Seeking Trade, Africans Find Western Barriers
New York Times May 26, 2002
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
nytimes.com
PRETORIA, South Africa, May 25 — This country's exports of automobile parts to the United States tripled last year. Uganda's government is making a big push to sell more coffee abroad. In Ghana, Awurabena Okrah is finding more American buyers for her small apparel company's traditional African clothing.
African leaders, along with some of the poverty-fighting advocacy groups that for years have viewed globalization with suspicion if not downright hostility, are increasingly embracing international trade as the most powerful tool available for creating jobs, steady incomes, hope and political stability. After concentrating for years on winning relief from crippling debt burdens and lobbying for increases in foreign aid payments, African governments are instead starting to demand reduced tariffs and other changes in trade policies from the United States and the other rich nations to increase sales of local products.
"The biggest request we are making of Western countries is to open their markets," President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda said. "Debt relief has saved us some money, but the real money will come from trade. Give us the opportunities, and we will compete."
But even as African governments, entrepreneurs and farmers try to reverse a long contraction in foreign trade, experts and some African officials say they fear a new wave of protectionism from the very countries, including the United States, that have been preaching the virtues of the free market.
They say that despite moves by both the United States and the European Union to give new trade preferences to Africa, powerful domestic lobbies have managed to limit access to markets in the rich countries for the only types of products — food and clothing — that most African nations are capable of exporting.
"The fields in which Africa is most competitive now — agriculture and textiles — are the areas that are most protected in the West," said Muna B. Ndulo, director of the Institute for African Development at Cornell University.
Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill, who is here this weekend as part of a two-week trip through Africa, heard complaints about American trade policy directly from South African officials.
Trevor Manuel, South Africa's finance minister, singled out the farm bill signed into law recently by President Bush for offering additional subsidies to American farmers, making it that much harder for Africa to compete on world markets.
Mr. O'Neill has heard similar messages from his traveling companion, Bono, the Irish rock star who has become an influential advocate for helping Africa, and from government officials and poverty-fighting groups in Ghana, his first stop on the trip.
Yaw Osafo-Maafo, Ghana's finance minister, said his country could sell cocoa beans duty free to Europe. But the country's efforts to make its cocoa trade more profitable by making the beans into cocoa butter and chocolate run directly into the kind of arcane but economically important restrictions that typify the world trading system: processed cocoa is subject to European tariffs.
Still, African officials and some economists said the rich nations are taking some steps to provide access to their markets. They point to an American law that went into effect last year, the African Growth and Opportunity Act. It eliminated tariffs on many African exports while keeping other restrictions, like requirements that some clothing be made using American textiles to qualify for the special treatment.
"I understand that the U.S. government has its own internal problems and politics, so maybe they cannot remove barriers in a precipitous way," President Museveni of Uganda said in an interview last week in Washington. "I'm happy with this beginning. Let's take advantage of it and argue as we go along."
That attitude is shared by Ms. Okrah, the owner of Winglow Clothes, a 30-employee apparel-making company in Accra, Ghana's capital. She said this week that the new American trade law had helped her to offset some of the many barriers to selling to the United States, including the difficulty of getting loans for equipment and materials at affordable interest rates.
She said she was now selling about 20 percent of her goods, worth about $10,000 last year, to the United States.
"It certainly has made all the difference," she said.
But she added that her plans to expand were likely to be limited if the American trade law continued to require her to buy fabric from the United States. Until she can reduce the cost of her materials, she said, she will not be able to afford the machinery needed increase output.
"It's very frustrating," she said.
Criticism of the United States is more pointed when it comes to agricultural trade. Activists in Ghana said the United States government had been hypocritical by demanding, through the International Monetary Fund, that Ghana phase out subsidies for rice, a food in which it was once self-sufficient, while increasing subsidies for American farmers.
At the Makola market, a teeming bazaar in central Accra, vendors sell produce from all over the country — and rice from the United States and Thailand.
Some of the women eking out a living selling shriveled vegetables in the market are economic refugees from regions in Ghana that once had economies built on growing rice but that can no longer compete with subsidized imports, said Bishop Akogolo, deputy executive director of the Integrated Social Development Center, an advocacy group in Accra.
The only answer, he said, is for Ghana to throw up its own trade restrictions to protect its farmers. "You keep your subsidies and we'll keep our subsidies and barriers," he said. "The U.S. farm bill is spelling more doom for us."
Indeed, the pro-trade view is by no means universal among development experts. Until the most deprived nations succeed in ending armed conflicts, controlling disease and making sure their people have enough food to eat, they said, talk of being able to being able to compete on international markets is irrelevant, some activists said.
"Trade is a red herring," said Njoki Njoroge Njehu, a Kenyan who is the director of 50 Years Is Enough, an activist group. "Even if you can export, do you have anything to export? Does it matter if Kenya is exporting flowers and coffee if people are still dying of hunger?"
But the growing enthusiasm for trade among the more stable African economies is mirrored by a more general acceptance of trade among groups that had long been skeptical that international commerce benefited anyone but big corporations in the rich nations.
In a recent report, Oxfam International, the relief and advocacy group, came down squarely on the side of promoting trade as a poverty-fighting strategy.
The group said sub-Saharan Africa's share of world trade had fallen to 1.3 percent, a third of its level two decades ago. If the region were to increase its share of exports of goods and services by one percentage point, it would generate $70 billion, Oxfam said. Total foreign aid and debt relief granted to Africa last year by the rich nations totaled $14.6 billion.
"Even modest increases in developing countries' share of the world export market will massively outweigh any conceivable increase in aid," the Oxfam report said.
But some African officials said that if the trade relationship between the developed and developing worlds was not managed better than it had been so far, Africa might get nowhere in its efforts to attract much-needed investment from abroad and to create economies vibrant enough to address the causes and symptoms of its extreme poverty. |
