 Welcome everyone. We are delighted to have Deborah Routigan back at SOS. Last time she came also to launch her well-known book, The Dragon's Gift. I think that large was involved in that session. And it's a real pleasure because for anyone who's interested in the topic of China's engagement in Africa, Deborah Routigan is clearly a major reference. She's a leading scholar in some of the key issues that have been discussed and debated for a number of years. I could say that for me this topic is ten years old, roughly. And when I started reading about it, I got interested for various reasons. And generally in the beginning pretty shocked by the poor quality of the reporting, media reporting but also the scholarship that was emerging in the early days. So when I read the first few contributions of Deborah Routigan on some of these issues, it was a major relief to see that there was some serious scholarship. Particularly on questions around debunking a number of myths. And I remember a few years ago when I asked Deborah to write a very short piece about debunking seven myths, I think it was, for a Spanish think tank. Even in Spain there was a lot of interest in China and Africa. So Deborah Routigan is the director of the China Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins University, the School of Advanced International Studies. And she's building quite an important research cluster there with a number of young scholars and emerging scholars working on these issues. And really promoting serious research and rigorous scholarship on this emerging topic. The literature on the topic has been growing exponentially in the last ten years. And I think I can say that probably nowadays the situation is far better than it was back in 2005. Deborah is very well known for her book, Dragon's Gift. It's probably one of the most cited publications in China-Africa relations. A very important book in terms of debunking some of the myths, but also in terms of providing a pretty grounded material on the actual realities of China's engagement in Africa and the variety and diversity of Chinese actors and African actors and the importance of African agency in all these. So she's coming today to present her new book entitled Provocatively Will Africa Fit China? And there's some interesting background story behind and I think I'm going to let Deborah tell us about this story. But I have just to say that I'm very pleased that I played a tiny role there when we were both working in a special issue for Third World Quarterly on the global land grabs, another big topic with a lot of problematic research in it. And that particular special issue was also about debunking some of the myths around land grabs. And Deborah kindly agreed to make an effort and tell us about the myths around Chinese land grabs in Africa. And that eventually turns into this book with further research and a huge amount of evidence collected over the last few years. The same she's done for many other issues, topics like aid, finance and so on. So I'm not going to spend more time into this endeavor. I think many of you already know her work and her background. She clearly manages to navigate various disciplines and topics with an over skill. And I'm sure this talk is going to be fascinating and I'm really looking forward to it. Thank you. Thank you, Carlos, for that introduction. And I did say to him earlier, it's really your fault, Carlos, that I wrote this book because he didn't force me to kind of really hone in on this topic. And then as I was doing the research for that, I thought, you know, I really know so much more than I can put into this 8,000 word piece and it turned into a large book. So it's not that large. I hope it's very readable. So it's always exciting to launch a new book. So I really appreciate you all coming to this book launch here. So I think we often ask, certainly in the United States, I know in the UK, Europe and around the world, what does China want? And one thing that China wants is McDonald's. China wants, obviously, to feed its people. And how will China seek to meet its needs? And what does this mean for the rest of the world? And so I think China's rise is probably the most important issue certainly for development studies and geopolitics of this new millennium that I think that's incontrovertible. But I am often, as I do my research, I'm mindful of something that John Pomfret, who is a former China Guaranteed Editor at the Washington Post said, that inflating the challenge from China can be just as dangerous as underestimating it. And I think when it comes to Africa, we do tend to inflate the challenge from China. And this is particularly the case in the West. These are not new photographs here, and to many people in the room you will have seen these many times. But this idea that China is kind of a threat in Africa and the land grabbing is certainly a part of this perception. And I really think that there's nowhere in terms of the topics on China-Africa where the gap between the perception and the reality is larger than in this narrative about what China is doing in rural Africa. And as the subtitle the new book that came out last year or the year before said that the Chinese are building a new empire in Africa. And so I think that's part of the idea that they're they're grabbing land in order to do this. So why do we think this? Well, China has 9%, 7% to 9% of the world's arable land and around 20% of the world's population, so naturally they need more land. At least that's how the thinking goes. And exactly 20 years ago Lester Brown published a small book with the title Who Will Feed China? And this book caused a real stir in China because they wondered was he right about his predictions as China modernized that demand for food was going to become quite alarmingly large and that this would wreak havoc with global food markets and prices would rise and this would lead to starvation and famine in other parts of the world. So that China's rise 20 years ago was looked at as being a threat for agricultural markets and for other developing countries. So of course the title of my book, well Africa, The China, is a play on that Lester Brown book. Now during the last global food crisis, which was started around 2007, 2008 when global food crisis were going up, it looked as though maybe Lester Brown's hypothesis was coming true and that Chinese demand, and of course there were other factors that led to these high food prices, biofuel demands was one part of that, but it looked as though maybe this was happening and that Africa was going to be a central player in China's own strategies to deal with that question who will feed China. And so this book examines four widespread beliefs around that and I'm going to read a little bit from the introduction here. And starting out in August 2012, the chief economist of the African Development Bank published an article on the risks and opportunities associated with China's rise. China, he said, is the biggest land grabber in the world and in Africa. And so I think one part of this conventional wisdom that we have about China's role is that China has actually or Chinese companies have acquired large amounts of farmland in Africa. So China is a big land grabber. And the second aspect of that conventional wisdom is that the Chinese government is leading this effort through its state-owned companies and sovereign wealth funds. And so for example, we see this strategy has been carefully devised by officials in Beijing, which is something coming from the Daily Mail, or something published in the Atlantic that the Chinese have set up a five billion dollar fund just to invest in agriculture in Africa. And then along the lines of that they have actually acquired a lot of land, we have these headlines. China recently purchased half the farmland under cultivation in the Congo. Chinese farms control most of Zambia's agriculture, or that China has extensive holdings in Africa, including pending or attempted deals for millions of hectares in the Democratic Republic of Likongo. Zambia is in Baba Uganda in Tanzania, with many thousands of Chinese workers brought in to work on these lands. So the Chinese, the conventional wisdom, the Chinese have acquired huge amounts of land. The government is leading this with its state-owned companies and sovereign wealth funds that they're sending Chinese farmers in order to grow this food, and then finally that the purpose is to grow food to send back to China. So a few more things here. The Rockefeller Foundation warned that, quote, the growing Chinese desire for African-produced food could mean that poor people in African countries may no longer have the resources they need to survive. And the French and a French newspaper, what the Chinese are doing in Africa is investing there to feed the Chinese people. In