Intra-EAC trade grows less than bloc’s external trade, as members impose more barriers

East African trade is threading in the wrong direction as member states of the East African Community (EAC) are trading more with countries outside the bloc rather than with each another, owing to pesky trade barriers.

While trading less within the EAC, members of the regional bloc are trading more with other African countries, particularly West Africans, and non-African nations, which is blamed on persistent trade disputes and non-tariff barriers (NTBs), which are choking intra-regional trade as well as undermining the regional integration agenda, according to a recent report by The East African.

One example is the trade dispute between Kenya and Uganda that has been running for years after Kenya impounded milk from Uganda and banned the imports of the commodity. The news publication also warns that this situation undermines the entire purpose of the regional bloc, which is to further intra-EAC trade, thus weakens the regional integration goal.

EAC Secretariat’s 2022 Trade and Investment Report has showed a new trend where the bloc’s member countries are doing increased business with the West African countries, Japan, the United States, India, China and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Although the EAC has so far resolved 23 out of 33 NTBs, Peter Mathuki, Secretary-General, EAC Secretariat, notes that “the persistence of NTBs (still) continued to negatively affect intra-EAC trade.” Provisional data show that in the 2021-2022 period, EAC imports from the UAE surged by 81.9%, from India increased by 20.9%, from China grew by 16.6%, whereas total intra-EAC trade grew by a mere 11.2%.