Yamuna Pushta resident Arun Kumar Jha sits on a footpath across from Ring Road in Delhi / credit: Parva Dubey
DELHI, India—Rohit Sharma stood on the spot where, more than a fortnight ago, he had a bed in a night shelter. After having traveled more than 650 miles from his home city of Patna, Sharma lived for the past four years in a shelter the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board (DUSIB) had provided.
“I used to get picked up from here for work. I would then come back and sleep here. This was my home,” said Sharma, who works in the tent-fitting industry. “Most of us fix tents or work for caterers for different occasions, like marriage or religious programs.”
Yet, everything changed on the night of March 9. That’s when bulldozers, in the presence of police, demolished temporary shelters, according to homeless people like Sharma. Now, he, along with about 1,200 people who used to live in four night shelters, sit under the sky. The site of the former shelter is close to the interstate bus terminus (ISBT) at Kashmere Gate, the northern entrance to the historic walled city of Old Delhi.
Map of Yamuna River flowing through Delhi National Capital Territory / credit: Google Maps
Displacing the Poor Ahead of G20 Summit
Activists and the affected said current demolitions are part of preparations for the Group of Twenty (G20) Summit that the capital city of New Delhi is preparing to host in September. G20 is an intergovernmental group made up of 19 countries plus the European Union. Altogether, the G20 represents two-thirds of the world’s population. Its stated aim is to address global economic issues. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi became its chairman last year.
Past G20 summits had been met with protests from both anti-globalization movements and groups opposing the displacement of society’s poorest to make way for a summit venue. Such was the case in 2010 in Toronto, Canada, and in 2017 in Hamburg, Germany, for example.
Similarly, before Donald Trump visited India in 2020 as the president of the United States, the huts of poor families were demolished around the venue to host him in Gujarat state in western India.
Estimates of 100,000 to more than 300,000 people live in Yamuna Pushta, where India’s largest reported slum developed in flood-prone conditions along the banks of the Yamuna River flowing through Delhi, India’s National Capital Territory (NCT).
Demolished shelter in Yamuna Pushta in Delhi near a crematorium known as Nigam Bodhi Ghat / credit: Parva Dubey
Destroying Livelihoods
Since the demolition drive in Delhi began, poor and working-class people said police have been trying to ensure they do not linger in the area where they normally wait to secure gigs for the day.
“They take us in a bus forcefully and drop us at a distance from here and ask us not to come back,” Sharma said, adding, “We find work at this place. Contractors come here and pick us up from here. Where else would we find work?”
The location to which homeless people must be moved is supposed to be “close to where they are concentrated and close to the work site as far as practicable,” as per Indian Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs’ Revised Operational Guidelines for Scheme of Shelter for Urban Homeless under Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana-National Urban Livelihood Mission (DAY-NULM).
However, the affected said they will struggle to find work after being forced to move.
“I have been working for the cause of the homeless for more than 20 years now. Governments never rehabilitate any homeless, like they claim to do,” alleged social activist Sunil Kumar Aledia, who is National Convenor for Homeless Housing Rights (NFHHR).
Yamuna Pushta resident Rohit Sharma (standing, in a pink shirt) on the spot where his bed once lay before a night shelter was demolished / credit: Parva Dubey
Bulldozing Homes
Aledia filed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) in the Supreme Court of India on March 3.
“We approached the Supreme Court as the demolition drive was going on in other places, and we did not want other temporary shelters to be demolished,” Aledia said.
But, before the court could take up the matter, Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board (DUSIB) razed the shelters.
“We were sleeping when the authorities came with bulldozers. They did not tell us the reason for demolishing our home,” Sharma told Toward Freedom. “Some of the inhabitants were manhandled by the police.”
Little information is available about the source of the demolition drive. NCT Urban Development Minister Saurabh Bharadwaj wrote to DUSIB on March 16, inquiring under whose direction the action was taken. The letter that the Times of India obtained stated:
“Director DUSIB has given a statement in the social media that the demolition has been carried out on the orders of Govt. of NCT, Delhi. DUSIB may kindly specify who in Delhi Govt. has given these directions? And whether these orders were recorded or merely oral?”
DUSIB remains mum.