Benin, the head of a civil society organization told a TV crew that the Chinese were growing vegetables there to send back to China. So in terms of the sending of Chinese, these are all things that have come out in various media stories and often been recycled again by think tanks and scholars even. So it even extends into the realm of fiction, or the Swedish crime novelist Henning Mankow told a journalist, and this was repeated in a French newspaper, I read just the other day that China has rented land in Kenya to move some one million peasants to Africa. So these are the things that are there and then no one really questions the reality of these things. So it seemed to me as these stories were being circulated, and I looked at this a little bit in the Dragon's Gift, but not with very great, not spending a lot of time on it, because that came out at the end of 2009. It was really a feeding frenzy, if you'll excuse the pun. But where are these reports accurate? And in the book, I look at all of those headlines and I could say that every single one of the headlines that I've just quoted to you is wrong. You know, there's no evidence to back up any of those things. And it's astonishing to me how great the gap is between what we think the Chinese are doing in terms of the four areas of conventional wisdom and what they're actually doing. Now, I have to admit I had start on doing this research. Now, this is a picture taken in 1984, in case you can't tell. That's me there in the middle in my useful days when I was a PhD student doing research on Chinese agricultural engagement in Africa. And so this is taken in Liberia on a Chinese aid project. And I watched in the 1980s, the 1990s, and so on how Chinese engagement in Africa changed and how the first investors came and in the agricultural sector was 1987. So the first investments started there and I looked at the history of how that happened. I talked about that some in the Dragon's Gift. But I had context for this, how the first investors came in, how they accelerated during the 1990s and that China was really incorporating Africa into its whole going global strategies. Now, how did I do the research for this book? Well, the first thing that we did was we tried to collect all of the stories that were in the media or in think tank reports or in other scholars' research, everything that we could find that was over 500 hectares. And then we tracked down, we collected 60 of these. And I don't know how well you could see this here, but right here is from the Hindustan Times, one of our, I have my pointer I would show you. There are two cases right here. It says China bought 2.3 million hectares in Congo. So China bought this land and China spent 800 million dollars in Mozambique in 2008. So these are the kinds of stories we looked into and we collected 60 of these. And we did this through what I call forensic internet sleuthing in part. That's the first thing we did. And so what does that mean? I don't know if here in the UK you get that CSI Miami. Right. So they do kind of forensic sleuthing high tech and all of this. Well, we do this on the internet and we take a case and we just dig into it. We find the name of the company. We find the name where they're from. We do this in Chinese and Portuguese and French and English and we just dig and dig and dig and we find everything we can find that's out there on the internet. And then we start putting together the story. And some of these are pretty easy to dispel. It takes five minutes sometimes. So you could find out, okay, this investment wasn't even in Chinese. It's a company from Korea or something like that. One example that we looked at was supposed to be a $2 billion investment in Nigeria in rice. So I thought, well, this is interesting. A little quick sleuthing on that. And another article comes up and it turns out that it's not $2 billion. It's $2 billion Naira, which is $17 million. Okay, there's a difference there, $2 billion, $17 million. But then a little more sleuthing and the name of the company, Ophada VT. All right, let's see if we can find out anything more about them. Turns out it's an Indian Basmati rice company. So a little more looking. And it turns out that $17 million investment is three rice mills that an Indian company is bringing into Nigeria in order to process rice from Nigerian farmers. There's no Chinese involvement at all. So that was just one example of a, we didn't even put that into the database because it took about five minutes to get that result. We just, we left that out because it was, there was so nothing happening there, not any land at all being exchanged. So that was how we did that kind of research. The second thing we did is we actually went to the countries and we did fieldwork. So this is again a picture of somebody doing fieldwork in 1984. But that's the kind of thing we did over and over again. We took our notebooks out, we talked to people that were doing this, doing farming, if they were actually there, we talked about why the investments didn't happen, if they didn't happen. This is one of my collaborators, Sigrid Ekman in this picture, Tang Xiaoyang is here. He and I went to a number of different countries on this research, worked with Sergio Chava and Mozambique and Zhang Haishen. And then we funded research by our scholar collaborators to do fieldwork to try to find out what was happening as well. So we went to the farms, we talked to African officials, we talked to African farmers, we talked to the people that were affected by the investments that actually happened. And this wasn't very easy work. This was in Zimbabwe. So I showed up there on a farm, I couldn't get an appointment. So we just found out where it was and we drove there and we arrived and they were asleep because it was nap time. So we weren't actually in this bus, we were just following the bus. So which was fortunate there. But that was the kind of thing we just kind of popped up there and they fortunately welcomed us rather than chasing us away. But that's how we got the information. And then finally, we collected information on the whole Chinese structure, the policy structure for going global in agriculture to try to find out what's there some special incentives to acquire land or to grow food in Africa to send back and were there was there something we could trace out there. So this is a picture from a seminar in Chinese Enterprise out on investment. There's a whole chapter in the book on what we found or what I found on this incentive structure. Most of that research had to be done in Chinese, which is really hard. Nobody has done this yet. And as I was doing this research and doing the field work and so on on the book, I often thought about something that a Chinese Ministry of Agriculture official said to me, which was he said, you know, it's really difficult to study this topic, even for us. And I had to agree with him. It was really hard. There wasn't any centralized depository of this investment data, or there wasn't any we had trade data, but we didn't have anything on the there wasn't any one place you could go to get the incentive structure, we had to put it together through the various pronouncements from the Ministry of Commerce and so on. So it was it was hard. It was very interesting. So ultimately, we came up with 60 cases, as I mentioned, of cases to look at of investment. And out of that, if the Chinese companies had acquired all the land that they allegedly I had acquired, it would have been 6 million hectares around, if you took the largest figure. And what we found out of those 60 cases, and this is online, you can see it at our website at slice-carry.org, or it's also in the appendix for the book. We found that the actual land acquired in all the 60 cases was under 250,000 hectares. And that's across a number of different countries. So it's not very much land that's actually been acquired for this. And so this is an example of 21 of the cases that we looked at. And we found that they took a certain kinds of patterns. So there was one whole group of investments that turned out to be old aid projects that the Chinese had built in the 60s or the 70s. And then they had come back and as investors, when these aid projects, which all were done for African governments, when they were privatized as state-owned farms, is privatized under structural adjustment programs. So we took those are some of these here. So those disappeared. I'm not sure if these actually align with the actual cases, but it's just for dramatic effect here. So and then there's another group of cases that were not old aid projects, but they were early investments that were done, you know, 1990 or early on 15 years ago or longer that Chinese companies did. So these couldn't be regarded as really new land grabs. And they also were usually existing farms that