04 March 2010
"I go across the border to Chipata, in Zambia, three times a week, for a day at a time. There’s a bigger market in there and more demand for food,” says 32-year-old fruit farmer, Elias Zulu.
"I make more money selling it across the border,” he adds.
Elias pedals 35 kilometres from his farm near Mchinji, western Malawi, and earns more than double by selling his produce – onions, Irish potatoes, carrots and cabbages at markets or wholesalers in Zambia.
As a small-scale farmer, Elias passes through the border without any travel documents, customs paperwork or import-export costs.
But bigger cargoes need vehicles for ferrying goods, and there are high costs associated with moving vehicles across borders.
Border queues
Many border posts have queues of trucks parked nose-to-tail waiting for the paperwork to clear so they can pass through the border.
Manuel Aramando, 42, has driven trucks between Malawi and the ports in Beira and Nacala, Mozambique for four years.
He’s waiting for his truck to be loaded with sacks of Fairtrade peanuts from farmers in Malawi bound for supermarkets in the UK.
Good quality roads and easy border crossings ensure access to UK supermarkets for farmers produce as well as a steady job for truckers like Manuel.
On the Beira route that Manuel uses, queues of up to 60 trucks can wait to cross, creating a bottleneck of deliveries coming or going from Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi.
Truckers have to repeat the same clearing process and paperwork; once as they leave a country and then again as they enter another.
"Transport owners are keen to see things moving so I’d love to see procedures at the border speed up so that it might take just ten to twenty minutes to get through,” says Manuel.
Upgrades
Along with other donors, DFID has invested in the upgrading of 4,000 kilometres of road and 600 kilometres of railway along the North South Corridor – a major trading route in Africa linking the copper belt of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Zambia with ports in South Africa and Tanzania.
The upgrade is set to cut trading times by 10%, which will boost regional and international trade.
The first one-stop border post to be upgraded opened at Chirundu, between Zambia and Zimbabwe, in December 2009. It is expected to cut the time it takes to cross the Zambia-Zimbabwe border from three days to three hours, lowering the cost of doing trade in the region.
Four other one-stop border posts will be created along the North South Corridor by 2012.
Improved transport infrastructure will open up access to markets and make it easier for African countries to trade with each other and with the rest of the world.
Facts and stats
- The North South Corridor programme is led by three Regional Economic Communities - the Common Market for East and Southern Africa (COMESA), the East African Community (EAC) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC).
- DFID is contributing £100 million to the programme, as part of international support worth $1.2 billion.
- The cost of transport in Africa is about 30% to 40% above that in other developing regions.
- For almost half of the 48 sub-Saharan countries, transport payments absorb more than 20% of foreign export earnings. In some landlocked nations it is 50%.
- Africa accounts for just 3% of global trade but has 12% of the world’s population.