“The matter is sub judice in the Supreme Court, and it wouldn’t be appropriate to comment at this stage,” P.K. Jha, an official of DUSIB, told Toward Freedom. Sub judice describes a matter under a court’s consideration and, therefore, official commentary is prohibited.
‘We Only Need Food and a Make-Do Shelter’
“Some big event is going to take place here. That’s why they broke this shelter,” said Arun Kumar Jha, another occupant of the night shelter, sitting on the footpath across the road. He frequents different night shelters in the area.
Dozens of homeless still sit in the place where their shelter was until a few weeks ago. They have always relied on voluntary organizations, temples and individuals for food. Across the road, approximately 300 meters (328 yards) away from the shelter is a revered Hanuman Temple. Hanuman is a Hindu god with the face of a monkey known for his devotion via service. The homeless crowd outside the temple has increased after the demolition. They find it easier to find food and money from worshippers visiting the temple.
“Food is not a problem here, many people come and serve us, that’s why we (homeless) do not want to leave this place. We only need food and a make-do shelter,” Jha told Toward Freedom. “Government takes us in a bus from here, but never provides food.”
Parva Dubey is a freelance writer based in New Delhi. Parva can be followed on Twitter at @ParvaDubey.
Every morning, Pandurang Khondre starts his day by looking for Khandya. “He was our family member,” he said, teary-eyed / credit: Sanket Jain
For the first time in Khandya’s life as a working ox, five veterinary doctors visited him more than 30 times in one week at Pandurang Khondre’s cattle shed.
It all started in mid-2022 when Khondre saw traces of an infection on the right leg of Khandya, his strongest ox. “Khandya” is derived from the name of a local deity named “Khandoba.”
“The ox had worked without any trouble for the entire day,” the farmer recounted. “However, I saw a few red-colored nodes when I returned the next morning.” Khondre immediately called a private vet. When the doctor showed up an hour later at Khondre’s cattle shed in the Jambhali village of western India’s Maharashtra state, he suspected Khandya must have been infected with Lumpy skin disease. That began the first of eight weeks of veterinary visits for Khandya and other cattle on the farm.
Lumpy, or LSD, is a contagious viral disease that affects cattle. Certain species of blood-feeding insects, like flies, ticks and mosquitoes, transmit it. Symptoms include skin nodules, severe loss of appetite, fever, nasal discharge, watery eyes, drop in milk production, and swelling of limbs and genitalia.
In 2022, Lumpy became an epidemic in India, affecting 2.9 million cattle (1.51 percent) across 23 states. From 2022 until the first week of this month, India reported 184,447 cattle deaths. No reports in the public domain have yet to sum up economic losses for the whole country. However, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization’s 2020 risk assessment report mentions Lumpy caused $1.45 billion in direct losses of livestock and production in south, east and southeast Asia. The report added, “These losses may be higher, due to the severe trade implications for infected countries.”
As of this month, 84.19 million Indian cattle have been vaccinated against Lumpy. If going by the latest livestock census released in 2019, that would mean 43 percent of cattle.
With the lives of India’s poor having been complicated by climate change impacts and livestock diseases, many have been forced to flee their homes in search of another source of income and take on loans for living expenses, as this reporter documented in a previous article for Toward Freedom.
Pandurang Khondre’s daughter-in-law shows a photo on her smartphone of their late ox, Khandya, who succumbed to Lumpy skin disease / credit: Sanket Jain
A Tearful Ox
Lumpy’s impact is so severe that Khandya went from eating 50 kilograms of cattle feed daily to finding it difficult to swallow five kilograms. Khondre, who is in his early 50s, and his wife, Malan, in her late 40s, spent over 16 hours a day looking after the ox as he struggled with the disease.
“He wouldn’t eat anything. When asked what happened, he always responded with tears,” says Khondre.
Khandya is among the 34,711 cattle in Maharashtra who have succumbed to Lumpy, for which goat pox vaccine is being administered. While India has developed an indigenous vaccine, it has yet to be made available for commercial production.
Then, in the final 72 hours of Khandya’s life in October, the situation took a bad turn.
