Topic: Various Symposia Reports

[E.R. Campbell]

I attended a talk by Dambisa Moyo yesterday. It was sponsored by Canada 2020. (I’m not a member but I do enjoy many of their events.)

It was pretty predictable, at least it was for those who have read her book – everyone interested in Africa should (and CF members should be interested in Africa). She emphasized that she is an economist and her arguments are those of an economist and she apologized because they have been misrepresented by the mainstream, celebrity obsessed media who cannot figure out why her views ought to be taken as seriously as, say, those of Bono or Bob Geldof.

She also emphasized that she is taking aim at official development aid, not emergency humanitarian aid or local, small project, “charity” both of which she accepts as necessary and very human responses to poverty and disaster.

Her argument for letting the Chinese and Middle Eastern investors “in” will continue to discomfit Euro-American traditional hypocrites – especially when she explains that it’s OK for America to go, cap in hand, to the Beijing bankers but, somehow, not OK for Africa to do the same.

After a brief talk she was “interviewed” by Paul Wells. He did a quite good job, until he got into an economic theory he doesn’t quite understand. Moyo is, of course, very used to critical questions and she had no problems with any of the predictable softballs he lobbed her way. It’s a pity she could not have been “interviewed” by someone with equally “good” economic credentials. Her arguments about how private capital can be harnessed to develop Africa need to be considered and only expert, critical questioning will do it.

By the way, the less "complex, challenging" missions about which Mr. Fowler speaks are in Africa and they are the direction in which the celebrities would have us go.

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) OF THE Copyright Act from the Foreign Affairs web site is an article relevant to Dambisa Moyo’s thesis:

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/65916/deborah-brautigam/africa’s-eastern-promise

Africa’s Eastern Promise
What the West Can Learn From Chinese Investment in Africa

Deborah Brautigam

DEBORAH BRAUTIGAM is Associate Professor of International Development at American University and the author of The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa.

Last November, in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao announced a series of new pledges for Chinese assistance to African countries -- and in the process, made many observers in the West very uneasy. Westerners think they know what Africa needs to do in order to develop: liberalize markets, get prices right, promote democracy. And they think they know what China is doing there: offering huge no-strings-attached aid packages to resource-rich countries that prop up pariah regimes.

But a closer look reveals a somewhat different story. Over the past few decades, China has managed to move hundreds of millions of its people out of poverty by combining state intervention with economic incentives to attract private investment -- the kind of experimentation that the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping once described as "crossing the river by feeling the stones." Today, China is feeling the stones again but this time in its economic engagement across Africa. Its current experiment in Africa mixes a hard-nosed but clear-eyed self-interest with the lessons of China's own successful development and of decades of its failed aid projects in Africa.

The first prong of Beijing's efforts is to offer African states resource-backed development loans, an initiative inspired by its experience at home. In the late 1970s, eager for modern technology and infrastructure but with almost no foreign exchange, China leveraged its natural resources -- ample supplies of oil, coal, and other minerals -- to attract a market-rate $10 billion loan from Japan. China was to get new infrastructure and technology from Japan and repay it with shipments of oil and coal. In 1980, Japan began to finance six major railway, port, and hydropower projects, the first of many projects that used Japanese firms to help build China's transport corridors, coal mines, and power grids.

Since 2004, China has concluded similar deals in at least seven resource-rich countries in Africa, for a total of nearly $14 billion. Reconstruction in war-battered Angola, for example, has been helped by three oil-backed loans from Beijing, under which Chinese companies have built roads, railways, hospitals, schools, and water systems. Nigeria took out two similar loans to finance projects that use gas to generate electricity. Chinese teams are building one hydropower project in the Republic of the Congo (to be repaid in oil) and another in Ghana (to be repaid in cocoa beans).

So far, most of these loans have been issued by China's export credit agency, the Export-Import Bank of China (China Eximbank). Offered at market rates, they do not qualify as official foreign aid but nonetheless can help development. In poor, resource-rich countries, which are often cursed rather than blessed by their mineral wealth, resource-backed infrastructure loans can act as an "agency of restraint" and ensure that at least some of these countries' natural-resource wealth is spent on development investments.

