Zambia central bank says will not intervene to halt kwacha slide

Zambia's central bank will not intervene to halt the slide in the kwacha, a senior official said on Wednesday, after the currency of Africa's top copper producer hit a new all-time low against the dollar.
   "We will not intervene in the market to deliberately change the direction of the kwacha if the economic fundamentals don't show that. Exchange rates will be market determined and not fixed administratively," the bank's head of economics Peter Banda told reporters.
   The kwacha <ZMW=> was trading at 5.9200 to the dollar at 0915 GMT on Wednesday after hitting a new record low of 5.9300 earlier in the session.
   Banda said the kwacha's weakness was being driven by the U.S. Federal Reserve's tapering of its quantitative easing bond-buying programme as well as by falling copper prices.
   "Most of our imports have been capital goods which have been coming to support investment and our imports have tended to grow faster than the exports," he said. "Therefore, that naturally results in some depreciation in our balance of payments."
   He added however the kwacha's fall was unlikely to have a significant impact on food prices.
   "When we talk of food mainly we are talking about maize meal and the exchange rate is not a main factor, but rather the rains," he said.