“He had become so stiff that whenever we touched him, it felt like we were touching wood,” Malan said. “The nodes often returned despite the regular treatment.”
The Khondres spent over 60,000 Indian Rupees ($724) over three months on the treatment.
“The Government doctors wouldn’t show up. There were times we waited for an entire day,” Khondre said.
Vishnu Kumbhar and his wife, Sarasvati, spent almost 16 hours a day looking after their cow and the bull calf infected by Lumpy / credit: Sanket Jain
A Dearth of Vets In a Country of Cattle
Public vet and livestock supervisor Raosaheb Salunkhe, working in the Danoli village of Maharashtra’s Kolhapur district, has helped save several cattle.
“During the peak of the outbreak, we were attending to as many as 80 cases daily,” Salunkhe said. “Many farmers spent a lot of money on private vets and consulted us much later, when the disease became severe.”
For the 302.79 million bovine population (as per the 2019 livestock census), India has 73,129 registered public veterinary practitioners and just 54 recognized veterinary colleges. That means 1 vet is available to care for every 4,140 cattle.
Of Khondre’s five cattle, another affected ox survived the disease. However, Khondre said the ox wasn’t the same after recovering. “After an hour’s work, he felt dizzy and kept losing balance.” Eventually, he sold the ox and bought a new one by paying another $181.
Khondre is now worried about his last stable income source drying up.
“Whenever the oxen worked in the fields, I got 800-1000 rupees ($10-12) daily. Now, with just one ox, I have to rent another, and even earning 400 rupees ($4.8) daily has become difficult.”
Buying another ox will cost him $1,000, which remains out of bounds with Khondre having taken a hit over recent years. Climate change events, such as incessant rainfall, heat waves and repeat flooding, have caused financial losses.
Farmer Vishnu Kumbhar, 70, who has been farming for over five decades, said he has never seen a disease like Lumpy as well as recurring floods, which have made farming unsustainable / credit: Sanket Jain
‘Everything Was Gone In a Few Hours’
About 30 kilometers from Jambhali village, Vitthal Kumbhar and his family recounted their own trouble with Lumpy. Of their five cattle, a 10-year-old indigenous cow and a bull calf were infected in November in their village of Bhendavade.
“Within a day, the swelling spread to all the legs,” 70-year-old Kumbhar described, “and at the same time, she was diagnosed with pneumonia.”
It took over two months for both animals to recover.
Jitendra Kurundwade, assistant commissioner of Kolhapur’s Animal Husbandry Department, explained how the district handled the contagious disease.
“There were cases where we were treating the same cattle for almost a month.”
Given the rapid movement of the virus, almost 31,000 cattle in 54 villages of Shirol block were at risk of being infected. (In India, several villages form a block. Jambhali village is part of Shirol block.)
“So, we decentralized the vaccination process,” Kurundwade said, “and vaccinated all of them in a week, which otherwise would have taken at least six months.”
Their efforts were successful, as Kurundwade shared that around 4,500 cows (14 percent) were infected and 150 succumbed. The death rate came to 0.48 percent of all cows and 3.33 percent of infected cows.
“Everything was gone in a few hours,” said Sarasvati Kumbhar about how severe climate change events, such as incessant rainfall and hailstorms, destroyed the sugarcane she cultivated on 1.5 acres / credit: Sanket Jain
A Virus and Climate Change Wreak Havoc
When the cow first showed Lumpy symptoms, Kumbhar called a private doctor from a nearby village. The vet visited once and suggested seeking treatment from the public hospital, as private hospital care is pricey. Kumbhar’s son, Ganesh, 32, transported each of the four public doctors on his bike from the veterinary hospitals on a daily basis. Collectively, they provided more than 90 injections in a month.
Before Lumpy, the cow produced daily at least six liters of milk, which they served to the bull calf. Now, they are forced to buy milk from the market or use milk from other cattle, which eats up a source of their income.
Farmers reported affected cattle took at least four months to recover. A decline in milk production and in cattle strength affected farm operations.
However, India remains the highest milk producer, contributing 23 percent to global milk production. The country produced 210 million tons of milk in 2020-21.
