African countries should endeavor to add more value to their abundant resources through industrialization rather than rely heavily on exporting unprocessed raw materials, experts said in Lusaka Thursday.

Eugene Appel, deputy minister of commerce, trade and industry of Zambia, said it would be difficult for African countries to prosper as long as their main exports were low value commodities.

Appel said this while officially opening a three-day sub- regional conference on improving industrial performance and promoting employment in the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) region.

The deputy minister cited leather industry to exemplify how much African countries have lost thanks to the low value creation.

He said a number of countries in the COMESA region earn over 15 percent of total export earnings from trade in leather. However, the continent accounts for only one percent of global leather goods production, partly because exporting live animals is literally giving away the hides and skins that are the basis of leather industry, though Africa owns more than 10 percent of the livestock in the world.

Other sectors such as cotton, tobacco and coffee plantation and mining industry also face the same problem of low value creation as these products are exported in raw materials instead of processed or finished products.

"Tobacco is auctioned for about two US dollars per kg in the region but when converted into cigarettes will fetch more than 500 dollars per kg," Appel said.

Exporting unprocessed raw materials is also synonymous with the export of jobs from Africa, he added.

Other representatives also expressed the same concern on the topic.

AU representative Tarana Loumabeka said Africa needed to embark seriously into transforming itself from a producer of primary goods into a producer of semi-processed and processed value-added products for domestic, regional and global markets.

"Conscious of the stakes for Africa, the AU Commission in its Strategic Plan for 2004-2007 provides for meeting the challenge by accelerating the continent's industrialization through local processing of agricultural, mineral and fisheries resources, rather than export them in their raw state," she said.

Chief Executive of the Chamber of Mines of Zambia, Fred Bantubonse, noted that minerals processing is a major sector of the economies of the southern African region, contributing an average of about 60 percent of foreign exchange earnings, 10 percent of gross domestic product and five percent of employment in the region.

"It will be therefore very important for us to examine closely how we can strategize the mining processing value-chain for maximum benefit," he said, adding that countries in the region should similarly pay attention to agro-based industry for stimulating balanced economic growth.

Source: Xinhua