[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 38 (Wednesday, March 1, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3306-S3307]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                         ADDITIONAL STATEMENTS

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                        AN INVESTMENT IN AFRICA

 Mr. FEINGOLD. Mr. President, as the Congress begins to debate 
the foreign aid budget this year, U.S. assistance and involvement in 
Africa is once again in question.
  It would be a grave mistake for the United States to disengage 
completely from Africa, particularly at this point. As the success 
stories of South Africa, Namibia, Mozambique, and other African nations 
in transition tell, there is potential for great gains in Africa--both 
politically and economically. At the same time, even recent history 
demonstrates that if we ignore Africa, conflicts and problems can 
explode into political, economic, and humanitarian disasters for which 
we all pay the price.
  On this note, I commend to my colleagues an article which appeared in 
the New York Times this weekend entitled, ``In Africa, West Can Pay Now 
or Later.'' It charts several reasons for international involvement in 
Africa in the global context, and documents some reasons for U.S. 
investment in the continent.
  Though some would like to write off Africa as irrelevant to U.S. 
interests, it is impossible to argue that what happens in a continent 
of close to 1 billion people has no effect on us. An investment in 
Africa of money, diplomacy, and attention today will help develop 
political stability, which in turn will yield economic benefits for 
Africans and international trading partners: Together political and 
economic developments will help reduce the number and level of 
tragedies we have witnessed in Africa.
  Reducing the Federal deficit is in our national interest and should 
be our top priority. But a wholesale abandonment of U.S. investment in 
regions of the world such as Africa is not in the U.S. interest. We 
need to make sensible decisions about necessary U.S. investments. In 
the long run, our populations, the environment, universal human rights, 
and international markets will benefit greatly from a relatively small 
investment today.
  I ask that the text of the article be printed in the Record.
  The article follows:
                [From the New York Times, Feb. 26, 1995]

                 In Africa, West Can Pay Now, Or Later

                         (By Howard W. French)
       Abidjan, Ivory Coast.--Having struggled across the Sahara, 
     250,000 starving Sudanese refugees assemble on the Moroccan 
     coast, hoping to cross the Straits of Gibraltar to Europe. As 
     an armada of camera crews film them, the refugee's leader 
     launches this challenge to European Union coastal guards who 
     would stop them: ``All we ask of you is, watch us die.''
       The event is pure fiction, the final scene of a 1990 BBC 
     television drama. But development experts say it neatly 
     illustrates a stark choice looming for the industrialized 
     world: Pitch in more energetically to bring Africa into the 
     global economic fold, or wait and watch as the continent 
     decends into a quickening spiral of disaster.


                        an exploding population

       With its population due to double to about 1.2 billion in 
     less than 30 years, and expected to reach 2 billion by 2050, 
     an Africa is crisis could well become the desperate stage for 
     a mass emigration the likes of which have never been seen.
       Despite such warnings, however, the West seems to have 
     grown only more indifferent to Africa's fortunes. Some 
     American congressmen have recently likened aid to the 
     continent to throwing money into a rathole; Britain has said 
     it will cut its contributions to Africa through the European 
     Union, and even France is grappling with ways to reduce 
     obligations to its former possessions.
       In response, frustrated development experts and new 
     democratic leaders in Africa have argued that would be far 
     cheaper to help the continent out of its problems now than to 
     rescue it later.
       To get a sense of scale, it helps to look at two examples 
     where extremely rapid population growth rates--well over 3 
     percent a year--are expected by United Nations statisticians 
     between now and the year 2000. They are Nigeria, which in the 
     early 1990's had 116 million people and a gross national 
     product per capita of only $350, and Kenya, which had 25 
     million people and produced just $340 per person.
       Nevertheless, the experts on Africa recognize that in an 
     era of austerity at home, arguments about investing abroad 
     today to prevent crisis tomorrow have limited appeal. They 
     now argue that traditional aid grants are not necessarily the 
     answer. ``The most effective thing that could be done for 
     Africa right now doesn't involve new money, but systematic 
     debt relief,'' said Thomas Callaghy of the University of 
     Pennsylvania. ``You could write off all of Africa's debts 
     tomorrow, and it wouldn't affect international financial 
     markets.'' But then, ``When you look at what has just 
     happened in Mexico you realize just how hard a thing this is 
     to sell politically.''
       If Africa's approaching peril is not enough to motivate the 
     West to act with greater generosity, many hope that old-
     fashioned appeals to profit might. Whether it was spices or 
     gold or slaves or vast quantities of gems and minerals, the 
     continent has always been a rich, if risky, El Dorado for the 
     venturesome outsider.


      Why do investors hesitate before Africa's new opportunities?

       Following Ghana's independence, Kwame Nkrumah, its first 
     president and a pioneer of the continent's ultimately 
     disastrous fling with socialism, defined the historical 
     problem, noting the ``paradox'' that Africa's ``earth is 
     rich, yet the products that come from above and below the 
     soil continue to enrich, not Africans predominantly, but 
     groups and individuals who operate to Africa's 
     impoverishment.''
       Now, throughout much of the continent, several years of 
     dramatic efforts to remove barriers to trade and investment, 
     trim bureaucracies and rejoin the global economy have mostly 
     swept away the legacy of three decades of Mr. Nkrumah's brand 
     of socialism. Ghana and Uganda are prominent examples, and 
     investment in South Africa can at last be viewed as an 
     investment in the continent as a whole.
       Because of these changes, Africa's riches are again up for 
     grabs. But so far, the international business community has 
     largely disappointed the development experts. Mali, for 
     example, can't find a partner to help finance a new power 
     company, even though companies from the United States, 
     Australia and Canada rush to explore for gold and diamonds 
     and oil there. Their hope is for the kind of quick extraction 
     of wealth that led to the continent's early disenchantment 
     with capitalism.
       If Africa still requires a more cooperative form of 
     economic involvement, development experts say, it is because 
     the years under socialism did little to alleviate deep social 
     problems that include an undereducated population whose needs 
     grow faster than weak governments can possibly cope with, 
     poor roads and communications, a lack of managerial 
     expertise, and most of all a shortage of capital.
       So Africa is in a bind: major foreign private investment in 
     productive new industries is unlikely unless these problems 
     are solved first, but the only sources of help to fix them is 
     overseas.
       ``People cling to the myth that if only these countries 
     would get their policies right, everything would be okay,'' 
     said James Gustave Speth, the administrator of the United 
     Nations Development Program. ``There is no reason to believe 
     that Africa can't make it, but right now this is a continent 
     that is bleeding and without substantial outside help, there 
     is no hope.''
       In addition to cutting debt burden, economists say the West 
     should drop barriers to 
     [[Page S3307]] goods like textiles that are often entry level 
     transformation industries for developing countries. In this, 
     they say, there could be a payoff for the West as well.
       ``Aid to Africa is not welfare,'' J. Brian Atwood, the 
     administrator of the United States Agency for International 
     Development, wrote recently in The International Herald 
     Tribune. ``Africa is today what Latin American and Asian 
     markets were a generation ago. It is the last great 
     developing market.'' But what many see as a sensible 
     management of long-term interests collides with political 
     expediency. ``Putting people on their feet is just good 
     business sense'' said Edward V. K. Jaycox, vice president of 
     the World Bank. ``But it is a question of old-fashioned 
     industrial structures in the north, where a lot of people are 
     engaged in activities that they are loath to give up.'' By 
     that he meant something very much like what Mr. Nkrumah used 
     to say: If the West really wants to see an Africa healthy for 
     investment, it should stop raiding the gold veins and diamond 
     mines and open not just its wallets but its markets as 
     well.
     

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