Sacu customs union reviewed by WTO

THE Southern African Customs Union (Sacu), the oldest such union in the world, has been assessed and reviewed by the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

The assessment comprised of two aspects – a factual evaluation of Sacu and the Free Trade Area (FTA) of southern Africa and secondly to test the legal compliance of the treaty establishing Sacu and the FTA.According to the Secretary of SACU, Tswelopele Moremi, the WTO undertook the factual review of Sacu at the 53rd session of the WTO Committee on Regional Trade Agreements (CRTA) at the WTO Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, last week.Representatives from all five Sacu member states were present.’The WTO review marked an important milestone in the history of Sacu, when the 2002 Sacu agreement was formally considered by the WTO as it was an opportunity to publicise Sacu to the rest of the world,’ Moremi said in a statement on Friday.As members of the WTO, Sacu member states are bound by the WTO principles governing trade and certain obligations arise from being a WTO member, one being the review of trade policies Sacu as a Regional Trade Arrangement (RTA), must undergo a factual review.Sacu was formed in 1910 and has been renegotiated several times, the last time in 2002. It has Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, Swaziland and South Africa as its members. Namibia derives about one third of its annual revenue from the Sacu revenue pool.Sacu received written questions from several countries, including Canada, Japan, the United States and Taiwan. The written questions and the answers provided by Sacu were translated by the WTO Secretariat into all the official languages of the WTO and distributed to all WTO member states last week’s meeting.During the presentation in Geneva, Sacu representatives emphasised that the customs union was an ideal tool for trade liberalisation in southern Africa as it facilitated the integration of the economies of its five member states into the global trading system. ‘WTO member states commended Sacu for progress made in integrating its members into the global economy and announced that the Sacu factual review had been completed successfully,’ the Sacu statement noted.