The dairy sector employs 80 million rural households in India, with the majority being marginal landowning farmers and the landless. For millions of farmers, dairy remains the only source of income, as climate change continues to destroy crops. For instance, in just October, Kumbhar’s 1.5-acre field was among the 2.8 million hectares (6.91 million acres) destroyed during heavy rains in Maharashtra.
In 2021, floods devastated crops on 7.79 million hectares (19.24 acres) of farmland in India, affecting 38.56 million people and killing 64,880 cattle. Further, from January 1 to September 30, 2022, climate disasters continued to wreak havoc in India, with extreme weather events on 241 out of 273 days.
Kumbhar survived the 2019 and 2021 floods, 2022 heat waves, and erratic rainfall only because of cattle milk. However, his cow barely produces milk after Lumpy, and debt is mounting fast.
His wife, Sarasvati, in her mid-60s, put things in perspective by recalling the recent disasters in their village, Bhendavade, in Maharashtra’s Kolhapur district. In October, hailstorms devastated the sugarcane she cultivated on 1.5 acres.
“Everything was gone in a few hours.”
Of the 100 tons she was expecting to cut that would have been worth $3,625, she only harvested 32 tons. “I wasn’t even able to recover the cost of production.” But that wasn’t the first time. In 2019, her family harvested just 30 tons of sugarcane. Then, in 2021, severe floods left them with 10 tons to cut. “Never in my life have I reported such low production,” Kumbhar said. “Despite using chemical fertilizers and pesticides, the production isn’t increasing.”
Similarly, Khondre, too, recently harvested 21 tons of sugarcane on three-fourths of an acre, compared to at least 45 tons.
“It takes about 15 months for the sugarcane to grow completely. The only thing we got from this was more debt.”
In the 2019 and 2021 floods and incessant rainfall of 2022, the Kumbhar family lost most of their sugarcane and couldn’t even recover the cost of production / credit: Sanket Jain
Mounting Debt and Losing a ‘Family Member’
Recurring climate disasters have led to mounting debts, forcing Indian farmers to cut back on fodder (animal feed). A 40-kilogram sack of maize cattle feed costs at least $17 and lasts less than a week. “If we can’t sell the cattle milk and face repeated losses in the field, how will we buy this fodder?” Kumbhar asked. Nowadays, most of the time, he skips fodder, which affects milk production.
Last year, they took out a crop loan of $1,208 and will have to take on another loan this year. With 30 tons of sugarcane, he just managed to get $1,087. In normal climatic conditions, it would have fetched him at least $3,624. “In 15 months, I couldn’t earn a single rupee. Rather, I am making a loss,” Kumbhar said.
“Just an agriculture loan is not enough now. We’ll also have to take loans from friends and private moneylenders,” said his daughter-in-law, Poonam, 28. Her husband, Ganesh, could not go to work for two months as an operator at a grinding machine in a nearby factory.
“I spent most of the time with the cattle,” he said.
Similarly, last year, Rohit Koli, Khondre’s neighbor down the road, spent over two months with his infected Holstein Friesian cow. “I couldn’t sleep properly for over 45 days. The vets treated her every day for 25 days. But, still, we lost an important family member,” the Jambhali resident said.
“For the final six days, she ate nothing, after which she passed away,” he recounted. “It will cost at least 110,000 Rupees ($1,329) to buy another Holstein cow, which we can’t afford.”
Koli recalled the cow produced at least 24 liters of milk daily, fetching him over $8. Four of the seven cows he owns were infected, of which three recovered and one died.
“Lumpy is like a corona of animals,” Koli said, referring to the novel coronavirus of 2019 that mainly affected humans. “I’ve never seen so many cattle falling sick and dying.”
Meanwhile, every morning, Khondre, starts his day by looking for Khandya. “He was our family member,” he said, teary-eyed. When the ox died, more than 100 farmers gathered to mourn. “Everyone loved Khandya,” said Khondre, looking at the ox’s photo once again on his daughter-in-law’s smartphone.
“Majha bail (My ox).”
Sanket Jain is an independent journalist based in the Kolhapur district of the western Indian state of Maharashtra. He was a 2019 People’s Archive of Rural India fellow, for which he documented vanishing art forms in the Indian countryside. He has written for Baffler, Progressive Magazine, Counterpunch, Byline Times, The National, Popula, Media Co-op, Indian Express and several other publications.
