Africa: Debts Paid for with
Natural Resources
Over at Africamix, Le Monde's Herviaux Olivier reviews (translation) Odiot Alice and Audrey Gallet's new documentary - Zambia: who benefits from copper? Excerpt:With a keen sense of narrative and didactic explanation, Alice and Audrey Gallet Odiot effectively dismantle the adage all too familiar in Africa: a rich country, poor people. Zambia, a landlocked country in the heart of the continent, holds in his basement one of the largest copper reserves in the world.... First shock: 1973 and the soaring prices of black gold. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB)... advise countries to borrow, the copper revenues allow sustainability repayment of the debt by the young nation. Second shock: in the early 1980s, the U.S. followed by Europe shrug their interest rates sharply. Result: Zambia must repay three times more interest. It's asphyxia. The country seeks the assistance of the IMF and the WB ... that shape their new credit to a privatization of the copper mines. Sell-off of farms in 2000 to multinationals, drastic fall in investment education and health systems ... The descent into hell begins.For those who argue that the inability of most Afican countries to benefit from their natural resources goes deeper than corruption, technology or the loan policies of the World Bank and the IMF, then sit back and get blown away by the first 48 minutes of Zeitgeist: Addendum, a 2008 documentary by Peter Joseph, which makes a case for the centrality of debt to the creation of money and expansion of the money supply in a fractional reserve system. Coupled with profit maximization, the indenturement of labor, or of those with natural resources, in a monetary system therefore comes across not as some cladestine developed world conspiracy or plot, but rather as something that comes natural to the system itself:H/T: Destination X