were acquired or purchased. So a few more disappeared through that. Then we found examples of projects that there was real intention, but the company never was able to actually acquire any land at all. And so those started disappearing here. Quite a few of those there. In fact, more of those. We could go back to that one. This is an example of a project that they would like to do. They're very serious about this. It's in Sierra Leone. However, the Ebola epidemic scared the company away and they haven't yet come back to complete that. So that's possible if that goes through that they will add considerably. And then there were acquisitions of very recent acquisitions that didn't even make it into some of these land grab databases, but a very large acquisition of a rubber plantation in the Cameron, which is the largest Chinese agricultural investment, which I think is a little bit back in this. I've already deleted it. So there were a few large investments. Now the one in Cameron is the largest. So this actually leaves once we get rid of this one. The ones that we actually found that were current Chinese new acquisitions in which there was land acquired from that was new land. So it could be looked at as some kind of land grabbing is here. So these are really about four cases that were very significant out of those 21. And then there are a few others in the appendix that you can hear about. So what I found in the this is an investment that happened in 1990. So this is one that China doesn't control most of the farms in Zambia that is really kind of laughable. The largest farms in Zambia are actually owned by white Zambian and Irish investors who have these big cattle ranches and their other large farming investments too. So this is one that's been there a long time since 1990. We visited that. I didn't take these pictures here. But this is an example of an old Chinese aid project in Somalia, which this one didn't turn into an investment. But it's just there still the buildings and so on. You see these scattered all around the continent. And then I want to tell you about some of the other investments that either did or didn't happen. I'll tell you three stories. And what I want to highlight of these stories is the African agency. The untold story of the Africans are part of this whole process. Now his picture is not here but this is a story about Zaidi Ali. And Zaidi Ali is a Mozambican. He comes off his background. He's been there three generations. His background is from Muslim India. His great-grandfather then came to Mozambique many years ago. And he fought in the Civil War and then he became a teacher and then he became an entrepreneur. And he bought a hotel and he had some restaurant up in Beira. And in about 2003 he decided to go into farming. And he thought, so he acquired a lease on 15,000 hectares. And then he had some kind of mysterious investment with a Chinese grain and oil company, CGOC. And it didn't work. Now that's all I knew about it. And I was really eager to find out more. There's very little information about this. But so how did I find out more? I eventually ended up meeting Zaidi Ali in Maputo. I found him on LinkedIn. So this is another example of how this forensic internet sleuthing can work. I searched for him on LinkedIn. He popped up. I sent him a message. He answered back. And we agreed to meet on my next trip to Maputo. So we had lunch together. And I said to him, tell me about this investment that you had with China grain and oil corporation. Because this was supposed to be like this really big soybean thing. So he said, well, in 2003 I acquired this land. And I decided to grow soybeans. But I didn't know the first thing about growing soybeans. So I went to Brazil. They know how to grow soybeans in Brazil. And so in Brazil I went around to a lot of different soybean institutes. And I talked to soybean producers. And I was looking to find somebody to bring back to Mozambique to train the farmers and to work on this. And while he was there he met China grain and oil corporation. And they were also on a delegation going around to the same places looking for soybeans to buy to send back to China. And so he met them. He had their business cards of course, exchange cards. He went back to Mozambique and he kept thinking about these Chinese guys. And he decided to track them down in Beijing and propose a joint venture. And he did that. He went to Beijing. They came. They looked at the land. They decided to invest. So they did this investment. And the first year it was a disaster. There was a drought. They didn't have an irrigation system. And it didn't end up working. The next year China grain and oil corporation was merged into Koffco, China's big grain trader. And so the head of Koffco looked around at these various things that the subsidiaries were doing. And he looked at this project in Mozambique. He said disaster. And just cut them off. So the finance ended. They pulled out. And Ziya Li was left high and dry. And I said to him did you lose money? He said yes. I almost, I had to take out a mortgage on my hotel. I almost lost it. And the Chinese had said they, they pulled out because it was a money losing operation for them as well. And, but then he said to me, you know, I learned so much from those Chinese guys. I loved them. And so he would be eager to partner with them where they could come back. Now, the second story is from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And this is a story that involves, again, one of these supposed very large. This is the one that was going to be half the arable land in the DRC, 2.3 million hectares that China bought and so on and so forth. What this actually was, was a telecommunications company, Zhongxin ZTE, many of you will be familiar with them. They were active in telecommunications in the DRC. And they've been there for a long time doing telecommunications projects. But ZTE decided, back in Shenzhen, which is their headquarters, they decided to diversify into biofuels. It was the idea of their entrepreneurial head. And so they were going to go to Indonesia and other places. They went all around to where they had subsidiaries and they said, what about getting land to do biofuels investment? And so they had very big plants. This is true. They really didn't want a big chunk of land. And their business plan for the Congo was about 2 million hectares or so in the business plan. So it really was an idea that they had that they wanted to do. However, ultimately, they only got 200 hectares. How did this happen? First of all, the agreement they had with the government was for 100,000 hectares. Still quite large, but not half the air of land in the Congo, which is a rather large country. So they got this land. It was allocated way out in the middle of the country. And so Wang Kuen, who was their regional sales manager, was in charge of this. He was not an agriculturalist. So he hired people from Indonesia to come and advise him on how to, whether this was a good piece of land. They took planes. They flew above it. They landed in the local airport there. They took soil samples and they said, you know, it looks pretty good. But they said, there's just one problem. There aren't any roads here. And you're going to have to bring everything in and out on the Congo River. The Congo River is a natural river. It's full of sandbars. It's full of obstacles, crocodiles or alligators or whatever it is they have there. It's not an easy journey. It's literally, as VS and I pull around, it's the heart of darkness. It's a, what did he say? An area of that book. Anyway, Stephen, I'm sure you know the name of that one. Bend in the River. Bend in the River. Bend in the River. Exactly. So they decided they had to see how the river transport would go. And Wang Kuen brought in a whole team of river transport people from China. And he, they hired a boat and they started up the river to the place where the plantation would be. And almost immediately they hit a sandbar. And it takes them three days just to go, you know, the first hundred miles or so. The boat starts breaking down. And I'm not sure they ever made it all the way up to the location. But the river team said to him, you know, they turned to him, they said, you know, Wang Kuen is going to take 100 years to make this a navigable river that can really be used for what you need. And so, they didn't go forward with the project. So again, the idea was there was not to grow food to send back to China, but it was an investment in biofuels that they were interested in doing. And what they ended up with was this very small pilot project of 200 hectares. The last story also involves Africans. And this is a picture which I took from his Facebook page of Kumu Kalani Fury. Kumu Kalani Fury was, is still, and actually he's probably in the UK. He's not here, is