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Zmeselo
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US Africa Leaders Summit promises more exploitation for Africa, record profits for US mining firms

Post by Zmeselo » 24 Jan 2023, 19:31





US Africa Leaders Summit promises more exploitation for Africa, record profits for US mining firms

JEREMY LOFFREDO

https://thegrayzone.com/2023/01/23/us-a ... ts-mining/

JANUARY 23, 2023

Recent deals between US Secretary of State Tony Blinken and African heads of state promise eye-popping profits for US mining multinationals and fewer protections for African laborers “toiling in subhuman conditions” to drive the digital revolution.

The US Africa Leaders Summit https://www.state.gov/africasummit/ held this December in Washington DC provided a platform for the Biden administration to advance its agenda across the African continent. With topics ranging from COVID-19 to climate change to “closing the digital divide,” to “strengthening democracy,” Washington’s agenda united around the belief that African collaboration with US multinational corporations would prove mutually beneficial, and advance long-term “progress.”

The weekend of discussions was conducted Davos-style, with heads of US industry seated directly beside African heads of state and members of the Biden administration. At the top of the corporate titans’ agenda was the relaxation of regulatory requirements, which they argued would make the continent more “inviting” for outside investment.

One set of regulations that the US would especially like to loosen are those relating to the mining sector. This includes miners’ rights, child labor laws, slavery laws, environmental regulations and mineral tariffs.

Deloitte, a US corporate giant and strategic partner https://www2.deloitte.com/mu/en/pages/a ... forum.html of the World Economic Forum, published a paper in 2018, “The Future of Mining in Africa,” https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/D ... mining.pdf which spells out the agenda Washington is advancing across the continent.

The paper argued that facilitating the digital transformation known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution would require African nations to loosen mining regulations intended to protect human rights and the environment. The paper lamented that the mining sector
continues to experience scrutiny by regulators in Africa,


which supposedly
creates uncertainty, delayed investment in mining expansion, and stops the development of new mines.
Deloitte went on to argue that Africa needs
to move away from enforcing [regulatory] compliance for compliance sake and move toward delivering value.
It was clearly implied that that “value” would be determined by corporate America, and not necessarily the African people.

The script put forward by Deloitte helped set the stage for the US Africa Leaders Summit this December. There, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken presented a memorandum of understanding to DRC Foreign Minister Christophe Lutundula and Zambian Foreign Minister Stanley Kakubo. The agreement, according to Blinken,
opened the door for US and like-minded investment
in the respective countries’ vast “green” mineral wealth, referring to massive deposits of nickel, cobalt, and copper.


US Secretary of State signs a memorandum of understand with DRC President Félix Tshisekedi
The DRC produces more than 70 percent of the world’s cobalt. Zambia is the world’s sixth-largest copper producer, second-largest cobalt producer in Africa,
Blinken said.
Global demand for critical minerals is going to skyrocket over the next decades…Electric vehicles help reduce carbon emissions and they support the global response to the climate crisis,
the Secretary of State continued, draping the plundering of Africa’s wealth in friendly green-speak.

Siddhartha Kara, https://carrcenter.hks.harvard.edu/peop ... harth-kara an academic and author of four widely-praised books exposing the business of human trafficking and slavery in Africa, has spent several years in rural Congo documenting the most hideous – and largely hidden – abuses of US multinational supply chains and mining operations.

Kara remarked to The Grayzone that the agreements hashed out at the US Africa Summit
will mean more demand for minerals used in EVs, leading to more exploitation, abuse, and misery for the women, children, and men who scrounge the world’s cobalt out of the dirt in the DR Congo.

Josh Goldman of the Bill Gates-backed KoBold startup in the “Deal Room”

Transnational billionaires aim to control “all the world’s reserves” of key minerals

The US Africa Summit culminated with an event called “The Deal Room
in which leaders of industry announced and celebrated successful agreements with African nations. Among the corporate executives to appear inside the “Deal Room” was KoBold MetalsJosh Goldman.

KoBold Metals https://www.koboldmetals.com/ is a new tech-mining company founded by https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/bi ... 022-12-14/ Microsoft’s Bill Gates and backed by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Virgin’s Richard Branson. The company relies on AI and advanced imaging systems to find and mine rare earth mineral deposits that other mining giants have missed.
Our job at KoBold is to invent better ways to find the metals to electrify the world economy. Copper, cobalt, nickel and lithium. We are working to discover the deposits that will become the next generation of mines and produce the materials that we need to avoid catastrophic climate change,
Goldman said at the event.

How many rare earth minerals does this Gates, Bezos, Branson company aim to mine and own? All of them, in fact.

The KoBold website candidly states https://www.koboldmetals.com/ that the company aims to secure control over
all of the world’s reserves of [nickel, cobalt, lithium, and copper.]


In the “Deal Room,” KoBold’s Goldman announced a new mining project in Zambia:
I’m here to announce the largest investment yet in our company’s history. An investment to own, develop and explore. Zambia is a place where the laws support investing and where the government supports our investment with actions that are transparent and fair and fast,
Goldman said.

