Trade Forward Southern Africa (TFSA) is a UK government funded programme that operates across countries in the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) and Mozambique. The programme targets its support on the private and public sector to facilitate new and ongoing trade relations between the SACU+M region and the UK through five programme components, including supporting compliance with market standards and integration into supply and value chains. TFSA works to increase opportunities to trade, overcome non-technical barriers to trade in goods, and improve export performance in the region while facilitating trade with the United Kingdom.
As a technical partner on the TFSA programme, Imani Development has been implementing direct support initiatives to the aquaculture sector in South Africa, Namibia and Mozambique. This includes piloting the TFSA aquaculture value chain support initiative. This involved industry mapping of support and standards infrastructure, identifying and profiling standards testing facilities, preparing and distributing market compliance assessment packs to empower shellfish producers to access export markets, and developing knowledge tools and advocacy support on regional access to quality feed, fingerling stock, and other productive inputs.
South African operators have expressed a strong interest to export farmed and wild-harvested molluscs (oysters, mussels and abalone) to the EU, however, up until now, there wasn’t a specific resource guide on EU compliance that that they could refer to. In July 2022, Etienne Hinrichsen, Imani Development’s aquaculture expert presented a brand new guideline resource on EU Compliance for the export of farmed molluscs from South Africa. The European Union Compliance Roadmap has been widely circulated and well received by sector participants and as well as authorities within the industry. The aim is to better equip all parties with steps to take to effectively deal with export barriers for farmed shellfish from South Africa. This resource will also provide valuable insights to other SACU+M countries that export molluscs to the EU market.
To access the Roadmap, please click here