adminThe Ebola epidemic has scared off ships and planes; prompted expatriates to abandon their posts; and delayed the roll-out of thousands of jobs in the three poor West African countries hardest hit by the virus: Guinea; Liberia; and Sierra Leone, reports The Wall Street Journal. ‘All projects are at a standstill,’ said Moïse Foulah, the CEO of mining-explosives company ECP Guinée. Steel giant ArcelorMittal has delayed a $1,7bn expansion at its iron-ore mine in Liberia. One of Sierra Leone’s biggest investors, London Mining, filed for bankruptcy in October after falling iron-ore prices and concern about Ebola hampered its ability to attract financing to address long-standing woes.
And in Guinea, Rio Tinto has stopped work on a $20bn iron-ore mine deep in territory hard hit by the virus. As a result, the sector that officials in the region were counting on to pull their poor nations out of poverty has become a victim of the worst Ebola outbreak on record. Now a three-storey steel ship-loader, the largest piece of industrial machinery ever imported into Liberia, looms unused above the Buchanan port.
An overgrown lot is piled high with shipping containers full of construction equipment. Also on hold is ArcelorMittal’s plan to hire about 2,000 people to help it triple the amount of iron ore it unearths each year in a country with scant opportunities for formal work. Trade to the three countries hardest hit by Ebola was down at least 10 percent, said shipping giant Moller-Maersk. And Ebola is not the only challenge mining companies in the region face. A global drop in commodity prices, driven by factors including China’s waning appetite for raw materials, was already hurting their bottom line. Development institutions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have loosened their purse strings to help fight Ebola. But, reports Business Day, they are also accused of having weakened public health services in West Africa as they imposed rigorous controls on borrower country budgets.
The report says the accusation arises from the IMF’s ‘structural adjustment’ programmes of the 1980s and 1990s, which tied loans to strict budget regimes, and might have resulted in cuts to health spending.
According to research by David Stuckler, professor of political economy at Oxford University, covering 1996-2006, expenditures on healthcare in countries under IMF programmes grew at about half the speed of those not beholden to the fund. As for the World Bank, health expert Mohga Kamal-Yanni of the antipoverty group Oxfam pointed at the way its promotion of healthcare user fees diminished the role of the state in delivering services. The result in the countries hit by Ebola, she says, is ‘no health workers, no health units, no available medicine’. But Amanda Glassman, director of global health policy at the Centre for Global Development, is not ready to blame the two Washington-based institutions.
According to Glassman, conflicts and bad governance were more responsible for the fall in health spending in the sub-Sahara region, from 6,9 percent of GDP in 2005 to 6,5 percent in 2012. — Wall Street Journal
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