AfCFTA presents a bigger market for fishing industry – Pierre Coussey
Executive Director of the SILLA Group, Pierre Coussey, has stated that the creation of a common market under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) will give the fishing industry across Africa a bigger market.
Speaking in reference to the lead-up to the Kusi Ideas Festival in Accra, the Executive Director noted that the AfCFTA will stimulate trade between African countries immensely.
“… It was General Obasanjo, as head of state of Nigeria, who had the first Coastal Line Council meeting,” Coussey said. “It made the whole of the European Union panic. Why? Africa was now moving into a common fisheries agreement which would then strengthen everybody.
“When Europe was going around having fisheries agreements with individual states, it was going to break the chain. Now at least we’ve got a hyphen that buckles everything together in terms of the free trade area, where we don’t have to re-discuss our fishing rights with each other, but come to a common agreement on how we actually use our strengths around it.
“With the Free Trade Agreement, we can look at this the hard way, to enhance our capabilities in harvesting our own products. The next thing is this: that, within the Free Trade Area, we are not subject to someone’s sovereign control on how we deliver our products. We must look the relationship with each other and strengthen it,” he said.
Read: Ghana announces tax incentives for Belgian investors
However, he called on African countries to join forces to make trade easier under the AfCFTA.
This year’s Kusi Ideas Conference, which will be a hybrid event (in-person and virtual), is under the theme “How Africa Transforms After the Virus” and subtitled “Beyond the Return: African Diaspora and New Possibilities”, which will take place in Ghana on the 10 and 11 December 2021.
The festival will be opened by President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, with other leaders taking part include Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, with other prominent personnel from business and politics across Africa to grace the event.
Clifford Machoka, the head of external affairs and marketing at Nation Media Group, has described this year’s Kusi Ideas Festival as a way to drive conversations about the AfCFTA by connecting African businesses.
Nation Media Group (NMG) launched the Kusi Ideas Festival in 2019 during its 60th-anniversary celebrations. The festival aims to be an “ideas transaction market” for the challenges facing Africa, and for the various solutions and innovations the continent is undertaking to secure its future in the 21st century.
The kusi is the southerly trade wind that blows across the Indian Ocean between April and mid-September, and enabled trade up north along the East African coast and between Asia and Africa for millennia.
Beyond trade, over the centuries, the kusi and other trade winds made possible cultural, intellectual and technological exchanges, and considerably shaped the history of the nations on the east coast of Africa, the eastern hinterland, and the wider Indian Ocean rim.
In the 21st century, the spirits of the trade winds express themselves in new ways. The Indian Ocean is a rich bed for the fibre-optic cables that make the Information Age possible in a large part of Africa.
The first Kusi Ideas Festival was held in Kigali, Rwanda, and was co-hosted by President Paul Kagame.
