A South African expert says Malawi is succeeding in the pursuit to attain an absolute trade justice and commended the country's Bureau of Standards (MBS) for adopting the system, which is currently being observed by all SADC countries.

The expert Brian Beard commended the country for adopting the practice of checking calibration equipment used by traders when measuring commodities for their customers on the market.

Beard a legal metrology specialist working for National Regulatory Compulsory Specifications-one of the two organizations in South Africa-equivalent of Malawi Bureau of Standards (MBS) said this in an exclusive interview in Blantyre after a Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) training workshop which attracted representatives from eight countries in the region.

The training organized by SADC-mel a secretariat for Standards, Quality Assurance, metrology and the legal protection of both customers and consumers was targeted at training the trainers.

The programme is part of huge project being by European Union with money amounting to 14million Euros scattered in a period of two years the whole SADC.

Beard said Malawi has adopted the trade justice requirements and is currently operating on the same wavelength with other SADC countries.

“What is remaining is to adopt legislation that can be used to strengthen the trade justice system, to ensure that traders don’t use tampered equipment for their customers,” he said.

“The idea of SADC-mel is to harmonize SADC protocol; there is a projection that within two years all the countries in the region would have adopted legislation which can prosecute traders using tampered equipment,” he said.

He said currently it is only South Africa which has in force such legal instruments able to prosecute traders who cheat customers.

“SADC mel does understand the fact that different countries have different metrology (measurements).

“But now that we are talking about free trade coming up soon, we need to update legal instruments and harmonize these aspects, so that by the SADC protocol, goods can freely move across borders without worrying about certain aspects like standards not being equal,” said Beard.

Senior Trade Metrology Manager at MBS Walter Msiska representing Malawi said information sharing is crucial on matters of that nature.

He said he was grateful that SADC mel decided to bring the training to Malawi.
Ends-----------------