Of course, China's loans pose some risks for the African recipients, particularly if Chinese firms are awarded infrastructure contracts without competitive bidding or if prices for the resources, the basis of the loan repayments, are fixed in advance. There is always a risk that African governments will not maintain infrastructure investments and that the Chinese projects' environmental and social safeguards will be too lax. Chinese construction companies often bring in Chinese manpower -- on average about 20 percent of the total labor their projects require -- reducing opportunities for Africans. When they do employ locals, Chinese firms often offer low wages and low labor standards.

But there are ways to mitigate these dangers. Under most of the agreements, the earnings from exports of natural resources are deposited directly into escrow accounts and their value is assessed at that moment, not fixed in advanced. This removes the potential for unfair pricing. Moreover, African governments are already driving harder and better-informed bargains. Angola required Chinese companies to subcontract 30 percent of the work to local firms and insisted that the Chinese solicit at least three bids for every project they planned to undertake. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) will receive a $3 billion copper-backed loan from the Chinese government, which will help finance railways, roads, hospitals, and universities. According to some reports, the Congolese government has stipulated that 10 to 12 percent of all the infrastructure work undertaken under this arrangement must be subcontracted to Congolese firms, that no more than 20 percent of the construction workers involved be Chinese, and that at least one-half of one percent of the costs of each infrastructure project be spent on worker training.

The terms of Chinese loans also tend to be better than those of deals from Western companies. As Congolese President Joseph Kabila has pointed out, a $3 billion joint mining venture in the DRC gives his government a 32 percent share, compared with the 7 to 25 percent that is typical for mining deals with other companies. Former Angolan Finance Minister José Pedro de Morais has said that by setting "a new benchmark," a  $2 billion loan from China Eximbank in 2004 helped Angola negotiate better terms for other commercial loans. Thanks to its trillions in foreign exchange reserves, China can offer loans at highly competitive interest rates. Eximbank gave the Angolan government three loans at interest rates ranging from LIBOR (the London Interbank Offered Rate, the rate banks charge each other on loans) plus 1.25 percent to LIBOR plus 1.75 percent, as well as generous grace periods and long repayment terms. Commercial lenders, such as Standard Chartered Bank, have charged Angola LIBOR plus 2.5 percent or more, without any grace period and while requiring faster repayment.

In its second major experiment, China is helping to build special trade and economic cooperation zones in Africa. Seven such zones are in the works: two in Nigeria; the others in Egypt, Ethiopia, Mauritius, Zambia, and, possibly, Algeria. Special economic zones were an important feature of China's early development; today, China has more than one hundred such areas. The economists Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion, and John Page, of the Brookings Institution, argue in a recent report for the United Nations Industrial Development Organization that special economic zones can be a very promising strategy for industrialization and employment in Africa's least developed countries. It allows countries to improve poor infrastructure, inadequate services, and weak institutions by focusing efforts on a limited geographical area. And a targeted focus on boosting manufactured exports can help countries overcome the exchange-rate appreciation and the weakening of local non-energy industries that often accompany natural-resource exports.

The Chinese government is mindful that these zones must be sustainable in the long term. For decades, Chinese teams in Africa constructed agricultural projects or built factories only to turn them over to inexperienced and sometimes uninterested host governments. Once the Chinese left, the benefits of the projects declined, prompting the host governments to ask the Chinese to return. Now, Chinese companies are taking responsibility for both designing and building the zones and then managing them as businesses. Beijing will subsidize part of the start-up costs, including some of the expenses that Chinese companies incur by moving operations overseas. Several of the agencies involved in China's own successful zones are advising -- and in some cases, investing in -- the projects in Africa. China's venture-capital fund for Africa, the $5 billion China-Africa Development Fund, has taken equity shares in three of the seven planned zones. A new $1 billion fund for small and medium enterprises in Africa, which was announced at the November summit in Egypt, will help African entrepreneurs set up businesses in the zones.

Why would the Chinese government push some of its labor- and energy-intensive industries to move to special economic zones in Africa, even as the U.S. Congress bans the U.S. Agency for International Development from financing any activities that could relocate the jobs of Americans overseas? Because Chinese planners want industrialists at home to move up the value chain. Polluting industries such as leather tanneries and metal smelters are no longer tolerated in many Chinese cities. And as the world economy recovers from the recent economic recession, wages and benefits will resume rising in China's coastal belt, as they had been before the crisis. Some factories will move further inland, but others will go offshore, closer to both the sources of and the markets for raw materials.

