Namibia will lose one quarter of its annual revenue from the Southern African Customs Union under a new set of shared customs and excise rules. Finance ministers from SACU last week met in Walvis Bay to review progress in the implementation of a 2002 agreement, which came into force on July 15 this year.

Namibia would lose about one billion Namibian dollars per year, according to Andrew Ndishishi, permanent secretary in the Namibian trade ministry.

The SACU agreement is a set of trade rules aimed at aiding the free flow of goods between the five countries and works on a system of revenue sharing.

Namibia last year received around N$ 4 million under the shared agreement. Ndishishi, describing the one-day conference of the SACU Council of Ministers, the group’s senior policymaking body, as "rather difficult on certain issues," added that the other four member states took note of
Namibia’s concerns.

SACU trade ministers also met with US trade envoy Robert Zoellick at Walvis Bay to discuss a free trade area between SACU countries and the US. Originally the talks on the common Free Trade Area started in June 2003 and were set to be completed by the end of 2005.

This week on 16 December, SACU and the four-nation South American Mercosur trade bloc signed a preferential trade agreement at Belo Horizonte in Brazil.