AFRO-NETS> Bush No-Show in Mauritius Reflects Deeper Disdain

[Claudio Schuftan <aviva@netnam.vn>]

Bush No-Show in Mauritius Reflects Deeper Disdain
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By William Minter*

From: <pambazuka-news-admin@pambazuka.org

In mid-December, in the midst of the controversy over racist remarks 
by Senator Trent Lott, Bush administration officials intimated that a 
presidential trip to Africa in January would demonstrate the U.S. 
president's sensitivity to African American concerns. If President 
George W. Bush had followed through on his plan to visit five African 
countries, Africans would have posed hard questions. Is your policy 
"just another trip"? Or are you willing to commit real resources to 
responding to the deadly threat of AIDS, and to other urgent African 
priorities?

An answer of a sort came just before Christmas, when a White House 
press release curtly announced that the trip was postponed. Later 
Secretary of State Colin Powell also called off plans to fill in for 
President Bush at the U.S. - Africa consultation being held in Mauri-
tius this week. Heading the U.S. delegation instead would be U.S. 
Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, who will tout the benefits to 
Africa of the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (which mandated this 
second consultation), and pitch other U.S. policies for promoting 
free trade.

Both the reduced U.S. presence in Mauritius and the exclusive focus 
on trade accurately reflect the realities of U.S. Africa policy. 
Washington policymakers are offering band-aids for the continent's 
gaping wounds, while pushing policies that add to the damage and de-
prive Africans of resources to fight back. This is evident in the 
U.S. willingness to use Africa as a military staging ground for war 
in the Middle East, while ignoring Africans' concerns for their own 
human security.

It shows up as well in the stingy U.S. contribution to the Global 
Fund to Fight AIDS, amounting to only a tiny fraction of the $ 3.5 
billion a year that would be the fair U.S. contribution, Meanwhile, 
the administration proposes handing over some $36 billion a year to 
rich investors by abolishing the tax on dividends. Last week U.N. 
Special Representative Stephen Lewis called rich countries' failure 
to respond to the AIDS pandemic "mass murder by complacency."

The administration brushes off findings that current "debt relief" 
programs leave desperately poor countries paying more to foreign 
creditors than they spend on the health needs of their people. And 
Bush refuses to act positively on global issues from women's repro-
ductive rights to global warming, on which the penalty for failure 
falls most heavily on Africa.

Bush's balance sheet is also deeply in the red even in the realm for 
which the U.S. claims most credit: trade policy. It is true that AGOA 
has opened some additional opportunities for textile exports from Af-
rican countries. But the benefits from this are estimated at only 
about $100 million to $140 million a year, and only go to a few coun-
tries. An International Monetary Fund study estimates that these 
benefits could have been five times greater if the U.S. had not im-
posed extremely restrictive rules of origin for the materials used in 
exported textiles. Meanwhile, African exports to the U.S. continue to 
be dominated by oil.

In December Washington stood alone to block a World Trade Organisa-
tion agreement to allow export of generic medicines from one develop-
ing country to another. African and other developing countries were 
outraged. The New York Times commented that Washington's position was 
"so obviously influenced by the drug companies that America is alien-
ating nations whose support it needs on other trade issues."

As African countries face the combined impact of famine and AIDS, 
they also see their agriculture devastated by another killer: agri-
cultural trade subsidies in the U.S. and Europe. Last year's U.S. 
farm bill, for example, added some $83 billion in new subsidies for 
rich U.S. farmers, whose exports already undercut developing country 
farmers who produce rice, maize, and other food crops. Such subsidies 
also undercut African exports. In a report last fall, for example, 
Oxfam calculated that U.S. cotton farmers received subsidies of $3.9 
billion. Oxfam estimated the damage to African cotton producers from 
these subsidies at about $300 million a year.

Most official speeches in Mauritius will undoubtedly extol the poten-
tial mutual benefits of expanded U.S. -African trade. But that poten-
tial stands little chance of being realized with the current busi-
ness-as-usual policy. When and if President Bush does visit Africa, 
he may seek to avoid answering the question of whether he values Af-
rican lives. Two years into his administration, the policy record 
leaves little doubt that the answer is "no".

* William Minter is a senior research fellow at Africa Action, the 
oldest U.S.-based advocacy group on African affairs. This commentary 
was originally published in Le Mauricien (http://lemauricien.com), 
January 15, 2003.

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