he? Anyway, Kumu Kalani is this wonderful guy, this Zambian, who went to China on a Chinese government scholarship to study civil engineering. And so he got his civil engineering degree, I think he was at Jiangxi University, and there he fell in love with a Chinese woman. And so he decided he wasn't ready to go back to Zambia quite yet. And he got a job. He got a job with Wuhan Kaidi, which was a renewable energy firm in Wuhan. And Wuhan Kaidi was like John Sheen telecommunications interested in biofuels. And they wanted to go out into Asia to do an investment there. And Kumu Kalani was hired as a civil engineer for them. But he said to them, why don't you go to Africa? And they said, well, where? And he said, well, what about Zambia? And so they said, well, why don't you go and check it out for us. So Kumu Kalani went to Lusaka and he then formed Common Cause with Thompson Sikala, who was the head of the Zambia Biofuels Association. And the two of them decided to go into a joint venture together. So they drove up all the paperwork. And at the first news report of this, it was a very big project. So Kumu Kalani and Thompson Sikala were talking big. Two million hectares was the word that got out that they were really interested. Now what I have learned is that many times these entrepreneurs will come and say, we want to do something really big. And they think this is going to get a lot of attention from the government. And the government will help them to do it. And this is actually, it doesn't work all the time, but it is a strategy. And that's one reason you get these big headlines. So Kumu Kalani and Thompson Sikala were this big investment that was supposed to be two million hectares. They actually ended up getting no land at all. For two years, they went around to the chieftains. They got these agreements. Finally, they had seventy nine thousand hectares, which was not anywhere close to two million, but they had agreements for this. And they had to have it approved by the Zambian government. There was an election. And it turned out that Michael Sata was elected to become the new president. And if you know anything about Zambia or China and Africa, Michael Sata is the one who was elected on an anti-China platform. And so he decided not to approve this investment. So that also did not go forward. So these are just some examples of investments that have been in the news and how they're much more complicated and they involve many more actors. You would not expect Brazil to be a player in this China-Africa engagement. You wouldn't expect that something that was described as being too half the arable land of the Congo would turn out to be two hundred hectares. Or that this China, something positioned as China requests two million hectares for biofuel in Zambia turns out to be two Zambians that are actually doing the requesting here. So it's a lot more complicated than you think. So what are the Chinese actually doing in Africa? Well, we, they're doing these agro-technology demonstration centers, which is an interesting model which involves bringing in companies. Companies actually propose these or they were selected to do these agro-technology demonstration centers funded by the Chinese aid budget. So it combines this business and foreign aid model. The companies are supposed to use these as platforms to do further investment. So these have been very much mixed in terms of the outcome. That is one thing that's going on and there are at least 25 countries that have these agro-technology demonstration. And there are other people in the room that can speak to this in greater detail. But in terms of is this really something uniquely Chinese? Not at all. What we have up here is something from USAID that there's a new alliance for food security which involves corporations joining together with aid agencies. And these are some American companies, Cargill, Monsanto and so on that are joining in with USAID to foster agricultural development and food security in Africa. So these parallels are quite striking in terms of this model. It's not all that different. Here's another thing that the Chinese are interested in. This is from Zimbabwe. It's the agro-technology demonstration there. Again, a Chinese company, the one that got this is one that promotes agricultural mechanization, agricultural machinery. And they're trying to sell their machines. And this is an example of some of the machinery that they have there. Now of course the US and other companies have already got good markets for machinery there. And this is from a picture I took at the China Africa Friendship Farm in Zambia which shows John Deere, an American tractor there, which was their preferred choice of tractors to use on that farm. This actually doesn't come from America. It comes from Brazil. So again, it's complicated global patterns that we see happening here. There are examples. This comes from the Cameroon. This is a rice project. Again, an agro-technology demonstration center in which the company running that wanted to make a really big investment. They wanted to do a 10,000-hectare investment, but they were never able to get the land. So still it's only at 100 hectares. And also they introduced these rice techniques to men, which I imagine a camera like many parts of West Africa. It's usually women who do these kinds of systems. So it's a cultural clash there. And also Chinese companies want to follow companies like Monsanto or Bayer Crop Science. They want to sell their own high technologies. And so this is a picture over here of Yuanlunping high tech. I visited them in Changsha, where their headquarters are in Hunan. And they have hybrids and high-yield seeds and other intellectual property in agriculture, and they want to market this. So they're also running some of these agro-technology demonstration centers in order to learn about doing business in Africa. And here is an example of these pictures come from Angola. I didn't take these, but they are contract building projects. So the Angolan government has contracted with Chinese companies to actually build state farms. And so there is what I saw a new wave in some places of these large state farm models of governments who think that building something big and having it under state control is one way to address food security issues in their country. And we see one case in Zimbabwe of a Chinese company getting a contract back in 2003 to build something that ended up failing because the Zimbabwe government couldn't afford to pay for it. In Mali, the Malibia project, I also talk about how that, that again failed because of the coup in Mali and then the Civil War in Libya. But that was again the Libyan and Malian government's idea of having a big project was contracted to a Chinese company to build it. And these projects in Angola of which there are about seven. So that's another model of what the Chinese are doing. They're building these. And then there are many small Chinese farms and these, this is from Lusaka from the market. And you could see over here there are just a few Chinese guys up there and they're buying some spring onions from a small Chinese farm who's selling spring onions. Later on in that morning the Chinese chicken sellers will be there although they weren't, there are certain hours of which they're restricted to be by in fact they might have already left because I think it might have been earlier that I got there that the Chinese they're selling chickens. But that's also happening and these are kind of sporadic they're usually making growing Chinese vegetables and selling to the growing Chinese communities in these areas. This is another model of contract farming and this is a kind of mixed model in Mozambique which is one of the large investments it will be up to 20,000 hectares it's not all in operation yet but it is quite vast and some of us in the room have been there but when you go there and you see this it really stretches out in this flood plain in Shai Shai in the southern part of Mozambique and this is one of the women who is working as a contract farmer there so she's getting supplies and inputs from the Chinese and then she's growing rice and selling it back to the company which then processes it and they want to expand that model to the full 20,000 hectares it's just on a small portion of that right now. So and then the last thing is that question about who will feed China? This is a picture taken in Brazil so Brazil, Argentina, the United States we're the ones feeding China so when China is importing they're importing 95 percent of the maize I think that the import comes from the United States the soybeans are coming from Brazil and that it's the United it's the Americans that are really feeding China and we looked at the trade data to look at what was happening in agriculture and what was happening between