He said: “this is the time to decide where you want to invest as a country so you must support your entrepreneurs to make them competitive at the regional and continental levels”.

Mr Gerbino stated this in an interview with the Daily Graphic in Accra yesterday.

The trade expert, who is also the Commissioner of the Italian Trade Agency(ITA) for seven African countries namely Ghana, Nigeria, Cote D'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Niger, Guinea and Mali, is attending an exhibition in Accra.

Exhibition

The exhibition was mounted by seven Italian manufacturers of machinery and products for the plastic, processing, packaging, and the agribusiness industries at the Accra International Conference Centre.

Facilitated by the ITA, the companies that exhibited various products were the Irritec Group, manufacturers of irrigation equipment such as pipes and sprinklers; Studio Tecnico Appiani, producers of hydrothermal processing plant and Pietribiasi Michelangelo Srl, manufacturers of dairy processing machines.

The rest are Pigo builders of freezers, dehydrators and vegetable processing equipment; Arol Group and SACMI, both food and beverage industries and Sud capsule, manufacturers of metal cap closing systems for vacuum packaging. 

Strengthen regulation

Mr Gerbino suggested to the government to equally work on internal regulations that would facilitate benefits that would accrue to the country in the course of AfCFTA implementation, banking and payment systems including putting in place measures to reduce cost of logistics among other issues.

He emphasised that the post-COVID-19 era had led to re-thinking of the global value chain as a strategy to re-shape the economies.
 

Doubts, optimism 

Sharing his experiences on how member countries of the European Union(EU) came together, after the second World War in 1945 to facilitate trade, Mr Gerbino noted that the EU had to go through long processes to get to where it is now.

Similarly, he advised African leaders to systematically build the capacities of their citizenry in entrepreneurship while waiting for all the aspects of the AfCFTA to become fully operational.

“It is a long process because it involves many aspects not only on the economy, society, culture etc it's a very long process which is made by taking several concrete steps to make it formidable.

“You can't do that overnight.

 Nobody can.

You need to get there gradually. 

It is good that there is a common vision that is shared among the people” he said.
 

Laudable

The trade expert explained that the AfCFTA agenda was a laudable initiative but cautioned that some aspects of the initiative would go faster than other aspects.

“There will be some serious issues to deal with which cannot be dealt with in a year or two.

 But I don't agree that nothing has happened, I think things have already happened.

I have seen the legal decisions taken on some aspects such as the payment systems, some agreements have been already reached.

There are activities to support intra African Trade etc" he said.