Local Products and Necessity for a Healthy Competition [Archives:2001/28/Focus]

Waleed Abdullah Al-saqqaf
The world has witnessed huge developments in every aspect of the life socially, economically and technologically. All these developments represent inevitable changes which are closely related to the political facet. At the same time it facilitates a congenial atmosphere to gain betterment and development by means of co-operation in the form of economic alignment. It is also easy to everyone to realize the reasons and try to make efforts to encounter this challenge.
Yemen has been playing a pioneering role to unite the Arabic nations. This can be clearly seen by its efforts to find rational solutions to the problems among its sisterly countries. The Republic of Yemen and its neighbor, The Saudi Arabia have held a rational dialogue to be more conscious and achieve economical transformations with the aim of improving complementarity and integration of different productive and economic sectors as well as pave to the way for product exchange between Yemen and Saudi Arabia by the establishment of the Yemeni-Saudi Common Market.
What we want to suggest here, is how the Yemeni industrial and productive sector is going to reach the competitive level with Saudi Arabia. Of course this will lead to the unmarketability of the Yemeni markets as before when the Yemeni markets opened the way for the foreign products. But we are in an urgent need to confirm our credibility in dealing with these challenges, not only to complain against the foreign products and articles and, its competitions to the local products and articles, but also by making actual studies concentrating on the preference of the Yemeni consumer for these products, and how to change the productive notions and methods.
Now we are facing a dangerous challenge in which we have to make modern productive and industrial policies a reality in our everyday life, particularly in the context of the concentrated orientation of the government to pave the way for the external investments. Of course, this will lead to the slumping of the products sooner or latter. We have to find suitable and proper policies to satisfy the public services.
Once I heard that some of the Yemeni fish were sold very cheaply to one of the Arab countries. My dear reader, can you guess what the country has done?
Fish were packed properly and re-exported by that country and sold at a high rate.
It is strange that the local products high quality are not available in the local markets. Who is responsible and who is going to protect the

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