[Kaspar]

The Southern African Customs Union, a group of five countries including South Africa, agreed to jointly negotiate future trade agreements, said Rob Davies, South Africa’s Trade and Industry Minister.

This will include trade talks with India and Latin America’s Mercosur bloc, Davies told reporters today in the capital, Pretoria, after a SACU heads-of-state meeting. Existing agreements won’t be affected, he said.

“We’ve finally been able to agree on a set of principles” to ensure all future trade talks are done collectively, Davies said.

SACU was formed more than a hundred years ago, giving South Africa, the continent’s biggest economy, the right to steer regional policies while sharing customs and excise revenue with neighboring countries Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Namibia. Income from the union, which makes up more than half of the budgets of Swaziland and Lesotho, declined in the past two years because of the global economic crisis.

In 2009, Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland signed separate economic partnership agreements, or EPAs, with the European Union, angering South Africa.

SACU also agreed to an “urgent” review of terms under which revenue is shared out among its members, the group’s Executive Secretary Tswelopele Moreni said today.

Thousands of people marched in Swaziland’s capital, Mbabane on March 18 to protest against possible job cuts and a civil service wage freeze as the government struggles to find ways to deal with a budget crisis.

To contact the reporter on this story: Franz Wild in Johannesburg at fwild@bloomberg.net

It makes me happy to see continued integration among SACU members. Despite obvious flaws, I think SACU could really become a model for other regional integration blocks throughout Africa, the most obvious being the East African Community. I'm hoping that regional blocks like SACU will be one of the lines of defense against shoddy Chinese investments that have recently been pouring into some African nations. I see regional integration within Africa as being an extremely important tool for economic development in the continent.