China and the African continent and what we found interestingly was that if you look at just food items anything that qualifies as food it's China that's feeding Africa because Africa is a food deficit region whether it's rice or maize or other food crops or even processed foods they're importing that food from outside and a lot of that food is coming from China if you look at shelves in African villages now you're seeing processed foods that are coming in from China so China is feeding Africa and the continent is by and large not able to feed itself so I think what does this all mean then it's there are several different things one is that Africa really is in charge of what happens whether or not Africa ends up being able to feed itself this is an African decision a second thing that came and that they have to implement a second thing that became clear to me is that this idea that the Chinese are there sort of repaciously grabbing Africa has very deep roots and I found this wonderful quotation from 1966 that was in this great book called The Star Wrap by Philip Snow it was a wonderful book so he wrote that the first president of Congo Brazzaville said in 1966 he said that Africa is under threat of a Chinese communist colonization coherent logical and terribly effective which would in due course turn the entire continent into a gigantic rice field so 1966 so of course that didn't happen and it's not happening now Africa is China the Chinese are not building a new empire in Africa really rather Chinese firms are part of a new wave of globalization so their agribusiness firms are going out like Cargill they want to model themselves after Cargill they want to model themselves after Monsanto they want to model themselves after John Deere and they want to model themselves yes after the U.S. companies like Firestone which has a large rubber plantation in Liberia so they are as scholar Edward Seinfeld put it they are playing our game and I think the sooner that we realize this the sooner that we see the parallels are really much more striking on the differences the sooner that we can work more cooperatively especially at the government to government level with the Chinese and perhaps helping to foster agriculture and food production so that Africa can one day feed itself and maybe in the future help feed China at the end we will take rounds of two or three questions yes please I was curious about the actual process during the research itself you mentioned a lot of internet sleuthing and following people lived in Facebook and that kind of thing did you find any sensitivities or barriers around actually accessing data was there a did was there any people who could go up on the side to see just things people didn't really want you to dig into I'm not sure yeah okay yes we'll take a few more and let me check I read an article in the BBC a few weeks ago and it talked about and talked about top destinations for Chinese investment in my book and I didn't really see much effort in countries there and the one I saw that was fifth is Nigeria which I thought was quite surprising because from hearing the rhetoric I never hear about China investment in Nigeria I heard about it in South Africa and Ethiopia and Zambia but never nothing to Nigeria so I was just wondering I would like to hear a story from the few examples that you gave so I was just wondering if you'd be nervous so thank you now that China's outward direct investment is probably going to outpace the foreign direct investment coming into China in terms of that pattern and that context it's also starting to change the destinations of this investment so we're seeing a lot more involvement in Central Asia for example in the Middle East I mean in this new context what kind of role will Africa plays it's still going to be top of the list for China if so why okay so let me start in the first question which I think is about the sensitivities and whether it was difficult getting this information first of all it was difficult getting the information and sometimes it was easy but it was hard just because it hasn't been collected that much and it really so much of it involved doing field work and that involved going out to the places and I found for example in just to give a story from my previous book The Dragon's Gift in Sierra Leone I was trying to find out what had happened to an old Chinese aid project and everyone in Freetown told me there's nothing there you know it's just bush but I got on a bus and I went out there and it took me two days to get there and I found it was flourishing and so that was just not the same story so by actually going out to the rural areas and I think there are many examples of people still that go to Africa and they just stay in the capital city and they don't actually go out to the field to see what's happening and they may get a different story there so about sensitivities there because there's really so little land grabbing going on it wasn't that sensitive because I think on the part of the Chinese they probably wanted to tell the story that we're actually not having a lot of success here grabbing land so and I was surprised by the it's not that easy like it took me a long time to get I interviewed Zhongxi telecommunications I didn't go to the Congo because I knew there wasn't and other people had gone there there wasn't anything happening there but I wanted to find out from them what had happened and so I went I met with them in China and then I finally was able to meet Wang Kewen who told me though he filled in all the story about as I'm able to talk to him so that and I was surprised he's studying in England he had very good English and he was very happy to talk with me and this most of the people that I've talked with have been you know they they're pretty straightforward I think if you're a journalist you probably get a different experience because they're really there's been so much sort of negative there's already just a negative feeling about having a journalist talk to you and then I think they don't trust that it's actually the story is going to get out there in its totality and rather than some little thing will be clipped and then you know that will be the thing that gets there so there's nervousness about that but I also have a my first book on China's agriculture was published in the 1990s and I always tell them that you know I've been doing this I'm a serious scholar I've been doing this a long time so I think that helps as well but then in Zimbabwe that didn't help I could not I could track down this I couldn't get an agreement to have a I couldn't even contact them so I just went there so and it worked I'm not sure it always would but I was lucky the top destinations for Chinese FDI Nigeria I haven't seen the breakdown in terms of the data but let me say related to the third question Africa is not a top destination for China for anything you know it's not for finance it is it's a it's a pretty big destination maybe half of Chinese over the finance is going to Africa but not for investment you know look at at Australia in just one country is getting in some years as much investment as the whole continent of Africa gets from China so it's not a really top destination so I was asking about because yeah I'm coming back to you okay and I just skipped ahead to answer her question but in terms of Nigeria um the there are there is Chinese oil investment in Nigeria there is manufacturing investment we have a whole project in which we're looking at this and a study that's about to come out actually in a Chinese manufacturing investment in Nigeria so that's there there's some small agricultural investment I'm surprised that it's one of the top destinations for Chinese FDI globally I would say I don't think that would be the case yeah in terms of Africa there's another way to look at this which is data on the number of approved investments and we also have that data so South Africa Nigeria are uh South Africa and Nigeria Egypt is very large Ethiopia Ghana Zambia I think Tanzania are the top countries for the number of investments we don't have the value they said investments and contracts between 25 and 25 is a different matter contracts is a different matter because contracts are financed they can be financed by the African government or private entities or by the Chinese and that's a very different matter from FDI and people often confuse them so Nigeria with the oil of money and the infrastructure needs and the telecommunication and the railway construction the light rail in Abuja it's a big market for contracts but that's just building things it's not only things okay I've got six questions coming to it so I'm going to take seven three now and then four later on okay can you do it first I just wanted to ask I mean in terms of how difficult it was for you to find all