By Charles Onunaiju
Borders that are crisscrossed more frequently by trades in goods and services are less likely to be besieged by soldiers and other armed elements, buttressing the fact that trade dividends are not just development, growth and prosperity but also peace and mutual understanding through the instrumentality of dialogue among civilizations. With the establishment and flourishing of regional free trade areas across the world, it is no doubt that trade makes concrete contributions to the national aggregates of many countries and trade promotions have become an existential part of contemporary diplomacy.
International trade expos have emerged as central theme in the contemporary international system. With trade as almost the indispensable oxygen that nations breathe, attempts and efforts to disrupt trade will have implications not only on how nations thrive but more importantly, how they survive.
In Africa, there are broadly share views that trade constitute a formidable path to not only ameliorate poverty but even to banish it with a recognition that trade is central to not only economic recovery but is remarkably consequential to the prospects of prosperity in Africa. It is further broadly recognized that the mono-structural framework of the economies in Africa which are both legacies of colonial domination and consequent skewed trade arrangement with former colonial overlords, is grossly inadequate to generate returns on trade for national aggregates.
The well-known struggles for economic diversification and added values have been the core themes of Africa’s approach to development and trade policies. The maturity and results of the efforts have greater prospects in the context of sustained international trading system now threatened by the political bombasts of the abuse of tariffs and trade wars.
U.S President, Donald Trump claimed that his reasons for instituting disruptive tariffs and escalating trade conflicts is because other countries in the world take advantage of the U.S market without the U.S enjoying reciprocal access to the markets of other countries. Without conceding these reasons are at best dubious, because problems and challenges of market access are sometimes related to the structure and nature of the individual national economies.
Trade war is not a cure-all for the structural maladies of the advanced capitalist economies, especially the United States but tampering with the pyramid structure of their economies and societies where the working people are the proverbial cannon fodders and expendables, rob them of the critical energizer of their overstretched economies barely subsisting on the tiny thread of their fabulous elite.
Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont and who vied for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party said “it is not just that one tenth of 1% owns more wealth than the bottom 90%. They don’t put their wealth underneath their mattresses right. They use that wealth to perpetrate, perpetuate their power. And they do that politically”.
From the point of structural constraint, the U.S can unshackle herself and become again, world renown and eminent trader.
Washington right now, does not seek what ails her from within but rather to engage in geo-political manoeuvre with trade disruptions as one of its key strategies. China is the U.S most obvious target in the tariff wars and trade disruptions. China happens to be the world’s foremost trader and investor. As the largest trading partner for more than 100 countries and investing an average of $340 million across the world on daily basis, China is as much an opportunity to the world as the world is an opportunity to China. China has been Africa’s largest trading partner for 14 years in a straight row and also instituted a 100% tariff free entry of goods from the least developed countries including 33 from Africa which has been a boon and veritable gateway to exit poverty for these countries.
Recognizing that trade and investment would be pivotal to the economic diversification strategies of African countries and central to her sustainability and growth, the third summit of the heads of States and Governments of the Forum on China-Africa Economic Cooperation (FOCAC) at Beijing in 2018 instituted the permanent mechanism of China-Africa Economic and Trade Expo which holds every two years in the China Southern province of Hunan. At the 3rd edition of the Expo held in 2023, a total of 120 deals valued at $10.3 billion were signed, with the Expo providing a platform for Africa’s producers and traders to explore new export markets and for Chinese consumers to find high quality, low-priced products.
Against the background of vigorous trade exchanges between China and Africa, Washington disruptive trade wars are both opportunities and challenges. Both the Chinese market and investment remain very critical to Africa’s growth prospect and development sustainability. The emerging framework of currency swaps enabling China and African businesses to conduct transactions in their national currencies without the medium of the third currency would bolster exchanges. The African Continental Free Trade Area (ACFTA) offers an integrated market and investment destination, given scope and effect to Africa ambitious plan of Agenda 2063, whose major fulcrum would consist in silencing the gun. Trade would be a major harbinger of Africa’s agenda 2063, and China as Africa’s foremost trading partner will be an important enabler in the continent’s trajectory to peace, stability and prosperity.
Strengthening cooperation with a view to build strategic resilience into its trajectories would guarantee long term prospects with minimal or even marginal effects of the trade disruptions.
Despite that trade wars are unwinnable and need not to be fought, the current Washington leadership would be hard to be persuaded. But as history has often does, it comes with the harsh reminder of having to be ignored. It did not take too long for the boisterous bubble of the “end of the history”, proclaimed in the 1990s with the collapse of the former Soviet Union to burst revealing that history was only at the cusp of a fresh starting point.
Translating the obsessive geo-political fantasy of America’s exceptionalism and hegemony into disruptive trade wars would backfire, heightening the tensions of the America’s fault line of race and street violence. Globalization powered by trade with communication technologies ever shrinking the space and helping the trends of inclusion are irreversible tide in the human prospects.
Inward and toxic nationalisms are at best ephemeral and transient. Trade may sometimes be unfair but the compelling dividends of trade means that such situations are better addressed with more trade and not less. While the mechanism of the World Trade Organization is evidently weak, however, its pioneering efforts through the Uruguay and Doha rounds remain the critical infrastructures for building consensus on basic rules.
Quite a number of regional free trade areas exist to address lacunas in trade and therefore, the international system is not short of rules to engage in issues of trade disputes.
The United States have ample leeway to redress her trade concerns and grudges, without launching disruptive trade wars. As with the U.S’ initial refusal under President Trump to engage in a broad international cooperation to contain the outbreak of the corona virus in 2020, it paid a disproportionate high price with more COVID deaths than any other country in the world. Now not only turning its back on global trade but even disrupting it, the current U.S administration would never have to entertain any illusions that there would be consequences.
•Onunaiju is director, Centre for China Studies, Abuja.
