{{China should publicly disclose what it pays African governments for extracting oil, gas and minerals as a way to level the playing field for companies worldwide and help countries get a fair deal for their natural resource wealth, billionaire investor George Soros said on Monday.}}<\/p>\n
\u201cChina has to line up to join the regulations. Otherwise they are spoilers,\u201d Soros said at a forum on natural resources held on the sidelines of the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit that runs through Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Sub-Saharan Africa has immense riches in gold, gems and rare minerals and new discoveries of oil and gas off east Africa promise to make it a leading exporter of hydrocarbons by 2030. Yet its citizens see only a fraction of that wealth on a continent that has among the highest levels of poverty in the world.<\/p>\n
The value of natural resources extracted each year in Africa is estimated at $500 billion but revenues collected by their governments are scarcely one-tenth of that, according to Daniel Kaufmann, president of the Natural Resource Governance Institute. In addition, $50 billion a year leaves Africa in illicit finance through mispriced trade and corruption, said Mojanki Gumbi, a trustee of the Thabo Mbeki Foundation, which focuses on the political and economic development of Africa.<\/p>\n
To increase accountability for natural resources, the United States and the European Union have passed laws requiring extractive industries listed on public exchanges to disclose their payments to governments.<\/p>\n
In addition, 35 countries including many in Africa are party to the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (EITI), a coalition of governments, companies and civil society that works to improve accountability for management of revenues from natural resources by setting global standards for payment disclosure.<\/p>\n
Soros called on Africans to urge China to participate in the initiative, and to expand payment disclosure from oil, gas and mining to include forestry and agriculture.<\/p>\n
{ reuters}<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
{{China should publicly disclose what it pays African governments for extracting oil, gas and minerals as a way to level the playing field for companies worldwide and help countries get a fair deal for their natural resource wealth, billionaire investor George Soros said on Monday.}} \u201cChina has to line up to join the regulations. Otherwise […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2000053399,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[101],"byline":[170],"hashtag":[],"class_list":["post-15725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","tag-internationl","byline-igihe"],"bylines":[{"id":170,"name":"IGIHE","slug":"igihe","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":8}],"contributors":[{"id":170,"name":"IGIHE","slug":"igihe","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":8}],"featured_image":{"id":2000053399,"url":"https:\/\/en-images.igihe.com\/IMG\/logo\/arton15725.jpg","alt":"","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","width":0,"height":0,"sizes":{"thumbnail":{"url":"https:\/\/en-images.igihe.com\/IMG\/logo\/arton15725.jpg","width":1,"height":1},"medium":{"url":"https:\/\/en-images.igihe.com\/IMG\/logo\/arton15725.jpg","width":1,"height":1},"medium_large":{"url":"https:\/\/en-images.igihe.com\/IMG\/logo\/arton15725.jpg","width":1,"height":1},"large":{"url":"https:\/\/en-images.igihe.com\/IMG\/logo\/arton15725.jpg","width":1,"height":1},"full":{"url":"https:\/\/en-images.igihe.com\/IMG\/logo\/arton15725.jpg","width":0,"height":0}}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15725\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2000053399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15725"},{"taxonomy":"byline","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/byline?post=15725"},{"taxonomy":"hashtag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtag?post=15725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}