According to the World Economic Forum, by 2030, U.S. multinational corporations like Microsoft, Amazon, Tesla and Google will require 17 times https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/09/ ... r-economy/ more rare earth minerals to power western consumers’ smart devices and electric cars for the coming green revolution.

In 2021, The U.S. Department of Defense https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stori ... to-ignore/ explained that Africa
has a plethora of strategic materials,
describing those resources as
critical to 21st century progress.
And according to The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/20/worl ... obalt.html the latest line of electric vehicles
rely on a host of minerals and metals often not abundant in the oil-rich Middle East, which sustained the last energy era.
These minerals are in another historical target of rapacious colonialism: Africa.

In Siddhartha Kara’s view, the growing demand for “green batteries” is
driving a scramble to extract vital metals out of the ground as quickly as possible.
The mineral rush has left thousands of workers with no protections while
toiling in subhuman conditions for a few dollars a day to feed vital battery minerals up the chain to consumer-facing tech and EV companies worth trillions.

Zambian activists and environmentalists protest pollution by the British-owned Vedanta Limited mining firm

Draping exploitation in the language of sustainability

Industry participants in the Davos, Switzerland-based World Economic Forum proudly embrace what they believe is a kinder, gentler economic model known as “stakeholder capitalism.” No longer will these corporate giants obey the will of shareholders at the expense of human rights and equity; instead, they are collectively moving forward toward a seemingly progressive vision that sees all of humanity as a “stakeholder,” and are working in its interest.

The mentality of stakeholder capitalism is clearly reflected in the tech and electric vehicle industry’s public relations campaign around their supposedly “sustainable” supply chains.

A 2019 class action lawsuit filed on behalf of injured Congolese miners shatters the industry’s rhetoric about ethical operations. The suit alleged https://www.washingtoninformer.com/u-s- ... ngo-mines/ that Alphabet (Google), Apple, Dell, Microsoft, and Tesla are
aiding and abetting the cruel and brutal use of young children… to mine cobalt.
However, the complex nature of the tech industry’s raw material supply chains, which change hands dozens of times between a wide array of unofficial and official groups, has made it practically impossible to pinpoint the origin of cobalt minerals. It was this deliberately opaque process that enabled the tech giants to dodge https://www.mining.com/tesla-apple-goog ... ss-action/ the Congolese miners’ lawsuit.

Apple, for its part, has released an official 20 page document https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsi ... n-2020.pdf promising that the company’s supply chains have been certified “ethical” by a
third party supply chain investigator.
Kara, the researcher of slavery in the African mining industry, dismissed claims like those by Apple as
little more than optics and marketing campaigns that rarely, if ever, touch the bottom of corporate supply chains. The assumption is — if we say we are ensuring dignity and sustainability all the way down our supply chains, people will believe us and business can carry on as usual.
The truth,” Kara explained,
is that there is a global subclass of humanity in appalling conditions at the bottom of our global economic order [in the mining sector].


With the demand for materials for EV batteries set to increase by 87,000 percent according to a 2020 study https://www.sussex.ac.uk/broadcast/read/50598 by Sussex University, the mining industry will be compelled to continually exploit new areas of the developing world – and new populations – to keep pace.

And just as the US waged regime change wars and conducted long-term military occupations across the Middle East to secure control over the fossil fuel energy sources Western consumers demanded, similarly coercive tactics could supplement memoranda like the one the US signed at its recent summit with Zambia and DRC.



Jeremy Loffredo is a journalist based in Washington, DC. He has worked on various independent documentaries in New York and formerly produced news programs at RT America. He is currently producing an independent documentary on the Green New Deal.

Zmeselo
Senior Member+
Posts: 33606
Joined: 30 Jul 2010, 20:43

Re: US Africa Leaders Summit promises more exploitation for Africa, record profits for US mining firms

Post by Zmeselo » 24 Jan 2023, 20:39

:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:



IDEAS PHILANTHROPY
Giving Cash to Africa is the Best Thing the U.S. Can Do For Both Africa and Itself


Sacs of corn are loaded onto trucks in the Sudanese Red Sea city of Port Sudan, as part of the US support for Sudan in the field of humanitarian aid, on Nov. 20, 2022. (AFP/Getty Images)

BY RORY STEWART (Stewart is the former U.K. Secretary of State for International Development and the President of GiveDirectly.)

https://time.com/6248466/giving-cash-to ... nd-itself/

JANUARY 20, 2023

This week, U.S. Secretary Janet Yellen is in Senegal, Zambia, and South Africa on a mission https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1186 to bolster America’s reputation on the continent. On the heels of December’s White House summit, this is part of an acknowledgement that America has lost ground to China and Russia in the contest to develop Africa. The administration pledged $55 billion https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/ho ... 022-12-13/ in support for health, climate adaption, and development. Not included: addressing poverty directly.

