Subscribe"He also worked with Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) to secure $20 million for the African Union peacekeeping mission."Which is such a pitiful, toothless "accomplishment" to be touting, in the face of a genocide, that it is nothing less than the crassest form of political grandstanding. To suggest that Obama is ready to commit U.S. forces is taking the phrase "helping to enforce a no fly zone" way past Weaseltown. "Helping to enforce a no fly zone" doesn't really mean a 10 year commitment of U.S. fighter jets flying daily missions over Africa, like it meant for Iraq, do you think? Maybe it means the U.S. will sell spare parts and munitions for anyone crazy enough to commit U.S. built planes to such a mission. But, in typical fashion, Obama's Web site is fuzzy on the details of what he is really prepared to do, as President. Moreover, NATO provided most of the air support for the AU Mission in Sudan (AMIS), through the end of 2007, and has pledged on-going support if requested, which is an existing role commitment with European allies for the U.S. that Obama completely fails to address.
“I know exactly who reads the papers: the Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country; The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country; The Times is read by people who actually do run the country; the Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country; the Financial Times is read by people who own the country; The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country; and the Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it already is.”
"... Bank policies in the 1980s and 1990s that pushed African governments to cut or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, decontrol prices and privatize may have improved fiscal discipline but did not accomplish much for food production, the evaluation said.Time and again, in Africa, Western aid, whether monetary, technical or humanitarian has been subverted, and it is such a watershed event when an African country has met minimum loan obligations, as Nigeria recently did, that the IMF and participating capital sources are routinely expected to additionally "forgive" yet greater existing loan obligations, as they have, time and again, when it has been obvious payment is simply not forthcoming. Even African organizations have begun to perceive that this cycle of borrowing to finance development, development failure, and forgiveness of debt is not working. And despite significantly increased U.S. aid to Africa by the Bush Administration, the conditions of the poorest people on that continent is never much improved, or their futures made more secure.
It had been expected that higher prices for crops would give farmers an incentive to grow more, while competition among private traders reduced the costs of seeds and fertilizer. But those market forces often failed to work as hoped.
“The whole thing was based on the idea that if you take away the government for the poorest of the poor that somehow these markets will solve the problems,” Professor Sachs said. “But markets can’t step in and won’t step in when people have nothing. And if you take away help, you leave them to die.”
Professor Easterly said the bank’s managers had made elementary mistakes. “It was a simplistic, Economics 101 lesson, that if you raise prices, farmers produce more, which makes sense if farmers have roads, access to credit, good access to fertilizer markets,” he said. “But most of the time, farmers were lacking those.”
In Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, the economy is going strong, but the prime minister, Hun Sen, has organized the plunder of the nation's resources for the benefit of its powerful neighbor, China—in exchange for Beijing's protection. ...paulsc: I think a better question might be, which US Presidential candidate is more wary of Africa's deep, continuing problems, and America's limited ability to directly lead in their resolution by applying Western solutions? What's wrong with letting the Chinese, the Russians, the Indians, or even the South Americans, or any remaining Europeans with an interest in doing so, have a go at Africa, now, except that only the Chinese, as a government, are significantly interested?
In March 2006, international donors attached numerous conditions, including the passage by the end of the year of anticorruption laws, to a vast package of aid to Cambodia amounting to some $600 million. Nothing came of this initiative, however, because one month later, in April, Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao landed in Phnom Penh. To the astonishment of other donors, he offered Hun Sen another $600 million, but without any conditions. With typical Chinese flair for the spectacular, this gift was a way of showing that Cambodia was now among the countries under Beijing's "protection."
Mozambique's is a sad story. At its independence from Portuguese rule in 1975, the country was one of the world's basket cases. It still is. Soaring violent crime and growing organized-crime networks. Systemic corruption. A police force as crooked as the crooks they chase. Little or no government transparency. A devastating AIDS crisis. Annual flooding of entire provinces. Years of socialist mismanagement and a brutal 16-year civil war that killed a million people before it ended in 1992. More than 70% of Mozambique's 20 million citizens live on less than $2 a day, and only 8% have electricity. ...In this situation--a weak country A is faced with a strong power B--a classic strategy is to bring in a competitor C, to establish a rough balance of power between B and C, improving A's bargaining position.