Anti-government protest in Sri Lanka on April 13 in front of the Presidential Secretariat / credit: AntanO / Wikipedia
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Multipolarista.
Facing a deep economic crisis and bankruptcy, Sri Lanka was rocked by large protests this July, which led to the resignation of the government.
Numerous Western political leaders and media outlets blamed this uprising on a supposed Chinese “debt trap,” echoing a deceptive narrative that has been thoroughly debunked by mainstream academics.
In reality, the vast majority of the South Asian nation’s foreign debt is owed to the West.
These structural adjustment programs clearly have not worked, given Sri Lanka’s economy has been managed by the IMF for many of the decades since it achieved independence from British colonialism in 1948.
As of 2021, a staggering 81 percent of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt was owned by U.S. and European financial institutions, as well as Western allies Japan and India.
This pales in comparison to the mere 10 percent owed to Beijing.
According to official statistics from Sri Lanka’s Department of External Resources, as of the end of April 2021, the plurality of its foreign debt is owned by Western vulture funds and banks, which have nearly half, at 47 percent.
The top holders of the Sri Lankan government’s debt, in the form of international sovereign bonds (ISBs), are the following firms:
BlackRock (U.S.)
Ashmore Group (Britain)
Allianz (Germany)
UBS (Switzerland)
HSBC (Britain)
JPMorgan Chase (U.S.)
Prudential (U.S.)
The Asian Development Bank and World Bank, which are thoroughly dominated by the United States, own 13 percent and 9 percent of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt, respectively.
Less known is that the Asian Development Bank (ADB) is, too, largely a vehicle of U.S. soft power. Neoconservative DC-based think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which is funded by Western governments, affectionately described the ADB as a “strategic asset for the United States,” and a crucial challenger to the much newer, Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
“The United States, through its membership in the ADB and with its Indo-Pacific Strategy, seeks to compete with China as a security and economic partner of choice in the region,” boasted CSIS.
Another country that has significant influence over the ADB is Japan, which similarly owns 10 percent of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt.
An additional 2 percent of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt was owed to India as of April 2021, although that number has steadily increased since. In early 2022, India was in fact the top lender to Sri Lanka, with New Delhi disbursing 550 percent more credit than Beijing between January and April.
Together, these Western firms and their allies Japan and India own 81 percent of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt – more than three-quarters of its international obligations.
By contrast, China owns just one-tenth of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt.
The overwhelming Western role in indebting Sri Lanka is made evident by a graph published by the country’s Department of External Resources, showing the foreign commitments by currency:
As of the end of 2019, less than 5 percent of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt was denominated in China’s currency the yuan (CNY). On the other hand, nearly two-thirds, 64.6 percent, was owed in U.S. dollars, along with an additional 14.4 percent in IMF special drawing rights (SDR) and more than 10 percent in the Japanese yen (JPY).
Western media reporting on the economic crisis in Sri Lanka, however, ignores these facts, giving the strong, and deeply misleading, impression that the chaos is in large part because of Beijing.
Sri Lankan Economic Crisis Driven by Neoliberal Policies, Inflation, Corruption, Covid-19 Pandemic
This July, Sri Lanka’s government was forced to resign, after hundreds of thousands of protesters stormed public buildings, setting some on fire, while also occupying the homes of the country’s leaders.
The protests were driven by skyrocketing rates of inflation, as well as rampant corruption and widespread shortages of fuel, food, and medicine – a product of the country’s inability to pay for imports.
In May, Sri Lanka defaulted on its debt. In June, it tried to negotiate another structural adjustment program with the U.S.-dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF). This would have been Sri Lanka’s 17th IMF bailout, but the talks ended without a deal.
By July, Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe publicly admitted that his government was “bankrupt.”
Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who spent a significant part of his life working in the United States, entered office in 2019 and immediately imposed a series of neoliberal economic policies, which included cutting taxes on corporations.
These neoliberal policies decreased government revenue. And the precarious economic situation was only exacerbated by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Facing an out-of-control 39.1 percent inflation rate in May, the Sri Lankan government did a 180 and suddenly raised taxes again, further contributing to popular discontent, which broke out in a social explosion in July.
