WASHINGTON (AP) — When President Joe Biden visited Angola last week, one of the highlights was his pledge of hundreds of millions of dollars for an ambitious trans-African rail project that would bring copper and cobalt from Central Africa to the Atlantic port of Lobito.
The project is possible thanks to the commitment of a $553 million direct loan from the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, which was created in 2019 during the first Trump administration to support the expansion of China’s global reach through infrastructure projects such as the megaport in Chancay, counter. , Peru, inaugurated last month.
On Monday, the US agency celebrated its five-year milestone by pledging to advance US foreign policy and strategic interests through projects around the world, such as the one in Angola. It also seeks congressional reauthorization and a greater ability to invest in more countries when there is a strategic need to compete with China.
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“We need to be good partners while offering an alternative based on our values,” said Scott Nathan, the development agency’s CEO, who was in Angola with the president last week. “Very simple: we have to keep showing up.”
Nathan is about to leave the post. President-elect Donald Trump has yet to make a choice to lead the agency.
During its first five years, the agency has developed a portfolio of more than $50 billion in 114 countries, including solar panel manufacturing in India, a power plant in Sierra Leone and digital infrastructure in South America. To do that, the agency has leveraged government funding to partner with private investments. In the last fiscal year, the agency committed to $12 billion in new transactions, using its approximately $800 million in appropriations, Nathan said.
Investments by the agency have a “transformational impact on economic development while concretely advancing U.S. strategic interests,” Nathan said.
In Angola, for example, the rail project would help secure the supply chain by reducing both time and costs in transporting critical minerals.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan said the agency was created as the US “ceded the field” to China in a new era of geopolitics. The US needed a vision “attuned to the new geopolitical realities” and that matched “the scope of the transformational challenges.” we encountered.”
It was in 2013 when Beijing launched the massive Belt and Road Initiative to gain markets and influence around the world by building roads, railways, power plants, transmission lines and ports, mostly in less developed regions.
A recent report from the US Government Accountability Office states that China provided $679 billion for international infrastructure projects such as those in transportation and energy between 2013 and 2021, compared to the $76 billion provided by the US during the same period. Western politicians have criticized these Beijing-backed projects for creating debt traps, but Beijing says they have delivered tangible and much-needed economic benefits to host countries.
In 2018, Congress passed a bipartisan bill creating the U.S. Development Agency, aimed at bringing private investment to low- and middle-income countries through tools such as equity investments, loan guarantees and political risk insurance.
On Monday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken praised the agency for “reimagining how the U.S. does development” and said that through its work the U.S. has “shown countries that they don’t have to resort to projects that are poorly built and that destroy the environment’. , who import or abuse workers, who promote corruption or saddle countries with unsustainable debt.”
“We are truly the partner of choice,” Blinken said.
With challenges ahead, Blinken says the agency must do even more and in more countries than before.
