Copper: Africa produces more, but who really cashes in?

According to Le Monde, strong global demand for copper is underpinning growth in production in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia. Still according to the daily, the market's buoyant prospects are attracting new investors, American ones among them. So much for the reported facts. The rest is our reading.

The dispatch we have is thin: we do not know the sums committed, the identity of the investors, the terms of the contracts, or the share that will go to the states or to the populations. It is precisely this silence that deserves attention. When one speaks of "momentum" for Africa, which Africa is meant: the one of public budgets, or the one of shareholders?

The notion of dependency helps frame the question. In this reading, poor countries are not "behind": their economies were shaped to supply the centre with raw materials, cheap labour and outlets. A rise in the volume of copper extracted says nothing, in itself, about a change of position. One can produce more and remain in the same place in the chain, the place where the digging is done, while processing, margins and decisions are made elsewhere.

There is also the angle of dispossession. Marxists argue that primitive accumulation is not a matter of the past: mining concessions, asset sales, and land and collective resources converted into private capital are common forms of it. An article about "investment opportunities" in central and southern Africa is therefore read with that history in mind. Katanga and the Copperbelt did not discover extraction yesterday; they knew it in its colonial form, before independence changed the flag without always changing the structure, as Fanon and Cabral wrote, according to the concept notes of the Gazette.

Kwame Nkrumah observed in Neo-Colonialism that profits are greater when extraction of basic commodities is intensified in Africa and Asia (our translation). Sixty years on, copper is feeding the energy transition and the power grids of the North. The demand is green; the supply chain is less so.

This is where climate enters the scene. Capital always demands more material and energy, and offloads the costs: water, soil, the health of local residents and miners. The populations who have emitted the least risk paying for the virtuous gloss of others' growth. We have no data in the dispatch on these impacts; they will have to be sought out.

So what should be asked before applauding: who owns the mines, which royalties are collected, where the copper is refined, what local jobs result, and what debt finances the infrastructure. A rush is not development. It becomes so only if the producing countries retain control and value. Otherwise, the momentum will belong mostly to investors, and Africa will once again have supplied the subsoil.