Mauritania’s economic growth rate for 2019 is expected to reach 6 percent, the West African country’s Minister of Economy and Finance Moctar Ould Diay said.
This level of growth confirms the economic recovery, he declared, adding that several sectors including agriculture, fisheries and mining contributed to the evolution of the basic indicators.
Ould Diay, who was giving a press briefing on Thursday night in Nouakchott, said that the area under cultivation has changed, especially in the irrigated sub-sector and rice cultivation, whose surface area increased from 16,000 hectares in 2016 to 17,900 ha in 2017, 27,000 in 2018 and 31,000 in 2019, with a profitability per hectare increasing from 6.1 tons in 2016 to 6.2 in 2019.
The quantities of fish exported for the first six months of 2019 are 423,000 tons, compared to 395,000 during the same period of the previous year, while their revenues were 18 billion ouguiya (US$486 million) for the first six months of 2016 against 19 billion (US$513 million) currently.
Regarding mining, the Mauritanian minister recalled that the National Industrial and Mining Company (SNIM) which exploits the iron ores expected a production of 12 million tons in 2019, revealing that the level of 6.1 million was already reached during the first six months of the year.
He also reported that Tasiast, a gold mining company, had increased production in the first half of 2019, compared to the same period the previous year.
A subsidiary of the Canadian group Kinross, Tasiast has boosted its foreign exchange earnings from US$80 million in the first half of 2016 to US$130 million for the same period of 2019, Ould Diay concluded.
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