The United Nations committed https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/poverty/ to ending extreme poverty by the end of this decade, a target certain to be missed. While the percentage of the extreme poor in sub-Saharan Africa is lower https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/po ... rth+Africa than it was in 1990, the absolute number in extreme poverty is 100 million https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/tota ... rld-region people higher. During a period in which the world has become three times https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/fin ... our-wealth wealthier, hundreds of millions of people remain unable to feed, clothe, or shelter themselves. By 2050, the continent will be home to a quarter of the world, https://qz.com/africa/467755/a-quarter- ... ca-by-2050 and we’ve failed to ensure they won’t be born into extreme poverty.

Some of the blame for our failure, of course, lies with corrupt local governments, decades of exploitation and underinvestment stretching back to the colonial era, and the catastrophic impact of COVID-19 and the Ukraine-Russia conflict. But much of the blame must rest with the way that the U.S. and its allies have spent trillions of dollars in international aid over many decades. And I personally, as the U.K. Secretary of State, responsible for an overseas aid budget of almost $20 billion a year, was complicit in much of this failure. Whatever we have been doing, it has not made enough difference to poverty in Africa.

China has deftly stepped into this void, propping up local elites and lending hundreds of billions http://www.sais-cari.org/research-chine ... -to-africa of dollars in sub-Saharan Africa with almost no benefit https://go.skimresources.com/?id=143429 ... 20%5B-1%5D to the extreme poor, plunging Africa into a debt crisis. https://www.wsj.com/articles/as-africa- ... 1587115804

In the process, China has built political influence and gained access to vital resources. Russia has gained a foothold in its own way, extending paramilitary support https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/24/worl ... agner.html to the most violent leaders on the continent.

Perhaps because of their failures, the West seems to be giving up on poverty alleviation. Britain has cut a third https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/19/heal ... h-aid.html from its international aid budget, and much more from its poverty programs in Africa. European governments are spending an increasing proportion https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/12/12/uk ... reign-aid/ of their aid on problems closer to home, such as Ukraine. Many U.S. private foundations increasingly focus on health initiatives such as vaccination, vitamins, and bed-nets, which have dramatically improved infant mortality and life expectancy but cannot end poverty. For her part, Secretary Yellen is spending her trip visiting https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1186 electrification efforts and business incubators.

But there is an option hiding in plain sight: simply giving the extreme poor cash. This is not a comfortable idea—not least because it challenges the way that we have done business for decades. But it’s been modeled in dozens of countries, and more than three hundred academic papers https://www.givedirectly.org/cash-evidence-explorer/ have demonstrated the extraordinary positive impact of cash. Rather than building dependency, $500 given directly to a family in poverty can have a literally life-transforming effect. The instant improvement in housing, livestock, nutrition, sanitation, electrification, kids in school and business income recorded in cash programs in rural Rwanda is astonishing. Or look to China, whose drive to eliminate poverty at home has most recently https://www.voanews.com/a/east-asia-pac ... 02791.html included direct cash transfers.

Cash works because it does not require outsiders to guess what a community needs; they decide for themselves. And it is very much an idea for the moment—it is only in the last decade that expansion https://qz.com/africa/2161960/gsma-70-p ... -in-africa of mobile networks and mobile money technology in Africa has allowed cash to be delivered safely and efficiently directly into the pockets of the world’s poorest, without the money being absorbed along the way by corrupt officials or layers of donor bureaucracy.

A well-funded cash program would be a powerful response to China and Russia. The U.S. could use much of the $50 billion https://www.usaid.gov/cj#:~:text=The%20 ... %20Year%20(FY,above%20the%20FY%202022%20Request. it spends annually on aid to lift millions from extreme poverty. A large-scale cash program would demonstrate key values: it would be entirely transparent and measurable, it would support the people not elites, it would give agency and dignity to the poorest people in the world, and it would address the abiding shame of persistent poverty.

Giving cash cannot, of course, do everything. If your target is malaria, bed nets are often a better investment. Good education still requires strong governments and public investment. But nothing is as easily scalable or replicable than cash—or is more suitable for large Western bureaucracies, which struggle to adjust flexibly to local contexts. In the worst case scenario, every transfer—delivered directly to a phone— brings immediate and tangible benefit to an individual in poverty. In the best case scenario it creates a sustained economic stimulus, transforming the broader economy.

The likely outcome, somewhere in between, would be far better than we have achieved almost anywhere to date. In the past two decades, $19 billion https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/DT ... view=chart has been spent on international development in Malawi alone yet more Malawians https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/po ... untry=~MWI live in extreme poverty. A fifth of that amount, delivered in cash, could make a substantial difference. Western countries, many with histories of slavery or colonization, have spent too long patronizingly lecturing others on how to improve themselves. Giving cash would be the most radical gesture of trust and respect. And we might even win back some badly needed credibility and legitimacy in Africa and beyond.

Zmeselo
Senior Member+
Posts: 33606
Joined: 30 Jul 2010, 20:43

Re: US Africa Leaders Summit promises more exploitation for Africa, record profits for US mining firms

Post by Zmeselo » 24 Jan 2023, 23:07

Answer the questions, darn it! :lol:


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