South Africa and India’s focus with regard to two-way trade was now moving away from simply undertaking trade flow expansion, towards finding ways to actively improve the trade flow between the countries, African National Congress Progressive Business Forum co-convenor Daryl Swanepoel said on Monday.

Speaking at an event aimed at promoting investment into the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, he noted that South Africa and India’s partnership through the Brics grouping, which also includes Brazil, Russia and China, as well as through bilateral agreements, was starting to deliver results.

Swanepoel pointed out that, during the last financial year, bilateral trade between South Africa and India had increased 31%, to $7.6-billion, up from $5.8-billion previously, while South Africa had accounted for 8.6% of India’s total import share in 2011.

“South Africa’s export markets have changed considerably over the past 20 years. New markets have emerged, while the share of exports to some traditional markets, such as the UK, Japan and Europe has declined.

“India is now South Africa’s fifth largest export destination,” he said, adding, however, that the two countries had to realise that they had only now started to “scratch the surface of the potential that exists”.

He stated that, to increase trade between the countries, market conditions had to be improved and trade reforms undertaken to make doing business between the two countries easier and more efficient.

“We need to look at strengthening strategic partnerships across all industries, such as healthcare, energy and infrastructure, and need to invest in sectors that assist technology and skills transfer and promote our political and goodwill initiatives,” he said.

Also speaking at the event, Madhya Pradesh Departments of Commerce, Industry and Employment and Energy principal secretary Mohammed Suleman pointed out that there were many synergies between South Africa and India that could be used to boost trade between the countries.

He noted that Madhya Pradesh’s main focus was agriculture and that this was an area in which the two countries could collaborate.

Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan pointed out that the region’s agriculture sector had achieved growth of 24.99% year-on-year in the last financial year.

“We believe that in agriculture there can be more synergies, [and if] strong practices in food processing are applied we can make a dent in unemployment,” he said.

Chouhan said this region of India had achieved the significant agricultural growth through irrigation initiatives, seed replacement strategies, supplying farmers with fertiliser, focusing on high-value crops and not charging the farmers interest.

The state of Madhya Pradesh would host a global investors summit, in India, from October 8 to 10 this year.