Media Falsely Blames China for Sri Lankan Debt Default
While 81 percent of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt is owned by Western financial institutions, Japan, and India, major corporate media outlets sought to blame China for the country’s bankruptcy and subsequent protests.
The Wall Street Journal pointed the finger at Beijing in a deeply misleading article titled “China’s Lending Comes Under Fire as Sri Lankan Debt Crisis Deepens.” The newspaper noted that the crisis “opens a window for India to push back against Chinese influence in the Indian Ocean region.”
U.S. media giant the Associated Press also tried to scapegoat China, and its deceptive news wire was republished by outlets across the world, from ABC News to Saudi Arabia’s Al Arabiya.
VOA accused Beijing of “pursuing a kind of ‘debt-trap diplomacy’ meant to bring economically weak countries to their knees, dependent on China for support.”
On social media, the Western propaganda narrative surrounding the July protests in Sri Lanka was even more detached from reality.
A veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and National Security Agency (NSA), Derek J. Grossman, portrayed the unrest as an anti-China uprising.
“China’s window of opportunity to one day control Sri Lanka probably just closed,” he tweeted on July 9, as the government announced it was resigning.
After working for U.S. spy agencies, Grossman is today an analyst at the Pentagon’s main think tank, the RAND Corporation, where he has pushed a hawkish line against Beijing.
China’s window of opportunity to one day control Sri Lanka probably just closed. pic.twitter.com/WOLIb3SUTf
— Derek J. Grossman (@DerekJGrossman) July 9, 2022
BBC Reluctantly Admits the ‘Chinese Debt Trap’ Narrative in Sri Lanka Is False
China has funded several large infrastructure projects in Sri Lanka, building an international airport, hospitals, a convention center, a sports stadium, and most controversially a port in the southern coastal town of Hambantota.
The UK government’s BBC sent a reporter to Sri Lanka to investigate these accusations of supposed “Chinese debt traps.” But after speaking to locals, he reluctantly came to the conclusion that the narrative is false.
“The truth is that many independent experts say that we should be wary of the Chinese debt trap narrative, and we’ve found quite a lot of evidence here in Sri Lanka which contradicts it,” BBC host Ben Chu acknowledged.
He explained, “The Hambantota port, well, that was instigated by the Sri Lankans, not by the Chinese. And it can’t currently be used by Chinese military naval vessels, and actually there’s some pretty formidable barriers to that happening.”
“A lot of the projects we’ve been seeing, well, they feel more like white elephants than they do Chinese global strategic assets,” Chu added.
In our latest film from Sri Lanka, which faces financial collapse as the global Big Squeeze bites, Ben Chu examines the effect that Chinese loans and investment are having on the country:#Newsnighthttps://t.co/GBFZ1ItP0G
The British state media outlet interviewed the director of Port City Colombo’s economic commission, Saliya Wickramasuriya, who emphasized, “The Chinese government is not involved in setting the rules and regulations, so from that standpoint the government of Sri Lanka is in control, and it’s up to the government of Sri Lanka’s wish to flavor the city, the development of the city, in the way it wants to.”
“It is accurate to say that infrastructure development has boomed under Chinese investment, Chinese debt sometimes, but those are things that we’ve actually needed for a long, long time,” Wickramasuriya added.
Chu clarified that, “Importantly, it’s not debt but equity the Chinese own here.”
“So is the debt trap not all it seems?” he asked.
Mainstream U.S. Academics Debunk the ‘Chinese Debt Trap’ Myth
Mainstream Western academics have similarly investigated the claims of “Chinese debt traps,” and come to the conclusion that they do not exist.
Even a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, which is notorious for its revolving door with the U.S. government and close links to spy agencies, acknowledged that “the Chinese ‘debt trap’ is a myth.”
Writing in 2021 in the de facto mouthpiece of the DC political establishment, The Atlantic magazine, scholar Deborah Brautigam stated clearly that the debt-trap narrative is “a lie, and a powerful one.”
