Algeria creates agency to promote non-oil exports

• Cement and mining export drive
• 2030 target of $30bn sales
• New railway for iron ore mine

Algeria is to create an export promotion agency to push non-oil international sales as the oil and gas producer faces plunging petroleum prices.

Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune revealed the plan during a meeting with national business leaders in the capital Algiers last week.

Tebboune said the export promotion agency would be set up next month and focus on expanding non-oil exports such as minerals and cement.

He said Algeria’s efforts to diversify its economy away from petroleum have started to pay off, with non-hydrocarbon exports climbing to a record high of around $7 billion last year.

“Achieving a $7 billion target is a miracle in itself but we need to make even a bigger leap and increase exports to $10 billion this year,” Tebboune said.

In a report early this year, Algeria’s Economic Renewal Council said the government has set a target to boost non-oil exports to nearly $30 billion in 2030.

“Algeria is witnessing big progress in the industrial sector, driven by the subsidies policy which aims to encourage local production,” the council board member Abdul Raouf Buhubaila said in the report.

“We believe that the council has the ability to attain targets set by the government, top of which is increasing non-oil exports to $30 billion in 2030,” he said.

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Tebboune said an increase in exports would be driven by a sharp rise in cement and mining production, adding that cement output would top 41 million tonnes this year.

“At the end of this year, the project to link Algeria’s biggest mine to a rail network will also be completed and this will lead to a large increase in metal production,” he said.

Algeria announced in 2023 it would invest as much as $10 billion in the development of the Gâra Djebilet mine in the western Tindouf province, with a targeted production of nearly 40 million tonnes of iron in 2040.

Gâra Djebilet is one of the world’s largest mines and contains an estimated 3.5 billion tonnes of iron ore, of which around 1.7 billion tonnes are exploitable.