Yesterday I blogged a Fast Company graphic showing Africa’s skyrocketing trade with both the U.S. and Africa since 2001:
China’s trade boom was expected, but (for me at least) not the U.S boom.
One commenter suggests that the graph may be stacked (meaning U.S. trade with Africa has stayed more or less constant, or even declined). The graph is admittedly unclear. From the text of the article, however, China is second to U.S. in trade, and so I believe the rise in both countries is real (meaning accurate, not inflation-adjusted).
Another commenter suggests that recent commodity price increases are to blame, but my understanding is that the commodity price spike is just that: recent. The slope of the U.S. increases barely changes from 2002 onwards. I think there’s another story.
That story may be one about petroleum. CGD’s Robin Kraft send me this graph. Looks like the increase is all about oil:
Alas, AGOA trade is but a blip. The graphic is from an unpublished chapter by CGD’s Vijaya Ramachandran, based on some work by Kim Elliot (also of CGD).
Finally, I had a productive e-mail conversation with the editor at Fast Company yesterday, who objected to the smug and unsubstantiated tone of my previous post. That’s probably an apt description of the post, and my criticism deserves a little more detail.
My reasoning is a certain weariness with a particular approach to journalism when it comes to poor countries, particularly Africa. I could describe what I mean, but I couldn’t do better than the Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina. In Africa, the sky is always falling. Particularly when the Chinese are around.
There’s some good support for this point of view, but I personally suspect it’s exaggerated. It certainly feels too easy, even cliche, and thus (in my view) suspicious. The FC article is a good piece, and avoids many of the pitfalls of Africa journalism, but I think Wainaina’s critique would still apply. In fact, he could probably add a few points: always make the (intrepid) white visitor the center of the story; always start with the rare disease you contracted; always overemphasize the danger or threat, especially if it’s from Asia.
Besides, is the pillaging of the continent today any different that 50 or 150 or 350 years ago–by us?
That plus the breathless tone (every increase is staggering, every deal is furtive) and I admittedly can’t get my way through the full 24 pages. So consider this my half-read opinion.
The best part of a blog: you decide. The FC editor disagrees with me, maybe you do too. I’d love to hear reader takeaways (or should I say, Great Takeouts) from the FC piece.
4 Responses
I came to your blog from Tyler Cowen’s just to read your first post on the FC article. I then went over there and read the whole thing (yes, all six parts.)
The journalist Richard Behar has done a reasonably good job with this long-form piece. It’s always a difficult thing to make the form work in a general-interest business magazine.
Some elements are generally emphasized more than others, presumably to appeal to the interest of a diverse group of readers. And one of those elements is what you (and Wainaina) point out is common to these types of stories: the crafting of the ‘menace’.
The Chinese play that role in this story, and I wish that Behar had made the parallels between their modern behaviour and that of the colonizing powers a bit more explicit, but word counts are what they are, and good editors know when to hold the line. It’s true that most of us remember the horrors of colonized Africa from our elementary school history books, but it’s been a few years since then, and some historical refreshment would have served Behar, or rather us, well.
What Behar made clear to me with his sketch is the extent to which Chinese involvement in resource extraction covers the continent. He fleshes this out with the observation that most of this involvement is driven purely by the sheer weight of domestic (Chinese) hunger for materiel. And he adds the color that there are few scruples practiced by the Chinese in obtaining resources. It’s purely pay for play.
What Behar doesn’t make adequately clear is that while the Chinese are making their entree into sub-Saharan Africa, what the response of the Western nations has been. He does claim that they are ‘losing’ the resource war, partly because they’re not as aggressive as the Chinese, and partly because their home countries demand they bear the responsibility for human rights conditions in the places where they operate.
But I don’t believe this at all. The firms of the West have been long-established powers in all areas of resource extraction in Africa. To think that they are not going to defend the franchise that they have spent decades building is nonsensical–unless they have become geriatrics incapable of the rough-and-tumble. If that is so, then it signals not the end, but at least the beginning of the end of the Western way of dominating the world.
It’s a decent think piece, and worth reading if you can get it all on one page. (I find it highly annoying that you have to click the blasted ‘Next’ button some 30 times to get through the whole set of articles.)
It’s definitely a stacked graph.
Good data on AGOA, Chris. Its effect has been very much overhyped by a lot of people. There is some evidence that it helped a few countries like Lesotho and Mauritius for a few years in the early 2000s before the 2005 Multifibre Agreement, but that its effects today are really minimal (on non-oil exports, that is). See this URL for a Tanzanian example: http://www.agoa.info/?view=.&story=news&subtext=940
Also, for more on America’s oil interests and how this leads its government to cosy up to the completely dictatorial regime of Equatorial Guinea, see the recent excellent book, _The Wonga Coup_ by Adam Roberts.
I’ve only read a couple pages of the FC article so I can’t rightly comment on its overall tone, but on the point of “Besides, is the pillaging of the continent today any different that 50 or 150 or 350 years ago–by us?”, the article early on indicates that it isn’t, but the comparison is outside the scope of the article:
In describing China’s exploits, it’s tempting to evoke the image of a benign, postcolonial West being outfoxed by a ruthless and unscrupulous neo-communist power. Don’t bother. The American track record in modern Africa has been deplorable — a half-century of backing strongmen, turning a blind eye, and taking what we can get with little or no regard for the health or welfare of the locals.
Of course, I can’t say if later in the article they engage in evoking precisely that image, though.