India: Bilateral trade with Africa to touch $90bn by 2015

India on Tuesday said that bilateral trade with Africa would touch USD 90 billion by 2015. Addressing the India-Africa Trade Ministers meeting in Johannesburg, Indian Minister for Commerce and Industry Anand Sharma said that investments from India to Africa crossed USD 50 billion in the last decade and that trade has now crossed USD 70 billion. "The bilateral trade target of USD 90 billion by 2015 (between India and Africa) is a modest one and is certainly achievable," the Indian minister told the gathering. "The robust economic growth of both India and Africa provided new opportunities of forging a development partnership which would not just be focused on transactional trade but subsume capacity building, institution building, human resource development and productive investments," he added. The Indian minister further mentioned that the governments of India and Africa were confronted by challenges of currency volatility, high inflation, commodity volatility, and similar issues of underdevelopment and poverty. Meanwhile, Chairperson of the African Union Commission Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, while addressing the trade ministers, said the Gross Domestic Product of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, China, India, South Africa) economies is set to overtake that of G-7 countries soon. Zuma noted that the rich resource base of Africa has driven the economic growth of the world. The plan of industrialization aims to increase value addition, enhance regional economic integration with an aim to achieve a pan-African free trade area, she stressed