Regional integration Southern Africa

Abstract

, with many countries having overlapping membership in different regional communities. The Southern African Development Coordinating Conference (SADCC)-the precursor to SADC-was established in 1980 with the specific aim of lessening dependence on apartheid-era South Africa. In 1992, the Southern African Development Community Treaty was signed, transforming SADCC into SADC. SADC graduated to become a free trade area in 2008 but has not yet transitioned to the next regional integration stage for various reasons, including lack of political will, proliferation of regional groupings, and lack of experienced human resources and funding. In addition, regional indicators show that SADC countries are at different levels of trade integration. South Africa is the predominant economy in SADC-the largest in terms of gross domestic product (GDP), the most diversified, and the overall best-performing country in terms of integration, scoring highest on trade, financial, and macroeconomic integration (especially among SACU countries), and is also the only country that scores above average on all five regional integration dimensions (AUC 2016). Southern Africa is failing to diversify away from primary commodities. SADC mainly trades commodities, especially primary products. In this chapter, we focus on trade in agricultural products. Agriculture is a key sector in most Southern African economies and plays a crucial role in trade and regional integration. Agriculture contributes 15 percent of total GDP in Africa, however, its contribution ranges from less than 3 percent in Botswana and South Africa to more than 30 percent in Malawi (World Bank 2016). Trade of agricultural products is low (Bouët and Odjo 2019). There is heterogeneity in agricultural exports across SADC countries, with South Africa dominating exports to SADC countries. SADC countries export similar products (tobacco, maize, sugar)-which may explain why intraregional trade is low. The top 10 intra-SADC exported products include sugar, live animals, maize, and tobacco, with the most traded products by value being maize from South Africa, followed by sugar from Eswatini, and cattle from Namibia. Most RECs in Southern Africa (SADC, SACU, COMESA, and EAC) have a comparative advantage in vegetable products, though for SADC it has been declining. Agricultural trade at the intensive margin 1 has been declining for Zambia, Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique; however, for South Africa, the intensive margin index of all products has been increasing. The ability to trade new agricultural products (extensive margin) varies across SADC countries, with Malawi, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Lesotho, and Zimbabwe showing a declining trend. South Africa dominates participation in various commodity value chains among SADC member states. Most of the intermediate goods exported and imported within the SADC region are from South Africa, in terms of averaged values for the period 2003-2017. This trend is also observed by Black et al. (2019), who find that South Africa is the main ...