Notes from La Republica

My wife and I receive a daily business newspaper here in our home in Colombia. The paper is called La Republica. I like the idea of receiving a daily paper and keeping up with the news (though recently I did one of those online carbon footprint surveys and learned that my daily paper consumes a lot of resources).

Almost a year ago my wife and I were selling our handmade jams in a national fair, when a woman approached us with a great offer: a year's subscription to La Republica, plus three free ads for our jams, for a very reasonable price. I eagerly accepted the offer, not knowing that La Republica was a business-focused paper, so I was surprised when we got our first issue. As a business daily it devotes inordinate space to big numbers, sales, etc. The paper gives a lot of coverage to mergers, stock offerings, corporate restructurings, and the like, which really isn't business news but rather finance. However, in a world in which so much of business is not actually production and sales of goods but rather shell games and reshuffling of capital, it seems that many "business dailies" focus mainly on the obscure machinations of high-level financiers.

Anyway, for a long time this daily newspaper went straight from our doorstep to the recycle pile, as neither of us was too interested in what the paper offered: rosy prognoses by the country's oligarchs, thinly-veiled promo pieces for private companies and government ministries, a consistent neoliberal bias that focuses on macroeconomics while not asking the hard questions about equity and real wealth creation. Many of the articles and editorials consist in willfully ignorant pronouncements by economic and political elites, who want to spin our country's inequality and poverty as something other than a total disaster.

But recently I've been reading the paper more. I don't read every article, but usually there are one or two interesting items in there. There are a few common themes that always grab my attention. Rightly or wrongly, I've come to think of myself as a smallscale mover and shaker, always looking for interesting business opportunities that might earn me a living while making my region a better place for its inhabitants. So I'm intrigued by articles on new business opportunities in Colombia, like this one on the growing call center sector and the major obstacles it faces. I fantasize about starting bilingual call centers for consumers in the US and Europe, or running tours for Chinese visitors to our country, or exporting emeralds, or whatever else I read about in the day's paper. Granted, I don't believe that exporting gems or receiving outsourced customer service responsibilities from richer countries are viable long-term strategies to advance Colombia or any other place, but on a small scale such businesses might be good for an innovative entrepreneur and his neighbors.

Another cool recent article is this one on economic and diplomatic relations between China and Colombia. The Chinese ambassador in our country talks about expanding Chinese tourism to Colombia, consumption of our raw materials, and a potential Chinese market for emeralds (of which Colombia is the world's leading producer). I glaze over the meaningless platitudes that abound in these types of articles: "We have many pending projects with Colombia and I hope that in the near future our relations reach new heights...I think every year our links are increasing. I believe we have a very solid base to further strengthen the links between both countries. Colombia is a country with lots of future, and it is a sister territory to China." But I am excited about the possibility of increased Chinese-Colombian commerce, because I think that people like me could learn some Chinese language and culture and position ourselves well as some sort of intercultural business attaches. I also love China's frankness about its insatiable commercial appetite: "Your raw materials are fascinating. You also have a great reserve of oil and especially of coal that interests us. ...Your traditional coal market has always been the US and European countries but with the crisis, these countries have reduced importation of coal from Colombia and for that you are looking for new markets like China."

On that note, I wanted to link to an article from the Atlantic about Chinese investment in Africa. This is a hot topic in development circles, because Chinese commercial development in the continent is surpassing Western development aid in many instances. This article is arguably imbued with the typical prejudices and preoccupations common to US accounts of China's rising presence on the world stage. I think that China's neo-colonial presence in Africa and other developing regions bring up some legitimate questions. Basically it seems that China is the first and only country in recent memory that is making a transition from an underdeveloped, exploited country to a world superpower exploiting underdeveloped countries. It's understandable that the heretofore powerful countries of the world are shaken by China's ascent, and it's right for local people in Africa and other places to be as critical of unethical practices by the Chinese as they are of those by other international companies.

That said, Chinese companies that extract raw materials from Third World countries don't seem that different from any other companies that do so. According to this article and other things I've read, there are large and small operators, companies that make use of more or fewer bribes, companies that contribute in differing degrees to real local development in the places they operate. But the interesting questions are if there truly are substantive differences in how Chinese companies and government relate to developing countries as compared to how the Western powers do so. If so, which model is more attractive for the Africans receiving this foreign interest--the Chinese who invest and extract without imposing their mores on Africans, or the Westerners who invest less but try to ensure a certain level of ethics (perhaps mere window-dressing) both in their own operations and in the governments receiving the money?

As I've noted above, China seems very interested in Colombia as a source of raw materials and a destination for Chinese production. I don't want Colombia to compromise its sovereignty by allowing Chinese firms to operate here with impunity (as I don't like our selling out to Canadian and US mining companies, for instance), but I think that our country is better situated to engage in trade with China than is a destitute place like Zambia. We can negotiate as equals with the Chinese, accepting what behooves us and adjusting the terms of business to our liking. We have our own infrastructure, we have our own government services, so Chinese or other businesses can't extract our resources in return for merely building a few roads or schools. And I think that Colombia can equalize the balance of trade over time by exporting more value-added goods to China as opposed to only raw materials. So I am excited about the possibilities of commerce with China.