The impact of famine on the people of Africa has been brought to our attention once again in recent weeks. The continent, however, also boasts seven of the world’s top 10 fastest growing economies over the past decade.
Dr Carmody, a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the School of Natural Sciences at TCD, explores the growing exploitation of African resources by Chinese and western agents. The Epoch Times spoke to the author to find out about the dynamics of the scramble.
One of the most obvious things that Dr Carmody noticed while researching his book over the past decade was the rapid economic growth of certain countries in Africa.
“This is a big change from the 1980s and early 1990s, when you had negative economic growth per head in a lot of African countries,” said Dr Carmody.
“The problems are that the nature of that economic growth is not what it might be, it’s very resource intensive; if you look at sub-Saharan Africa’s exports, approximately 75 to 80 per cent of them are unprocessed primary commodities, so it is unsustainable; the copper reserves, the gold, the oil are being mined, and a lot of these resources will run out in between 10 and 30 years time,” he explained.
The nature of recent economic growth has also been suspect with respect to its environmental sustainability and its limited job creation, according to Dr Carmody, who added that inequality has been rising in most African countries, so that the increased interest in African resources has tended to “reinforce the power of incumbent regimes.”
“Governments that are already in power tend to be able to access some of the revenues from these resources and use them to be able to stay in power; it’s argued that what is happening is that authoritarian governments are being strengthened by this resource boom,” said Dr Carmody.
The big player is China who, according to Dr Carmody, is Africa’s second-largest trading partner after the United States, although if the EU is taken as a block, it counts for twice the trade to Africa that China does.
South Africa is also engaged in this scramble for Africa, said Dr Carmody, because they have big multinational resource companies.
South Africa is now China’s biggest trading partner in Africa, and China is also South Africa’s biggest trading partner in the world, said Dr Carmody.
“If you look at the structure of trade, most of it is in mineral exports [being exported to China] and manufactured goods being imported to South Africa,” said Dr Carmody, who noted that this replicates historical neo-colonial trade structures.
This model is displacing South African manufacturing, which simply can’t compete with cheap Chinese imports.
Dr Carmody says that the Chinese authorities have responded to this by imposing voluntary export restraints on textiles and clothing to South Africa, because there was such concern and so many demonstrations about the number of workers losing their jobs because of Chinese textile and clothing imports.
“I hope to achieve greater awareness about what is going on in Africa, and what some of the potentials and pitfalls are of the current conjuncture,” said Dr Carmody, pointing to his new book.
“The fact that African economies are growing fast for the most part is good, but it depends on the quality and the distribution of that growth what the longer term impacts are; it depends on how that growth is distributed among different social classes in Africa – that’s what I hope to address,” said Dr Carmody.
The current growth in Africa is very different from the boom seen in Ireland over the past decade, because the resource boom in Africa has been generated by rising commodity prices across the world, and China has had a big part to play in that story, said Dr Carmody.
Resource for Infrastructure Deals
A growing trend in Africa is that of natural-resources-for-infrastructure deals, where countries like China have brokered deals such as the 6 billion dollar copper and cobalt deal for rail and road in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Dr Carmody said that, under the deal, Chinese companies get access to copper and cobalt reserves estimated at between 25 – 40 billion dollars, in exchange for the companies building rail and road infrastructure for the Congo. “That’s the way that a lot of Chinese involvement is working in Africa: they agree to build hospitals and roads in exchange for mineral rights,” said Dr Carmody.
“There are two ways of looking at this; some say the deals are very exploitative – sometimes the conditions of the loan require a lot of Chinese labour to be brought in, so there is not the local job creation … the other side say that this is a more effective way of reducing corruption … because no money is exchanged,” explained Dr Carmody.
With respect to the standard of construction of infrastructure and hospitals, Dr Carmody said “it’s been controversial … when I was in Zambia a few years ago there was a new road that had been built by a Chinese contractor – when the rains came, the road got washed out … so there have been concerns raised about the quality of some of the infrastructure that’s been delivered.”
Dr Carmody said that the Chinese work is viewed dialectically because the Chinese just come and build, without the social or environmental impact assessments which other institutions such as the World Bank would insist on. “It doesn’t take years and years of planning – they just come and do it, so there are pros and cons to that.”
The EU, US, China, India and Brazil all have an interest in African countries continuing to export natural resources, so they all have a common interest in this. What they do is compete, and their companies compete in specific places for specific resources, so what you see is a mix of conflict and collaboration between the different powers.
The EU has its own raw material initiative, according to Dr Carmody, which consists of making sure that governments in African countries don’t put export taxes on raw materials, because they don’t want the price of raw materials going up for European companies.
