Africa will learn from China, work with EU

It was Jane Goodall and her work with chimps that first got me obsessed with Tanzania. Now it's the economy. Actually, both are going hand in hand, now that Green Mountain Coffee Company, based in Vermont, revealed its new coffee today. It's called Gombe Reserve: In Cooperation with the Jane Goodall Institute. The coffee is grown by members of the Kalinzi Cooperative, a group of 2,700 small-scale farmers who live near Gombe National Park in Tanzania, which is the site of Goodall's groundbreaking research on chimp behavior.

But I am really thinking about what's in the news today about Ghana, Uganda, Mozambique, and Tanzania taking economic lessons from China., Reuters reported that trade between Africa and China has grown 40% over the last year--and is still growing.

East Africa Business Week reported that the European Commission delegation in Tanzania has confirmed that the EU will remove the remaining quota and tariff limitations on access to the EU market for all African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) regions. The Economic Partnership Agreements aim at integrating the ACP into the world trading economy and increasing the quantity and diversity of their trade. These partnership agreements are meant to encourage regional integration, the growth of regional markets and creation of regional supply chains.

Critics of the trade agreements blame the EU for pressuring Tanzania and other countries to liberalise their trade markets far beyond what has been under discussion at the World Trade Organiation (WTO). One report, by a Christian organization, says that the trade talks have been grossly unbalanced and unfairly tied to future aid.

During the talks this weekend, President J. A. Kufuor of Ghana stressed that this new partnership between Africa and the European countries must be based on mutual respect and benefit. Today, Ghana's largest daily news reported the President as saying that

. . .any relationship that rendered Africans as beggars would not augur well for a globalized world in which the focus was on partnership rather than master-servant relations.