Utenlandske investeringer, naturressurser og lokal utvikling

This session will start with the screening of the film Stealing Africa. How much Profit is fair?, followed by a debate chaired by Håvard Haarstad, Post Doctoral Fellow at the Department of Geography, UiB.

About the film: In Ruschlikon, a sleepy village in Switzerland, the wealthy residents are receiving more tax revenue than they can use since the arrival of Ivan Glasberg, CEO of commodity giant Glencore. Yet in Zambia, where Glencore owns a majority stake in the country’s biggest copper mining operations, tax is an issue that’s contributing to its poverty...

Glasberg netted $9.6 billion when Glencore went public in 2011. The receipt of of his taxes overwhelmed the public coffers of Ruschlikon so much that the mayor decided to lower the town’s tax rate by 7%. The residents of copper-rich Zambia - where Glencore owns a 73% stake in the Mopani Copper Mines (one of the biggest mining operations in the country) were not so fortunate.

Unfortunately, Zambia’s copper resources have not made the country rich. Virtually all Zambia’s copper mines are owned by private corporations. In the last ten years, they’ve extracted copper worth $29 billion, but Zambia is still ranked one of the twenty poorest countries in the world.

So why hasn’t copper wealth reduced poverty in Zambia yet made the residents of Ruschlikon better off? Once again it comes down to the issue of tax, or in Zambia’s case, tax avoidance and the use of tax havens.

In figures...

• Tax avoidance by corporations costs poor countries and estimated $160 billion a year, almost double what they receive in international aid.

• That’s enough to save the lives of 350,000 children aged five or under every year.

• For every $1 given in aid to a poor country, $10 drains out - money that would make them less reliant on aid and that could help a poor country pay for healthcare, schools, pensions and infrastructure.

Stealing Africa. How much Profit is fair? was produced by Why Poverty? Check out this initiative and more films on www.whypoverty.net

This plenary presentation is free and open to all!