.
He said the government is keen to promote growth of the local motor
vehicle assembly sector as a means to boost job creation.Ma
Rentao, president of Foton International Group, said the automobile
firm is keen to grow its brand across the east African region.
.
Kenya needs to reinvent
industrial production to expand exports to China
Nairobi (Xinhua) --
Kenya should improve quality of manufactured goods to
enhance their competitiveness in the Chinese market, experts said on
Friday evening.
Bitange Ndemo, professor of economics at University of Nairobi,
said conducting a research on possible deficiencies in the Chinese
market would be the beginning of enhancing competitiveness of Kenyan
products in the world’s largest economy.
"We cannot say we want to increase our exports to China without
precisely knowing what they want," Ndemo said.
Taking into account its population, Ndemo noted an existing gap
for food supply which Kenyan producers can bridge if they produce en
masse.
"Considering their population they need a lot of food to consume.
"We need to know how much they import, where they import it from
and what capacities do those countries have," he added.
Ndemo proposed that in order for Kenya to have a competitive
leverage in China, the government should implement a land
subdivision hindering policy to encourage large scale farming to
ensure a consistent adequate supply of the produce exported.
"We need to have a huge production to compete against other
countries," said Ndemo.
He also appealed for development of an initiative that would give
preferential access to African goods to influence the growth of
Africa’s exports.
Phyllis Wakiaga, chief executive officer of Kenya Association of
Manufacturers, said importation of mechanized solutions into farming
as well as knowledge transfer will play a huge role in increasing
productivity per acre of which the firm outputs could be
agro-processed locally or exported to China.
Kenya is eager to export to China products including flowers and
vegetables, analysts said.
Fruits, vegetables and flowers are already a key foreign exchange
earner for Kenya, bringing in about 1.15 billion U.S. dollars in
2017, according to Kenya’s statistics bureau.