The early stages of industrialization might bring pollution, low wages, and long workdays, especially if the Chinese zones are successful. But like China's resource-backed loans, the planned economic zones promise to provide African countries with some things they very much want: employment opportunities, new technologies, and badly needed infrastructure. This is an opportunity for African states to ride into the global economy on China's shirttails rather than remain natural-resource suppliers to the world.

While the West supports microfinance for the poor in Africa, China is setting up a $5 billion equity fund to foster investment there. The West advocates trade liberalization to open African markets; China constructs special economic zones to draw Chinese firms to the continent. Westerners support government and democracy; the Chinese build roads and dams. In so doing, China may wind up supporting some dictatorial and corrupt regimes, but -- and this is an inconvenient truth -- the West also supports such regimes when it advances its interests. And given the limits of the West's success in promoting development in Africa so far, perhaps Westerners should be less judgmental and more open-minded in assessing China's initiatives there.

Copyright © 2002-2009 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
All rights reserved.

The loans to which Brautigam refers are not quite the investments Moyo wants, but they are a huge step in that direction.

[GreggCentre]

Update from Kandahar
 
A Gregg Centre public lecture by:
Colonel Roch Lacroix
Deputy Commander Task Force Kandahar, 2009
7:30 PM, Monday February 1st, Wu Conference Centre,
UNB, Fredericton, New Brunswick

Colonel Roch Lacroix recently returned from Afghanistan, where he served as Deputy Commander of Canadian and NATO Forces in Kandahar Province from February to November 2009.  Col Lacroix will offer the latest first-hand insights into the counter-insurgency struggle taking place in this conflict-stricken region.  He will also provide an update on Canadian Forces assistance efforts on the development, reconstruction and law and order fronts.   Col Lacroix served at a unique time in Canada’s Afghan Mission, when President Obama’s increase of US forces and aid greatly increased the NATO effort in Kandahar.   

www.unb.ca/greggcentre
 

[GreggCentre]

Atlantic Military Affairs Symposium:
Islanders at War and Peace, Charlottetown 2010

Friday April 16th
At the University of Prince Edward Island
DUFFY Lecture Theatre (Rm135 in the Science building)
Reception to follow at the Faculty Lounge in the MAIN Building

Saturday April 17th
At the Prince Edward Island Regiment’s Queen Charlotte Armoury
On the corner of Haviland and Water Streets

Public Symposium Connects Prince Edward Island’s Military History to the Modern Canadian Forces.
Local Soldiers, Sailors and Aircrew form the core of a two-day conference focusing on the Island’s role in the defence of Canada.

The Gregg Centre for the Study of War and Society at the University of New Brunswick, the University of Prince Edward Island, HMCS Queen Charlotte and the Prince Edward Island Regiment are teaming up to host the first annual Atlantic Military Affairs Symposium in Charlottetown.  This public military history and current affairs gathering takes place on UPEI campus on Friday evening 16th April and at the PEI Regiment’s Queen Charlotte Armoury all day Saturday, 17th April.

The event includes local and national military historians presenting on subjects ranging from the Island’s 19th Century militia and contribution in two world wars to the role of today’s PEI army and naval reservists around the world.

This first annual Atlantic Military Affairs Symposium features a keynote address on Friday 16th April by renowned Canadian naval historian, Professor Roger Sarty from Wilfrid Laurier University.  In honour of Canada’s Naval Centennial, Professor Sarty’s address is titled: “By accident as much as by design:  The surprising origins and rise of the Royal Canadian Navy, 1881-1945”
 
The organizers aim to bring together historians, Island Reservists, students and the general public interested in how Prince Edward Island connects to Canada’s military past and present.  Other featured speakers include The Gregg Centre’s Lee Windsor and Brent Wilson, PEI’s own Boyde Beck and David Campbell, and reservists from HMCS Queen Charlotte and the Prince Edward Island Regiment who’ve returned from service overseas.

Admission is free and all are welcome!
Lunch will be provided and the PEI Regiment Museum will be open.
For more information see our program at:
http://www.unb.ca/greggcentre/public_education/amasconference.html

Or contact:
Lee Windsor PhD, Deputy Director
Gregg Centre for the Study of War and Society
University of New Brunswick
PO Box 4400 Fredericton NB E3B 5A3
Tel (506) 453-4911; Fax (506) 447-3175
lwindsor@unb.ca  www.unb.ca/greggcentre

[E.R. Campbell]

Please look here.

