Cabinet approved South Africa’s initial transport sector offer under the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Trade in Services Negotiations.

The objectives of the SADC Protocol on Trade in Services are to progressively liberalise intra-regional trade in services, create a single market for trade in services, enhance economic growth and development and improve the capacity and competitiveness of the services sectors of SADC State parties.

Cabinet Spokesperson, Minister Faith Muthambi said, “The services sector is critical to South Africa’s growth and job creation prospects, both as an intermediate input to merchandise trade and as a tradable in its own right.”

Intra-regional integration of transport services can generate commercially valuable market opportunities for South African service suppliers as well as investment across the transport sectors in the region.

“As income is generated by exporting services within value chains, South African companies could obtain commercial benefits at the same time as they contribute to the development of the regional transport sector,” said Minister Muthambi.

If these are accepted they will offer South African services exporters better terms of access to those markets than non-SADC countries.

Commitments include in Maritime, Internal Waterways, Air Transport, Space, Rail, Road, Pipeline, Cargo-handling storage and warehouse and Freight transport agency services.