The decision was expressed during the hearing that the Minister of Industry and Commerce, Victor Fernandes, granted this Tuesday in Luanda to the ambassador of India in Angola, Pratibha Parkar.
Angola imports from India, mainly, pharmaceutical products, machinery, apparatus, electrical materials, motor vehicles, machinery for the industrial sector, chemical products and exports fuels and mineral oils, salt, sulphur, cement, among others.
At Tuesday's meeting, the Indian diplomat expressed interest in strengthening trade cooperation in the areas of diamonds, oil, agriculture, information technology, health and industry and food safety.
According to the Indian ambassador in Angola, trade relations between her country and Angola are at a good pace and trade between both has already reached 4.6 billion dollars in imports and 3 billion dollars in imports, "mostly oil".
"But, also, we agree in being able to diversify the areas of action," he said in statements to journalists.
"The objective of this meeting was to approach the areas that we want to reinforce, in the framework of bilateral cooperation, such as agriculture, health and pharmacy, food transformation, information technology and diamonds", pointed out Pratibha Parkar.
In turn, the Minister of Industry and Trade, Victor Fernandes, reported that Angola is in the process of changing its economic structure and direct investments that may arise from countries like India are welcome.
A technical group, which will involve Angolan and Indian entrepreneurs, will be created with the objective of having a "widest possible scope" to find areas to work in a practical way to achieve results.
"The objective is to share a concrete list of opportunities that could interest the national and Indian entrepreneurs in the sense of relaunching our transforming industry and also the agriculture", he highlighted.
India "has a very interesting participation already in Angola", with industrialists connected, essentially, in construction materials, but the objective is "to widen the base of works", so that Angola "stops being a country dependent on oil and this is only done with investment in the areas outside the oil".
According to Victor Fernandes, the trade balance between Angola and India "is more unbalanced for Angola, which exports more to India than it imports.
"Anyway it is still with much incidence in the oil sector and what we want is to transform it and put it in the productive sector linked to agriculture and manufacturing industry," he stressed.
Angola and India have in force a commercial agreement, signed on October 4, 1986, with automatic renewal for successive periods of two years.
