Ethiopia: Indian Expertise Sought to Develop Local Bamboo Industry
AllAfrica.com, Washington
The Daily Monitor (Addis Ababa)
25 March 2008
Posted to the web 25 March 2008
Addis Ababa
With its expertise and entrepreneurship, India can help Ethiopia develop its bamboo industry, an Ethiopian official visiting India said on Sunday.
Currently, bamboo plantations cover about one million hectares in Ethiopia.
Eighty percent of these is of the lowland variety. Lowland bamboo is used in producing handicraft items while highland bamboo is used in paper mills.
According to an Indian news website, the visiting official said that Ethiopia has huge potential in bamboo cultivation and that it was eager to develop this as a small and medium industry.
He said Ethiopia wants to come forward and help organise the sector,” “Bamboo has a huge demand locally due to increasing use in industry and housing. It has application in terms of home furnishing, curtains and decorated items and so on. And these are also environmentally safe,” Ahmed Nuru, deputy director, privatisation and public enterprises supervision agency, told Indo-Asian News Service (IANS) in an interview.
Bamboo production in Ethiopia constitutes 67 percent of the total in Africa.
“We want to now give our bamboo items an export edge for which we are inviting several countries to come and set up large-scale industries,” Nuru said.
Chinese companies have expressed interest in making large-scale investments in Ethiopia’s bamboo industry, according to Nuru.
Ethiopia’s main concern is that expansion of agricultural land is eroding its bamboo groves; hence their preservation has become a major issue.
“We need to take urgent and immediate action as the resource has not been attended to, due to lack of attention and only large-scale and sustained production can ensure its growth and sustenance,” he said.
Trade between India and Ethiopia stood at $127 million in 2006-07, up from $72.5 million in 2002-03.