Many observers, however, see China's deals here as emblematic of the imbalance of power between the two countries, what the head of the African Development Bank recently described as Africa's lack of "capacity to negotiate." That sentiment is echoed by Jim LaFleur, senior economist for Mozambique's largest business association and a longtime American resident of Maputo. "The Chinese are building things in exchange for mining rights, timber rights, fishing rights, and these are absolutely bad deals," LaFleur complains. "We've lost an asset, and in exchange we got a ministry building, which is just an opportunity cost for China." Stellenbosch University's Corkin is more categorical still: "China is very clear about what it wants from Africa," she says. "Africa has absolutely no idea what it wants from China."
On the front of energy and resources, Latin America presents a bonanza for China in the areas of oil and gas, iron ore, agriculture produce such as beef and soya bean, and other items. The "all-weather strategic partnership" that Hu was able to cement with Brazil last week was especially noteworthy. The Brazil state oil firm, Petrobras, expected that China would this year become the third-leading destination of Brazilian crude exports, with shipments of about 50,000 barrels per day. At the same time, the Chinese state oil company Sinopec invested $1 billion in a joint venture with Petrobas for the construction of a gas pipeline linking south to northeast Brazil. Other deals the Chinese have recently signed included iron ore shipments from Companhia Vale do Rio Doce (CVRD), one of the world's largest mining concerns, for Shanghai's famous Baoshan Steel Mill.
China's influence in the entire region has expanded owing to a dizzying array of new investments in not only mines and oilfields, but infrastructure and transport. Cumulative capital outlay has exceeded $4 billion. Last year alone, Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) pumped $1.04 billion into the region, accounting for 36.5% of Latin America's foreign direct investment (FDI). Yet this figure has been dwarfed by what Hu and his delegation of state entrepreneurs pledged last week. The Chinese vowed to plough in $100 billion in the coming ten years. For instance, in Argentina alone, the SOEs are due to invest $19.7 billion in the coming decade in mines, railroads, and other infrastructure projects.
"The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is augmenting an existing facility and reshaping a second to help countries worst hit by the food and fuel price crisis, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. ..."A 0.5% rate of return to lenders is too expensive? For the risk of lending to Africa??? Coming from an Oxfam spokesperson, that is a grim, grim assessment of the likelihood of IMF efforts being any more likely to succeed now, than they have been for the last 30 years in Africa. Not because that what the IMF recommends, which worked in South America, and in Southeast Asia in the last 30 years is bad policy, but because Africa is too broken.
"... IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn also pledged to reform the Exogenous Shocks Facility (ESF), which provides low interest loans to countries affected by natural disasters, conflicts and crises in neighbouring countries that disrupt trade.
"We're going to reshape our exogenous facility, which obviously is not adapted to the current crisis, and we'll meet other requests if needed," he told a Fund forum in Washington. The ESF requires that a Fund-supported economic programme be put in place.
This implicitly assumes that the country needs to change policies and/or adjust their macroeconomic stance, which is not always the case and causes delay, an IMF spokesperson said.
But for some in the humanitarian community the move, though welcome, is not enough, and the terms of 0.5 percent interest, and repayment over five-and-a-half to 10 years, still too arduous.
"We're worried that the Fund's money is actually relatively expensive," Oxfam International senior policy adviser Elizabeth Stuart told IRIN. "They say they've checked and countries can afford to take on more debt. Well, maybe they can this time, but if this is going to carry on, can they afford to take on more debt in the future? So we say that the Fund should make its lending cheaper."
She compared IMF loans with those under the International Development Association, the World Bank's low-income arm. "You've got a payment holiday for 10 years and then you have 40 years to repay the loan, and there's no interest rate," she said.
"So that tells you how relatively expensive Fund money is in comparison. If the Fund wants to be a serious player in doing something about the food crisis, it needs to make its money cheaper. ..."
