A newly published study by the World Bank said Kenya is partly responsible for high food prices in landlocked countries like Uganda, that depend on Mombasa port to import goods.
The study, which published in the local daily the Standard on Wednesday, said Uganda is likely to suffer higher food prices due to lengthy cross-border crossing at Busia and Malaba in Western Kenya.
"Goods bound for Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi spend an average of five days more -- 25 versus 20 days -- in Tanzania's Dar Es Salaam port than domestically bound goods," said the report.
"The same is true for goods shipped through Mombasa, Kenya. It usually takes more than 24 hours to cross the Kenya-Uganda border."
The World Trade Indicators 2008 study report released by the World Bank Institute this week said goods to Great Lakes Region from the ports of Dar-es-Salaam and Mombasa took unnecessarily long time.
The bank said shipping costs are also a key component of food prices, and are generally far higher for many low-income countries than for industrialized countries.
A paper on rising food prices released during the IMF-World Bank annual meetings earlier this month said trucking operators in oil-importing land locked countries were paying as much as 50 percent more for fuel than in other countries of the region even before the recent oil price jumps.
"Delays increase costs and the uncertainty of delivery, and that's as big a problem as a lengthy transport process," said the report.
It says other factors such as cartels in the trucking industry in both landlocked and coastal countries and also bribe-taking drive up the costs.
The business community in East Africa has often complained of numerous police checks along the Northern Corridor between Mombasa and Busia.
However, the World Bank said that most developing countries continued to improve trade policies supporting greater integration last year.
It said countries with lower barriers tended to have stronger, more consistent trade and export performance over the past decade.
"The ranking shows that those countries that have reduced their trade barriers, and are doing well on trade facilitation and institutions, have also experienced sustained increases in their volume of trade," said Roumeen Islam, a manager at the World Bank Institute.
Source:Xinhua
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