Governments in Africa have been mortgaging their natural resources to secure loans from China, a trend that often ignites debt distress when commodity prices collapse.
Angola, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Ghana, Guinea, Sudan and South Sudan are among the countries in the continent that have used future revenues from natural resource exports as collateral for Chinese loans, a new study conducted by the China-Africa Research Initiative (CARI) at Johns Hopkins University shows.
“Contracting future revenues from natural resource exports as loan repayment is a way both for borrowers to attract finance and for lenders to mitigate risks to repayment. However, this lending modality can pose problems when commodity prices fluctuate,” notes the study.
— Read on www.maritime-executive.com/editorials/limited-sovereignty-as-african-countries-mortgage-resources-to-china
Tag: Africa
Rise in piracy along West Coast of Africa
Late one February night, a band of pirates hijacked a Chinese fishing trawler 80 miles off the coast of Gabon. Over the next 36 hours they swept across the territorial waters of four west African countries, attacking three more boats before sailing the Lianpengyu 809 a further 250 miles to the Niger delta in Nigeria.
Just after midnight on February 10, they abandoned the trawler off Nigeria’s Rivers State and took 10 of the boat’s 14 crew members into the creeks of the delta, a safe haven for the increasingly sophisticated criminal syndicates that have in recent years turned the Gulf of Guinea into a global hotspot for piracy.
A month later, the crew members were released in exchange for $300,000 in ransom, according to local media. The attack on four boats in less than two days was particularly brazen, but came after a year in which the Gulf of Guinea accounted for 130 of the 135 sailors kidnapped anywhere in the world, according to data from the International Maritime Bureau.
Read More – https://www.ft.com/content/4c085762-2150-43b2-afa6-02ad23795f42
