vaccines in the continent (V-Trace). We also control pharmaceutical products throughout the VoC program to fight against counterfeit medicines, which is a scourge on the African continent,“ it said.
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