this information and you know how many myths there are around sort of Chinese investment flows into Africa how accurate can we assume that sort of the top line figures that we are actually getting on sort of overall FDI or ODI and China are at all I'm Tony Allen from SOAS and Kings thank you about Deborah that was wonderful okay I was I was in a room with about the same number of people two evenings ago it was a press club and I can report that the Chinese myths are big and strong I was the only one pushing back saying no China Chinese are not investing in far Latin Africa so there there were 80 or 90 people associated with journalism who was making the argument yeah do you think well I was put slightly put down because I was saying no no there aren't because I know because of your work that they aren't but the guy next to me was who was something of an academic other people weren't on the were not academics on the panel said but I was there when I was having dinner afterwards he said he was he actually hadn't been there since 2005 he had been there well this is this is how this stuff was there but can I just have confirmation we worked you know thank you for the chapter in our book but we observed both the Chinese especially when you contrasted what the Middle Eastern investors were doing whether the very rich ones or the not so rich ones they were really doing crazy things investing in quite accessible places but in places where the water resources had already been over-allocated what the Chinese clearly it's interesting hearing it because what the Chinese obviously did was learn in the past 30 years that investing in African agriculture was likely to be tough so if you're going to invest in agriculture you invest in Brazil you invest in the United States and you invest in Australia you don't lose a dollar you get certain that your dollars are going to stay there they may not make much but you also learn a great deal so they're very panning on on that they've learned and they can see the difficulties but what they've also learned is that the infrastructure is going to be put in place and they're certainly doing a lot of that ports and roads so I don't know whether that's contracts but it's certainly doing in my view the right thing because African agriculture cannot take off until the infrastructure is there I think I would make it even broader and say that there is a lot of Chinese finance for infrastructure in Africa I don't see this as some people do with the purpose that they need to build the ports up so they can ship all that food back to China they're doing it because African infrastructure needs every year are about 90 billion dollars and that's a huge amount of business so Chinese companies can get those contracts so Chinese banks will finance a lot of those contracts and this is win-win in terms of building and China's construction companies going out and becoming global champions so that's I think the purpose of that and it also helps to foster the trade to make to make those all the roads and the railroads and so on better but we can talk about this if this was about infrastructure because I have a lot of things to say about that but let me just say about that answer the question about the accuracy of the FDI figures this is for those of us that work in this area we know that the FDI figures the official figures from China are not very good and the reason they're not very good is not because they're trying to hide it or they're trying to mystify the rest of the world it's because China has capital controls and so what that means is that if you're a Chinese company and you get your capital outside of China and this includes going to Hong Kong that's considered outside it's an overseas financial center it then isn't any more recorded as coming from China so if you look at Latin America in terms of the official data the two largest the places that get the largest Chinese OFDI overseas foreign direct investment in Latin America it's not Chile it's not Brazil it's not Argentina or Venezuela it's the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands the top two destinations for Chinese investment in LAC so you know that's ridiculous obviously you wouldn't go to the British Virgin Islands and see like Chinese have taken over the whole island and everything is just it's not invisible because it's an overseas financial center and so that money then is going from the BVIs and it's going anywhere it's going to to invest in the United States it's going to invest in the UK it's going to invest in Africa by corporations that are headquartered in the BVIs so that means we cannot actually get accurate data on this another problem just to elaborate on this is is the problem of where a company comes from not just that but the example of Addix patrolling company this was purchased by a Chinese firm they have assets in Gabon I believe Cameroon maybe Nigeria as well and Iraq so and they're headquartered in Switzerland so a Chinese company buys them but and that's clearly investment in Africa but it shows up as investment in Switzerland because that one actually was you know it kind of came up in the figures or this big Cameroon investment I think a lot of people have missed this this is the largest Chinese agriculture investment in Africa it's over 100,000 hectares in three plots and this is the purchase by Sinochem 51% of a Singapore company which already had those plantations and GMG Global so it's still called GMG Global Sinochem owns it 51% so I'm calling it now Chinese and yet it doesn't it doesn't show up because it's an investment in Singapore so that's what makes it difficult to get really accurate figures so the follow-up sorry really quickly from that is where's the best source though at this point if you're looking at projects Derek Scissors has the at American Enterprise Institute he keeps what's called the China investment tracker so he looks at both contracts which is what somebody else asked about and then also FDI it's not perfect because Derek just puts down the value that's publicly of what the investment is hoped to be so it's larger than the actual investment but at least he's tracking that and that's pretty good so if you look at that you look at the MOFCOM data you look at the approvals data which is available and then you can look at the host but I think the host country data is usually pretty bad too because they just it's basically approval data also and it doesn't actually track necessarily as we found out in Ethiopia with the actual investments we can talk further about that just a quick one what's the proportion of state-owned investment or community development as in four places state-owned companies as opposed to private companies who more quick one sorry yeah you mentioned that you that you'd also looked at the policies policy and incentive structure from the Chinese government for out there investment I wonder if you could say a little bit more about that and relatedly what does the sort of grand food security strategy the Chinese government of like yeah well when we talked about China and Africa three assumptions came out easily one is land grabbing the other is imperialism the other is quality of work from experience in Africa land grabbing is widespread all over the world imperialism is coming from the same place that has come always quality of work we can challenge any company work that has been made in Africa from companies from all over the world so the question is why do you think those assumptions are so accepting Western countries and if do you think that there is any political intention to promote this vision of the question in Africa shall I wait till she's answered those they're quite big questions okay yeah state versus private that's an interesting question and I haven't I should look at the 60 cases of that sort of alleged investment the actual investments are so few so ones that were attempted you know we have some kind of bigger category my my sense is several things one is that the older investments were almost universally state because most of them were China they were two companies China State Firemaker Business Corporation which is now under China National Agricultural Development Corporation Group and then the other was Comflams which is China Complete Plant Export-Import Corporation they did a lot of the sugar plantation investments so those two companies were a lot of the early investments in the 80s and the 90s and then when you get up into the late 90s into the the last 15 years you start to see more diversification and so it's something is a question I don't know is ZTE they a state-owned company are they private I'm not even quite sure what they're state they're state they are state-owned it's state ownership but operate like a private so they are and I'm not even sure at this point in