... as European societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries developed new standards of cleanliness, health, social efficiency and technical achievement, there was added to [the] traditional right of conquest an assumption of cultural superiority that made such imperial dominance appear to the conquerors not only natural and inevitable but in a deep ethical sense right. Indeed it came to be seen as an obligation, a mission civilisatrice, to open up the dark places of the world, as they were seen, to the light. Anti-imperialists have written much in disparagement of the trader with his whisky bottle and the soldier with his machine-gun, but against these archetypes must be set the doctor and the missionary, who were quite often combined in the same person.... There was, in the generation of Victorian Empire-builders, a deep sense of rectitude and obligation [!], a belief that from those to whom much was given, much was also required. It has been inherited by the idealistic young people of the West who today concern themselves so passionately with the problems of the Third World; even though they do not take kindly to being reminded how much they share in common with their imperialist great-grandfathers.Where this idealism was completely absent, as in King Leopold's Congo Free State, wealth was indeed extracted.
... So to the right of conquest, and to a sense of cultural superiority so strong that we would not hesitate to condemn it today as "racist," there was added a sense of obligation, which often appeared at its most intense in such countries as Egypt and the Sudan, from which no profit whatever was to be drawn.
"... The Chinese, though, are suddenly omnipresent. Trade between the two countries has expanded sixfold since 2001. Steel factories. Textiles. Shoes. Motorbikes. Auto products. Hotels. Banking. A $2.3 billion soft loan for a controversial dam the World Bank deemed too risky to fund. A new soccer stadium. A glittering convention center. A parliament building. A state-of-the-art airport makeover. The humongous headquarters of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, perhaps the most modern structure in the capital city of Maputo.Much of Africa has never really known what it wanted. That didn't stop the local powers that be, at any given time, from granting long term concessions to whoever was willing to pay for them, in pretty trinkets now. Africans know that it takes years and years to mine, and that it is damned hard to haul away or conquer Africa a wheel barrow at a time. They know that renegotiation is the form of negotiation that eventually favors them, always. It hardly matters what the local powers that be in Africa get as a down payment, or what they have to promise in exchange. In the end, the red dirt of Africa stays, and the people of Africa remain, as do the tsetse flies and the malaria, and only the "whoever" and the down payments once offered, in the form of soccer stadiums, parliament buildings, glittering convention centers, deposits in Swiss bank accounts and large, useless Foreign Ministry buildings, exchanged in smiling ceremonies for signatures on 99 year mineral leases, are changed.
China is providing science equipment to the country's main university and helping build a satellite campus. Its embassy here is a sprawling gated complex of six huge yellow buildings that dwarfs its sleepy American counterpart. China's government blithely calls its relationship with Mozambique a "win-win" situation by two undeveloped countries that have endured similar abuses, a sentiment echoed by Mozambique's government, at least publicly. "Mozambique has a socialist past," a Western diplomat based in Maputo points out, "so it is closer to China politically than other countries. And [Mozambicans] say they remember that 'the Chinese were with us' when they were fighting for independence."
Rafique Jusob heads the Mozambican government's center for promoting investments. "China treats us like a peer," he insists. "They have a culture of respect for other people. They don't interfere, they don't invade countries. Americans? They don't even know where Mozambique is. And you [Americans] are trying to export morals which even in your own country didn't work."
Many observers, however, see China's deals here as emblematic of the imbalance of power between the two countries, what the head of the African Development Bank recently described as Africa's lack of "capacity to negotiate." That sentiment is echoed by Jim LaFleur, senior economist for Mozambique's largest business association and a longtime American resident of Maputo. "The Chinese are building things in exchange for mining rights, timber rights, fishing rights, and these are absolutely bad deals," LaFleur complains. "We've lost an asset, and in exchange we got a ministry building, which is just an opportunity cost for China." Stellenbosch University's Corkin is more categorical still: "China is very clear about what it wants from Africa," she says. "Africa has absolutely no idea what it wants from China." [emphasis added]
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After battling for years against the white colonial powers of Britain, France, Belgium and Germany, post-independence African leaders are happy to do business with China for a straightforward reason: cash.
Oh yeah, also because they spent years battling with Europe and are a wee bit pissed off about that.
The people of this bewitching, beautiful continent, where humankind first emerged from the Great Rift Valley, desperately need progress. The Chinese are not here for that.
They are here for plunder. After centuries of pain and war, Africa deserves better.
Really, an English newspaper is going to criticize people for plundering Africa?
posted by tkolar at 11:14 PM on July 19, 2008 [6 favorites]