“Our research shows that Chinese banks are willing to restructure the terms of existing loans and have never actually seized an asset from any country, much less the port of Hambantota,” Brautigam said in the article, which was co-authored by Meg Rithmire, a professor at the stridently anti-socialist Harvard Business School.
The Chinese "debt-trap" narrative is a false one which wrongfully portrays both Beijing and the developing countries it deals with, Deborah Brautigam and Meg Rithmire write: https://t.co/FagExsdeNT
Brautigam published her findings in a 2020 article for Johns Hopkins’ China Africa Research Initiative, titled “Debt Relief with Chinese Characteristics,” along with fellow researchers Kevin Acker and Yufan Huang.
They investigated Chinese loans in Sri Lanka, Iraq, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Angola, and the Republic of Congo, and “found no ‘asset seizures’ and, despite contract clauses requiring arbitration, no evidence of the use of courts to enforce payments, or application of penalty interest rates.”
They discovered that Beijing cancelled more than $3.4 billion and restructured or refinanced roughly $15 billion of debt in Africa between 2000 and 2019. At least 26 individual loans to African nations were renegotiated.
Western critics have attacked Beijing, claiming there is a lack of transparency surrounding its loans. Brautigam explained that “Chinese lenders prefer to address restructuring quietly, on a bilateral basis, tailoring programs to each situation.”
The researchers noted that China puts an “emphasis on ‘development sustainability’ (looking at the future contribution of the project) rather than ‘debt sustainability’ (looking at the current state of the economy) as the basis of project lending decisions.”
“Moreover, despite critics’ worries that China could seize its borrower’s assets, we do not see China attempting to take advantage of countries in debt distress,” they added.
“There were no ‘asset seizures’ in the 16 restructuring cases that we found,” the scholars continued. “We have not yet seen cases in Africa where Chinese banks or companies have sued sovereign governments or exercised the option for international arbitration standard in Chinese loan contracts.”
Benjamin Norton is founder and editor of Multipolarista.
A Saharawi refugee camp in the Tindouf province of Algeria / credit: European Commission DG ECHO
Editor’s Note: The following represents the writer’s analysis about a disputed area known as “Western Sahara” and was produced byGlobetrotter.
In November 2020, the Moroccan government sent its military to the Guerguerat area, a buffer zone between the territory claimed by the Kingdom of Morocco and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR). The Guerguerat border post is at the very southern edge of Western Sahara along the road that goes to Mauritania. The presence of Moroccan troops “in the Buffer Strip in the Guerguerat area” violated the 1991 ceasefire agreed upon by the Moroccan monarchy and the Polisario Front of the Sahrawi. That ceasefire deal was crafted with the assumption that the United Nations would hold a referendum in Western Sahara to decide on its fate; no such referendum has been held, and the region has existed in stasis for three decades now.
Map of the disputed Western Sahara, with a red pin marking the location of Guerguerat, a town on the border with Mauritania / credit: Google
In mid-January 2022, the United Nations sent its Personal Envoy for Western Sahara, Staffan de Mistura, to Morocco, Algeria and Mauritania to begin a new dialogue “toward a constructive resumption of the political process on Western Sahara.” De Mistura was previously deputed to solve the crises of U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria; none of his missions have ended well and have mostly been lost causes. The UN has appointed five personal envoys for Western Sahara so far—including De Mistura—beginning with former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker III, who served from 1997 to 2004. De Mistura, meanwhile, succeeded former German President Horst Köhler, who resigned in 2019. Köhler’s main achievement was to bring the four main parties—Morocco, the Polisario Front, Algeria and Mauritania—to a first roundtable discussion in Geneva in December 2018: this roundtable process resulted in a few gains, where all participants agreed on “cooperation and regional integration,” but no further progress seems to have been made to resolve the issues in the region since then. When the UN put forward De Mistura’s nomination to this post, Morocco had initially resisted his appointment. But under pressure from the West, Morocco finally accepted his appointment in October 2021, with Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita welcoming him to Rabat on January 14. De Mistura also met the Polisario Front representative to the UN in New York on November 6, 2021, before meeting other representatives in Tindouf, Algeria, at Sahrawi refugee camps in January. There is very little expectation that these meetings will result in any productive solution in the region.
