Business
China’s trade with Africa at record high
China’s enduring importance for Africa was strengthened again in 2013, when trade between the globe’s most populous country and the African continent soared to a record total of US$200 billion. That included a 44 percent spurt in Chinese direct investment in Africa.
U.S. trade with Africa, but only in goods, not services, totaled US$85 billion in 2013. Services amounted to about another US$11 billion. European trade with Africa reached US$137 billion in 2013. So long as China grows its own gross domestic product (GDP) at more than 7 percent it will need to rely on the resource commodities of Africa – the bulk of this US$200 billion trade.
Likewise, so long as China grows rapidly, Africa itself can grow at a rapid pace, currently about 5 percent per year on average. Africa, in other words, cannot prosper without China.
As Africa’s millions of people shortly become billions and countries like Nigeria, Tanzania, and the Democratic Republic of Congo swell dramatically in size, only a flourishing trade with China will permit the possibility of a realizing a demographic dividend for sub-Saharan Africa.
China’s trade with Africa is largely import driven, with China taking petroleum mostly from Angola, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Ghana, Nigeria, the Republic of Congo, Uganda, South Sudan, and the Sudan. It purchases copper, cobalt, cadmium, ferrochrome, platinum, coltan, diamonds, and gold largely for industrial purposes from countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. In 2011, the largest African exporters to China were South Africa and Angola, followed by the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mauritania, the Sudan and South Sudan, and Zambia.
As the world’s largest importer of iron ore, China has also been diversifying its purchases away from traditional suppliers such as Australia and South Africa to trade for the ore with 15 African nations including such previously globally unimportant producers of the metal as Guinea-Bissau, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia.
China takes hides and skins from Ethiopia and sometimes turns them locally into shoes. It fishes off Senegal and other African coastal countries. It grows cassava, maize, and sorghum in such places as Zimbabwe and Madagascar and ships the produce home to hungry animals in China. Recently, too, China became as major purchaser of cotton grown in Mozambique, a country not hitherto known for its cotton. But the new production was stimulated by a Chinese technical assistance effort, part of a Chinese attempt to help Mozambique improve its agricultural productivity.