agriculture certainly if there's that much utility in making that distinction although it's interesting but I do see companies that have a state connection particularly at the provincial level and we're seeing these they're acting like you know they're acting entrepreneurial so they're not sort of going out there directed by the government to do this it's more that the opportunities come up and they go out to seek them so the in terms of the the one Zambia Mozambique is a mix you know they're really they're these hybrids now like what WANBAO that whole investment in Mozambique it's WANBAO is a private commodities firm the original company that set up the farm was a state-owned company with a lot of shareholders from other state-owned state farms and Hubei it's just it's a very interesting mix of models so the policy oh gosh well I haven't hold it's the longest chapter in the book on the the policy framework so I'm not sure I can repeat it all right now I bet I'd advise you to buy the book can they buy the book then you'll get the whole story but I would say just very briefly that there has been an evolution that the a few bottom lines one is that the agricultural going global is pretty much assumed within the general going global so there isn't a special thing about agriculture in general so agriculture was always part of the going global so if you look at all the incentive structure all this is about overseas land it was part of one of the things that qualifies for special incentives right back to the beginning from everything that we could see and then there are there is one company set up by China Development Bank or the China Africa Development Fund and the China National Agriculture Development Corporation Group which is called China Africa Agriculture Investment Corporation but this is a one capitalized at one billion UN remedy and that's about what 116 million dollars or so it's not very big and they've had a lot of trouble finding bankable projects to invest in so and then in terms if you look at what the incentive structure is like for food imports coming in that's it's been opened up for maize and for soybeans now but it's still not that open for there are quotas on things like rice and wheat so it's not that easy or sugar even it's not that easy it's not just a street open market for those commodities because they're still protecting Chinese farmers and and wanting to ensure which gets into the question about the the food security strategy there are many debates in China about China's food security and whether or not they can rely on global markets and they're getting a lot of advice from outside to open up and rely on global markets Shenzhen Fahn they had a if free as we're making this argument Justin Yifu Lin has been making this argument you can trust the global markets not everyone in China doesn't chuckle when I said that not everyone in China believes this you know I was just reading a book two days ago in which by a security studies person which said there was a line in this book that said China's goal is to destroy the world system that is that you know the United States has made safe for global prosperity in China's goals destroy the system and that we should counter China by setting up choke points in Malacca and other areas you know where they get their oil and so on and we should you know be ready to choke them off if they move more aggressively in this way or that way so you know in Beijing they're sort of reading these things also they're going to really want to have all of our food coming through the Malacca straights and so there are debates and they have they have revised the food security recommendations and so those are coming in in greater and greater quantities but the rice and wheat is still pretty much for domestic self-sufficiency there are some important experts with that but not not very much and you can see Xi Jinping as again said and they have a very important statement that happens at the first big conference of every year it's always about agriculture food and he has said you know our goals must be filled with Chinese grain so you know there's that political statement like we are going to be sure that the Chinese rice bowl will be filled with Chinese grain and that we will not leave our food security up to global markets that some other people might cut us off at the Malacca straights at some point but that is debated okay the quality work or why these assumptions so you know I think there are many Chinese media there was just something that came out an interview with with me in China daily I don't know if you saw it but you know they they really love this thing that's like the western media is against us and they're putting all these myths out there and I don't think there's really an intentionality about it I really don't think it's like a conspiracy on the part of the west but I do think there is a kind of almost a studied lack of desire to really look into it because this narrative is so in some ways comfortable and it sells it sells newspapers the sort of China threat narrative is and I've been wondering like how much media attention my research will get because you know the headlines of China not grabbing land in Africa is just not it's catchy okay we've got five more and I I hope that Deborah is very tired she arrived this morning and she's had a very full day so I'm going to take two now and then answer and then three more and we'll finish with that so we talked about the western media's myths about China and Africa what did you discover about the African view of China's land so-called land grabbing or agricultural activity in Africa I wanted to ask a different kind of question there's quite a lot of China Chinese living in Africa and I believe about a billion many of those are um you think great you know that many of those I remember looking at when I was in Shanghai looking at CCTV a lot of stories about small business rather than setting up small farms and other kinds of businesses I wonder whether you had a chance with the first track one more at the back no actually I always asked my question was um I think it's kind of been asked because it was about the ideological basis for these headlines that you've been examining and um you've kind of followed the trajectory searching for the veracity of the headlines and coming from a specific a specific perspective where um there's a lot of ideological argument about China versus the U.S. trying to make boys into the desert so I wonder if you're saying like you're sure about it because you seem to suggest that there isn't this great anti-China narrative going on and I think there is something to that or not or not or not just because it's worried about as well all right so what what is the African view let me first of all say something that maybe I should have said right at the beginning that I think land grabbing is really problematic if you're an African subsistence farmer and if you are having your land be allocated by your government which is usually how it happens to foreign corporation and then you have to be resettled somewhere if you're lucky or just pushed off if you're not this isn't a type of experience and we you know in the west we've already we've finished and done with that period you know Australia has already grabbed its land the United States took its land away England and the enclosure movement which we were just talking about so you know South Africa got its land and so on so these things happen and all through the Latin America we don't have to say you know the the native peoples the land has been grabbed in Africa a lot of countries this hasn't yet happened or it hasn't happened and so there are these large areas in which traditional land holding goes on there are also a lot of other pieces but just taking those and these are many peoples' lives are ripe for commercial investment which would use the land more efficiently there may be some truth to that but if this happens it's going to be very painful and it's going to be and it's never going to happen in a way that will probably make those peoples' lives better off I don't know if it will happen I expect it will because that's been where how it's happened everywhere else this thing about preserving small-scale agriculture and then building commercial farms up that way is very rare it doesn't happen that often even if you look at Taiwan, China all these things they that landlords were there and then redistribution happened so it wasn't just those small subsistence farmers you know grew from subsistence to become small commercial farmers it didn't happen like that so I do foresee there will be pain and then it may be that as Marx or as Barrington Moore said about that the history will roll over that these subsistence farmers in Africa in a painful way I don't know if the Chinese will