The Minister of Trade and Industry, Dr Rob Davies says government has embarked on a mission to take the country’s industrialisation to the next level by ensuring that the Industrial Policy Action Plan (IPAP) accomplishes higher impact industrial development in South Africa.

Minister Davies was speaking in Cape Town on 4 August 2015 where he was briefing members of the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Trade and Industry on progress made in the implementation of the sixth iteration of IPAP.

In his presentation, Minister Davies highlighted various positive milestones that have been achieved in the implementation of IPAP so far. These included the highlights of achievements that IPAP interventions in priority sectors such as automotive, clothing and textile, metal fabrication, capital equipment, agro-processing and the green economy have attained.

“In the automotive sector, government support has taken the industry from production of 356 800 units in the year 2000 to over 566 000 units in 2014. This support has grown auto exports from 11 000 units in 1995 to over 270 000 units in 2014 300 000 jobs have been created in the automotive sector,” said Minister Davies.

He reiterated that government’s intervention aimed at arresting the decline of the clothing, textiles, leather and footwear sector resulted in 68 0000 jobs been retained in the sector and 6 900 new jobs created since 2010. By the end of March this year, a total of R3.7 billion in support of the private sector had been approved since the inception of the Clothing and Textile Competitive Programme in 2010. Since 2009, the Department of Trade and Industry (the dti) supported agro-processing industries to the value of R1.2 billion through various schemes.

Minister Davies said that what government has achieved so far through the implementation of previous iterations of IPAP shows that the policy was working. However, there is a need to scale up industrial development in the country.

“We need to scale up the impact of our industrial policy as we are not yet where we need to be. In order to achieve this we need stronger conditionalities to be attached to existing incentive programmes when it comes to competitiveness raising, Broad-based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE), supplier development and localisation. We also need to roll out the Black Industrialists Programme and also develop new sector-specific incentive schemes which have proved to be effective in leveraging investment,” said Minister Davies.

He added that there was also a need to develop an agro-processing and smallholder agriculture linkage support programme which will also support agri-park initiative, as well as the development of a new incentive to support Greenfield investments.

“We also need procurement. We have designated 16 products already. Given the R3,6 trillion infrastructure build programme, we do need to localise and make sure we reduce import leakages. We also need to ensure that there is compliance across government departments, spheres of government, State-Owned Entities and government agencies to all the procurement policy levers such as designations and the Competitive Supplier Development Programme,” emphasised Minister Davies.