The Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa has moved to eliminate barriers to trading in maize in six member states.

Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe have endorsed the draft Mutual Recognition Agreement (MRA), which complements the Comesa Mutual Recognition Framework (C-MRF) launched in December 2015.

The framework seeks to reduce compliance costs by doing away with multiple testing, assessment and grading of maize and its products.

Restricted maize movement has fuelled an informal trade, which has made it hard to control diseases across borders.

Speaking in Nairobi last week, standards experts from the Comesa and the East African Community Secretariats noted that informal trade denies countries’ both social and trade integration benefits.

Food security

“The mutual recognition of conformity assessment of maize and maize products promotes food security and therefore require special instruments to ensure their free flow across the region,” said Dr Francis Mangeni, Comesa director of trade and Customs.

Within Comesa, regulatory barriers are manifest in multiple sampling, testing and grading, which often leads to the grain being rejected in some markets.

Besides regulatory impediments, aflatoxin is a major barrier to trade. Aflatoxin has led to serious illness and deaths in Kenya and disrupted trade and livelihoods in a number of countries, according to sanitary and phytosanitary expert Martha Byanyima.

Ms Byanyima said the differences in quality assurance infrastructure and conformity assessment, including laboratory competence, often cause regulatory or non-tariff barriers.

“This remains a major cause of high costs of trading and trade disruptions, hence one of the main reasons for low intra-Comesa trade,” she said when handing over aflatoxin testing equipment to Kenya and Uganda.

The equipment is expected to make the Kenya Bureau of Standards a reference laboratory for testing of aflatoxin in the region.