necessarily be the instrument of that I don't know that that will happen but I do I do expect and I suspect that the vision of smallholder subsistence farms growing into commercial yeoman farmers is probably not going to be the way it's going to unfold that's going to take a lot of time and having this process developed I hope perhaps it can happen with industrialization providing the jobs that people will need to go to as they did in England with the inclusion movement there but so the African view of this is I think there's both excitement and fear so the excitement is that China's new and a new investor coming in African governments and African joint venture partners are excited about that they they like to the idea of partnering with the Chinese but ordinary Africans are more concerned because they know that the history of outsiders coming into Africa does not always make good things for ordinary people and so there's concern about that I do think to say one more thing about that which is that we do have data on public opinion polls and public opinion polls whether it's from the BBC or the Afrobarometer or the Pew there are a number of these I've blogged about this on my blog ChinaAfricaRealStory.com so you can you can have links to some of these polls but they show that by and large of across Africa the public opinion on average is positive about the Chinese and it's less positive than it is about the United States so opinion is positive about us little less for the Chinese and then the former colonial power is also positive but less again or somewhere around there it's all like 60, 70 percent positive on average it varies a lot country by country so for example South Africa is much more negative about the Chinese than Kenya or Nigeria so that's the only thing otherwise if we're talking about public opinion we're just talking about anecdotes you know oh I talked to a taxi driver he's really good some Chinese all right you know I talked to one person that they love the Chinese you know it doesn't really mean that much if we're just talking about our own anecdotes Chinese living in Africa the million Chinese this is you know the data we have like there are million Chinese there are million Chinese we have a bloody clue how many Chinese there are living in Africa we really haven't three million in the U.S. well you know there's supposedly around seven the Japanese have very they have official figures on how many Chinese have residence permits and it's between 700 and 800,000 Chinese living in Japan and nobody's calling Japan China's you know second comment it's not like the Chinese are taking over Japan I just I find these these statements about you know million Chinese farmers or million Chinese whatever's in Africa we don't know and probably the majority of the Chinese are transient they're there working they're there trading they're not actually settling and living permanently there but that will change and there will be more of that and this is probably this is an interesting development and whether it's a billion or not I really have no idea so I think I know the Pacific the Pacific I'm going to punt that back to my colleague Phillipa Brandt who is at the Lowy Institute in Australia she works on the Pacific that's what she does research on and she's really a much she and there are several other Australian scholars and some American scholars living in Australia that work on this and so I just all everything I know about China the Pacific comes from Phillipa and Gavin Neely and others who who work on this but it does seem to me that there are some similar patterns a lot of foreign aid and I think that's partly because there are many many little countries in the South Pacific just as there are many many little countries in Africa many many little countries in the Caribbean that's again a lot of foreign aid and there's diplomatic reasons why that happened so that's one common pattern other than that I really don't know know that much about the South Pacific that's the last two questions you I'm interested actually in your thoughts on the prospering of African countries within the Unmored Initiative and I apologize if you touch on this in the beginning for your lecture there are a lot of Chinese companies that are very interested in investing in Africa for example we had we were in touch with state and enterprise and they were very interested in venturing there but Belt and Road touches Kenya not Nigeria but Nigeria obviously is the most attractive market for them for first point of entry so I'll be interested the governments in Africa posturing themselves to be part of that vision that China has for Belt and Road and download the final question I would like to see the picture about you know I mean the global players in this agricultural investment in China I don't know if you have the input but probably it's probably so beyond the Chinese not only the Chinese it's like beyond the global yep like looking at what other players are doing in this agricultural investment and transfer probably I don't know if that would be a future work that would be okay yeah I wanted to look at one case here okay the Belt and Road it's a really interesting question and I think my sense is that that nobody that people in Africa don't really know what Belt and Road is going to mean for them they you know first of all it seemed like it was going to be Asian it's going to be contiguous and so on and to the Silk Road doesn't really get to Africa and then now it's going to be along the Zhenghe voyage that maybe Kenya maybe Bosnian vehicle get some of it the way Zhenghe stopped there so many years ago Zhenghe was the Chinese admiral that came during the Ming dynasty so I don't I I think it's really much more spin about you know that Africa's got a little piece of this just like for the BRICS like the New Development Bank South Africa got to be the S before it was just Russia, India, Brazil and China and then South Africa conveniently was an S so they got to be part of the BRICS so I think this it's just I don't really see that there's going to be a huge amount of finance going in that's going to generate a lot because Kenya is not the place where the Chinese companies are really interested in going they have South Africa Nigeria and other spots so I wouldn't look to that to be really a boom area in terms of the global players in Africa I didn't do that research so it's it's a huge it's a three years to do this book and I I really would encourage somebody to do this on on other things I would I would advise you to look at Eckert Worts W.E.R.T.Z. I think it is Eckert who is works on Gulf State and Saudi investment a lot in the Ethiopia Sudan that area he also found that there was much less actually going on that have been in the headline so not that they didn't want to but again some of the same problems happen but I will tell you that there was something just fascinating and I talk about this in the book but Eckert is also he also has a blog and in July 2014 there was a story published in Harpers Magazine by a journalist let's name him Frederick Kaufman and he told this story about a Ethiopian Saudi businessman his name is Alamoudi and he was supposedly investing in Gambella which is in the south of of Ethiopia which is an area where the Ethiopian government wants to do a lot of investment so he said this is what Kaufman wrote he said Alamoudi is getting his hands on as much land as possible much rice as possible flying it over the heads of his starving countrymen and selling the treasure to Saudi Arabia last year Alamoudi who most Ethiopians call this shake exported a million tons of rice about 70 pounds for every Saudi citizen so that's what he wrote in Harpers Magazine which is a very legitimate place well they clearly don't have any fact checkers because words pointed out that Saudi Star which was this company they had a lease for 10,000 hectares that this is true but in that year 2013 to 2014 they had they were still in the pilot phase of their project 250 hectares was all that they had developed and they had deep production financial challenges there were riots there violent protests and the poor infrastructure so all of these things were a problem for that project and in 2013 which was the year in which this rice was supposedly being flown over the heads of the starving Ethiopians to feed the Saudis Saudi Arabia did import 1.2 million tons of rice that year it came from 70 percent from India and the rest from the United States Pakistan and Thailand so it did nothing coming from Ethiopia at all and now Alamoudi has gone bankrupt so you know it's just that was really to me just astonishing that that harbors could publish this and with stuff that was just made up so thank you for the great questions we're going to draw this session to a close and then we'll end together