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Pakistan eyes joint ventures in tea industry
2005-07-06 09:01:26
By Ludger Kasumuni
Pakistan is eager to invest in Tanzania’s tea industry on a grand scale through small and medium enterprises (SMEs), the country’s High Commissioner to Tanzania said yesterday.
Syed Zahid Hussain said when he met Reginald Mengi, the Executive Chairman of IPP Limited, in Dar es Salaam that Pakistan had a big market for processed tea and was ready to enter into joint ventures with Tanzanians in the area of tea processing.
The envoy said Pakistan imported 80 per cent of its tea requirements at a cost of about US$250 million a year and added that this made it feasible for Pakistani investors to come to Tanzania and invest in tea processing factories in partnership with small and medium-scale Tanzanian entrepreneurs.
Hussain concurred with Mengi’s view that developing countries needed to increase the volume of trade among themselves, saying Pakistan was the world’s biggest consumer of tea, but had been importing the commodity from Africa through Europe.
’’We want tea to be manufactured here and be sold directly to Pakistan in the form of Tanzania’s brands. We also want to promote investments in other fields.
This is in line with the spirit of South-South Co-operation,’’ the ambassador said.
He said cotton production was another area in which Pakistan could invest in Tanzania.
Pakistan had over 200 cotton ginneries and boasted of the capacity to export cotton products worth US$9 billion a year, the envoy added.
Earlier, Mengi, who is also Chairman of the Confederation of Tanzania Industries (CTI), said Tanzania and other African countries had been losing a lot of wealth to developed countries because of exporting raw materials instead of processed agricultural produce.
The concept of adding value by embarking on agro-processing industries had been mere rhetoric for a long time, he said and added that it was high time Tanzanians joined hands with Pakistani investors to establish agro-processing industries through SMEs.
“There are many Africans buying African goods through Europe. This is a very bad trend which is shifting wealth from the South to the North.
We export a lot of raw materials. We don’t add value to these materials by processing them so as to earn more money,’’ Mengi said.
He added:
’’We in developing countries must trade among ourselves. This is the solution to poverty.
Let Pakistani SMEs come to Tanzania and those in Tanzania go to Pakistan. CTI will be happy to host a delegation of Pakistani investors.’’
Mengi said developing countries should take concrete measures to increase trade volumes among themselves as they strived to fight trade injustices.
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