Abraham Accords
In August 2020, the United States government engineered a major diplomatic feat called the Abraham Accords. The United States secured a deal with Morocco and the United Arab Emirates to agree to a rapprochement with Israel in return for the United States making arms sales to these countries, as well as for the United States legitimizing Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara. The arms deals were of considerable amounts—$23 billion worth of weapons to the UAE and $1 billion worth of drones and munitions to Morocco. For Morocco, the main prize was that the United States—breaking decades of precedent—decided to back its claim to the vast territory of Western Sahara. The United States is now the only Western country to recognize Morocco’s claim to sovereignty over Western Sahara.
When President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, it was expected that he might review parts of the Abraham Accords. However, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made it clear during his meeting with Bourita in November 2021 that the U.S. government would continue to maintain the position taken by the previous Trump administration that Morocco has sovereignty over Western Sahara. The United States, meanwhile, has continued with its arms sales to Morocco, but has suspended weapons sales to the United Arab Emirates.
Phosphates
By the end of November 2021, the government of Morocco announced that it had earned $6.45 billion from the export of phosphate from the kingdom and from the occupied territory of Western Sahara. If you add up the phosphate reserves in this entire region, it amounts to 72 percent of the entire phosphate reserves in the world (the second-highest percentage of these reserves is in China, which has around 6 percent). Phosphate, along with nitrogen, makes synthetic fertilizer, a key element in modern food production. While nitrogen is recoverable from the air, phosphates, found in the soil, are a finite reserve. This gives Morocco a tight grip over world food production. There is no doubt that the occupation of Western Sahara is not merely about national pride, but it is largely about the presence of a vast number of resources—especially phosphates—that can be found in the territory.
Detailed map of Western Sahara, showing borders with Morocco, Algeria and Mauritania / credit: Kmusser, based primarily on the Digital Chart of the World, with UN map and commercial atlases (Rand McNally, Google, Encarta, and National Geographic) used as references
In 1975, a UN delegation that visited Western Sahara noted that “eventually the territory will be among the largest exporters of phosphate in the world.” While Western Sahara’s phosphate reserves are less than those of Morocco, the Moroccan state-owned firm OCP SA has been mining the phosphate in Western Sahara and manufacturing phosphate fertilizer for great profit. The most spectacular mine in Western Sahara is in Bou Craa, from which 10 percent of OCP SA’s profits come; Bou Craa, which is known as “the world’s longest conveyor belt system,” carries the phosphate rock more than 60 miles to the port at El Aaiún. In 2002, the UN’s Under-Secretary General for Legal Affairs at that time, Hans Corell, noted in a letter to the president of the UN Security Council that “if further exploration and exploitation activities were to proceed in disregard of the interests and wishes of the people of Western Sahara, they would be in violation of the principles of international law applicable to mineral resource activities in Non-Self-Governing Territories.” An international campaign to prevent the extraction of the “conflict phosphate” from Western Sahara by Morocco has led many firms around the world to stop buying phosphate from OCP SA. Nutrien, the largest fertilizer manufacturer in the United States that used Moroccan phosphates, decided to stop imports from Morocco in 2018. That same year, the South African court challenged the right of ships carrying phosphate from the region to dock in their ports, ruling that “the Moroccan shippers of the product had no legal right to it.”
Only three known companies continue to buy conflict phosphate mined in Western Sahara: Two from New Zealand (Ballance Agri-Nutrients Limited and Ravensdown) and one from India (Paradeep Phosphates Limited).
Human Rights
After the 1991 ceasefire, the UN set up a Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO). This is the only UN peacekeeping force that does not have a mandate to report on human rights. The UN made this concession to appease the Kingdom of Morocco. The Moroccan government has tried to intervene several times when the UN team in Western Sahara attempted to make the slightest noise about the human rights violations in the region. In March 2016, the kingdom expelled MINURSO staff because then-UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon referred to the Moroccan presence in Western Sahara as an “occupation.”
Pressure from the United States is going to ensure that the only realistic outcome of negotiations is for continued Moroccan control of Western Sahara. All parties involved in the conflict are readying for battle. Far from peace, the Abraham Accords are going to accelerate a return to war in this part of Africa.
