Dagnachew Teklu
The Daily Monitor, April 7, 2005
Excessive transport cost is currently challenging Ethiopia, a landlocked country, and is weakening its competitiveness in the world market, UN said Wednesday.
After the loss of Assab Port ten years ago, transportation is costing Ethiopia a lot of money, it said.
Anwarul K Chowdhury, UN Under-Secretary-General told journalists that geographical constraints faced by landlocked developing countries continue to be a major constraint on their development.
“It is increasingly recognized that excessive transport costs do more damage to trade than tariffs. Half of the world’s 31 landlocked developing countries are in Africa. They are currently facing a major problem from transport costs than the payment of tariffs,” he said
Chowdhury who is also a high representative for the least developed countries said that transit transport cooperation is crucial in Africa to tackle this problem.
“UN has been undertaking efforts to implement the Almaty Program of Action for transit transport cooperation, which was adopted in 2003 at the UN conference in Almaty, Kazakhstan,” he said, adding, “the recently launched UN Millennium project report stressed that the MDG-based strategies for landlocked developing countries should be based on the implementation of the Almaty Program of Action.”
The envoy also indicated that Africa’s success or failure in trade would largely be determined by transport availability and cost.
According to him, landlocked countries, particularly in developing world experience tariffs up to four times higher than other countries.
“Their situation is further aggravated because of the inadequate infrastructure development and costly and inefficient border crossing and other procedures in their transit neighbours most of which are too poor to develop their transit system without major infusion of external assistance,” he added.
National priority for the transport sector by African countries, total debt conciliation, increasing Official Development Assistance (ODA) and opportunities for the world market are among others, which were stated as ways to tackle the problem.
Ten of the 15 landlocked countries in Africa, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Central African Republic Chad, Malawi, Mali, Niger, Rwanda, and Uganda, spend up to 40 percent of their export earning for transportation and insurance services.
World Bank on its part has expressed its commitment to scale up transport development aid in the coming years.