China is planning to increase its African imports beyond and into agriculture, a senior Chinese foreign ministry official has disclosed.
Gatekeepers News reports that Wu Peng, Director-General of the ministry’s department of African affairs, gave the hint at a launch ceremony of “African Products Online Promoting Season”.
Wu said Beijing was already mapping out new policies that will ease the export of agricultural products from the African continent to China. Further details are expected to be revealed soon at the 21st Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) which will be hosted by Senegal.
“We are preparing some new measures to promote China-Africa trade relations, especially encouraging the importation of more agricultural products from Africa,” Wu said as he declined to give more details ahead of the trade forum.
He noted that agriculture was the solution to food security and that Chinese authorities were “thinking about how we can provide more easy access to the Chinese market for African agricultural products. There are a lot of African products that can enter the Chinese market, but it’s not enough.
“So, what we can do now is to put some even more privileged policies or measures to encourage Chinese companies to import more products from Africa,” he said.
Gatekeepers News reports that China’s African imports are dominated by natural resources such as crude oil, copper, cobalt, iron ore and diamonds, which it buys to meet its industrial and manufacturing needs. While Africa imports machinery, electronics, textiles and manufactured consumer goods from China.
Meanwhile, the trade volume between China and Africa hit $139.1 billion in the first seven months of the year, as China’s ministry of commerce revealed that imports from Africa were $59.3 billion.
