Lusaka (Zambia) - The organisation for a common market for Eastern and Southern Africa COMESA, is going to hold the 13th summit of the Head of States 2009 from the 7th to the 8th of June in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe.

COMESA was established in the 1960s in order to enhance regional economic co-operation between the participating member countries.

Member states are Burundi, Comoros, D.R Congo, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Uganda, Seychelles, Sudan, Swaziland, Rwanda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

The slogan used by the organisation is; “400 million Africans UNITED in ONE market”.

COMESA is expected to announce the launch of a customs union between all member states during the coming summit. Eritrea and the Democratic Republic of Congo have each been chosen to present a COMESA project, which is serving as a testimonial during the summit for the planned customs union .

Eritrea is presenting the EU funded COMESA project ASYCUDA, which is an undertaking in cooperation with the Eritrean Customs Department.

ASYCUDA was launched in five African countries in 2006 with a budget of 3 Million Euros. One of the goals of ASYCUDA is to improve the exchange of transit data between borders through web services.

According to Mr. Haile, the Eritrean Director General of the Customs Department in Eritrea, the project is aiming to modernize the administrative and operational infrastructure of Eritrea’s customs administration, in order to keep up with the global development of computerized systems.

The project was launched three years ago, aiming to computerize the whole Eritrean customs operation in order to enhance statistical processing, accounts management , declaration processing, goods release and report generation.

In 2007 the first implementation of ASYCUDA was finalized at Asmara Airport. In the following year 2008 Asmara Railway customs station, the port of Massawa and the port of Assab customs stations received their ASYCUDA upgrade.

Mr. Haile states, that the initial project scope did not include the post station and the airport passenger terminal in Asmara. However, the system modernization was also implemented at these facilities. Future plans aim to extend the project to Tesseney customs station on the border to Sudan.

The planned COMESA customs union is intended to facilitate trade between the member countries and reduce bureaucratic barriers in order to improve productivity.

Chinese News Agency Xinhua reports that Chinese Ambassador to Eritrea Shu Zhan is expecting trade and cultural relations with Eritrea to be strengthened further. Shu points out that China has already aided a hospital, two schools and one human and social science institute to Eritrea and that trade volumes of China with Eritrea have reached $31 Million in 2008, which was a 7.6% increase compared to 2007.

The statements of the Ambassador follow previous steps taken by China and African countries to improve bilateral trade relations. For example, in August 2008 the China Development Bank signed a credit agreement worth $50 Million with PTA Bank, which stands for Eastern and Southern African Development Bank. The shareholders of the PTA Bank are Eritrea, Burundi, Comoros, Rwanda, Seychelles, Somalia, Ethiopia, Egypt, Djibouti, Kenya, Tanzania, Seychelles, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe. The credit was supposed to support industrial sectors, which require heavy investment such as mining, telecommunication and infrastructure and was a result of the Bejing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in 2006. China is also involved in the gold mining projects in Eritrea with companies such as Donia Resources & Co (capitaleritrea).