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Trade between India and Africa was on track to reach the $90-billion target set for 2015, Trade and Industry Minister Dr Rob Davies said on Tuesday.
Trade between Africa and India had already surpassed $60-billion by 2011 and continued to increase, he said at the opening of the third Africa–India Ministers of Trade meeting, in Sandton.
India's continuing investment into Africa provided the continent the opportunity to drive industrialisation and interregional trade, as well as to further strengthen ties between the two emerging economies.
Africa was currently India's sixth-largest trading partner, while India had emerged as Africa's fourth-largest trading partner.
The Asian country had, over the past decade, invested over $50-billion into Africa – a sum India's Commerce and Industry Minister Anand Sharma indicated would increase, particularly into mining, infrastructure and energy, besides other sectors.
Davies said this meant that, for the continent to leverage the increasing investments and the increasingly changing economic landscape, Africa now needed to make a shift.
"We need to reposition ourselves from being producers and exporters of primary products and importers of finished products to become industrial producers and exporters," he said.
African countries collectively represented a mostly youthful population of over one-billion and the continent had a combined gross domestic product of $2.6-trillion, which provided the leverage needed to industrialise.
He further noted that the continent needed to boost intra-African trade to further extend the benefits to the continent’s citizens.
The partnerships between other emerging economies and Africa would enable Africa to exploit resource value addition, critical skills transfers, poverty eradication and take advantage of the fact that emerging economies were growing ahead of developed countries.
Davies explained that the option of "simply producing value-added goods for the developed world was no longer available."
The embattled "rich world" was currently experiencing low growth and trying to reindustrialise itself.
"We need to have another leg to build our markets."
African Union chairperson Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma added that the economies of Brazil, India and China would surpass those of Canada, the US, the UK and Italy, besides others, over the next few years, while Africa increasingly represented a frontier of economic growth and stability.