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From the Cape to Cairo, private Chinese investment thrives in Africa
When one thinks of Chinese investment of Africa, one thinks of state-owned enterprises, which is appropriate enough given the size of the SOE role on the continent.
But increasingly there is more and more private Chinese investment in Africa where a little SME money can go a long way - certainly further than in Europe, America or Japan.
What's more, there is also a push that comes with this pull. Africa has what China increasingly lacks, affordable labour, lower environmental compliance costs and ready markets for low-end goods which are harder to make and sell in China today.
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Trans-Med migrant flow abates to the great relief of east west trade lanes
While UN agencies and NGOs are more concerned with the health and welfare of migrants flowing from Muslim lands across the Mediterranean into Christian Europe than stopping it, the good news for international shipping is that the flow is much abated.
The main stream of migrants has been from Libya into Italy, Malta and Greece and from Morocco and Algeria into Spain, and, until recently, across the Aegean from Turkey to Greece.
Henceforth, few containerships and their 20-man crews will be faced with the dilemma of either ignoring the plight of a small craft holding 300 desperate people or rescuing them, feeding them and keeping them under control without means to do so, or even the deck space to accommodate them. Imagine tens of seamen, with daily seafaring duties to perform, having to keep hundreds of idle, angry men in order.
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Belt and Road in Africa: Can western join in to make it benign influence?
One can take a benign view of the British Empire, though few do today. The same goes for China's Belt and Road initiative, ostensibly conceived to shore up infrastructure gaps worldwide but mostly along the old trading route from Asia to Europe.
But just as one can cast a forensic eye on the British Empire, and its later incarnation, the Pax Americana, one also be suspicious of ulterior motives behind China's Belt and Road imitative, particularly in Africa.
On one hand Belt and Road can be viewed as an effort, guided by reasonable and legitimate self-interest, to fix broken infrastructure, roads, bridges, tunnels and the like, to ease the sale of Chinese manufacturers and facilitate the import of natural resources. Alternately, it can be regarded as a tactical stab at global hegemony, which is the way the US sees it. The fact that China's President for Life Xi Jinping says that he thinks it perfectly reasonable to have China replace the "Pax Americana" in precisely those terms, lends credence to the less benign view.
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Rising oil, growing middle class, lower slot costs spur West African prosperity
As oil prices rise from 2014 lows, there is more European interest in West Africa as re-generating petrodollars increase the flow of containerised consumables into the coastal nations of the Bight of Benin over 2,000 miles from Senegal to Cameroon.
While much attention has been focused China's Belt and Road Initiative, its African activity has largely been in eastern and southern Africa. Meanwhile, European forces have been active making deals in West Africa.
Like book ends on each side of the Bight of Benin are Cameroon's Port of Kribi in the east and Senegal's Port of Dakar in the west with lots of rival ports in between.
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Mediterranean & Africa
Trade Specialists |
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