Those who can should attend David Bercuson's talk tomorrow. (Sadly I have a previous commitment.)

There is no charge, registration is not required. The building is at the corner of Laurier and Nicholas - just across from NDHQ South Tower (101 Colonel By Drive).

[E.R. Campbell]

And also, please note: 28 Oct 10 at 17:30 Hrs -

Debate – Should Canada Buy F-35 Fighter Jets?
For: Rob Huebert, University of Calgary
Against: Michael Byers, University of British Columbia

Same place: Desmarais Building, 55 Laurier Ave. E., Room 1150 (1st floor)

Should be interesting for those who can attend. "This free event will be in English. Registration is not required."

[E.R. Campbell]

Those who can attend - unfortunately I am away in Texas and China - may find all three of these talks by Paul Myer, Taliban Jack Layton and Kim Richard Nossal interesting.

All are in the same place:  The Desmarais Building, 55 Laurier Ave. E., Ottawa, Room 3120 - just across the street from the South Tower of the NDHQ building. There is no fee and registration is not required.

[Journeyman]

may find all three of these talks...interesting.

Hey, you didn't mention the following talk on their list -- Peggy Hicks, (Global Advocacy Director, Human Rights Watch, New York), talking on "Human Rights and the United Nations"; don't you think that will be fascinating?   

[E.R. Campbell]

Those who can attend - unfortunately I am away in Texas and China - may find all three of these talks by Paul Myer, Taliban Jack Layton and Kim Richard Nossal interesting.

All are in the same place:  The Desmarais Building, 55 Laurier Ave. E., Ottawa, Room 3120 - just across the street from the South Tower of the NDHQ building. There is no fee and registration is not required.

From CIPS:

Room change: Jack Layton speech

Please note: today's 2 p.m. presentation by Jack Layton will take place on the 12th floor of the Desmarais Building, 55 Laurier Ave. E. (not the 3rd floor as previously advertised).

[E.R. Campbell]

The very few members who pay any attention at all to my musings will know that I have reservations about Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in both theory and practice. Thus I am (slightly) saddened to be, still, In China, when I could be attending what looks like an interesting presentation by Prof. Ian Hurd of Northwestern University at Ottawa University/CIPS.

Here is the "blurb:"

-----------------------
February 18, 2011

Ian Hurd
Is Humanitarian Intervention Legal? The Rule of Law in an Incoherent World

A talk by Ian Hurd, Northwestern University

Presented by CIPS
Location: Desmarais Building, 55 Laurier Ave. E., Room 3120
Time: 11:00 a.m.
Free. Registration not required. In English.

Ian Hurd is Associate Professor of political science at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.  His teaching and research is on the interaction between governments and international institutions, and he has published widely on international organizations, international theory, and world politics.  He is currently on leave at the Niehaus Center on Globalization and Governance at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, where he is writing a book on the connections between international law and foreign policy.  His most recent work is International Organizations: Politics, Law, Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2011), a textbook for courses on international politics and international organizations.


It is tomorrow - your time.

[KaiserBill]

The Second Annual "New Perspectives on the Second World War" Colloquium

The History Graduate Students' Union and Calgary Military Museums' Society are pleased to announce a special colloquium and reception in honour of the 70th Anniversary of the Japanese attacks on the British Empire and the U.S. featuring talks by John Ferris and Christopher Bell.

This evening is the second session of the annual "New Perspectives Colloquium," and is host to two talks by pre-eminent historians.  Professor John Ferris, a noted historian of British intelligence and strategy will speak about his current research on British and American intelligence in the lead up to Pearl Harbor. He will be followed by Dr. Christopher Bell of Dalhousie University, who will speak about Canadian soldiers and the attack on Hong Kong.
 
The colloquium will be held at the Kensington Legion (1910 Kensington Rd NW Calgary).  The evening will run on 8 December 2011, from 6:30-9:00 pm, and will include a New York steak dinner. Admission for the general public is $40.00.  Veterans and students are particularly encouraged to attend and registration for both is only $20.00.  Tickets can be purchased securely through PayPal or at the door (cash or check only).  Follow the link at the history department website to register: http://hist.ucalgary.ca/hgsu/

To RSVP (registration must be received by December 1, 2011) or for more information, please email The History Graduate Students' Union at ranke@ucalgary.ca, or call (403) 220-2669.