The French statesman François Mitterrand famously confessed that “Without Africa, France will have no history in the 21st century.” As national independence movements swept across Africa in the 1950s and 60s, France worked to consolidate an overtly neocolonial relationship with its former colonies, to ensure access to their resources and markets on favourable terms. This arrangement is known as Françafrique.

France has a large military presence in West and Central Africa, it routinely intervenes in the political processes of African states, and maintains control over the region’s currency and monetary policy through the CFA franc system, which encompasses fourteen countries. Governments that have attempted to break free from this arrangement have faced intimidation, destabilisation operations, assassinations, and coups d’état.

In a new study published in New Political Economy, we wanted to understand whether the Françafrique system involves unequal exchange of physical resources — a phenomenon whereby rich countries appropriate goods and services from poor countries through international trade, due to commercial and geopolitical power imbalances. The results are quite striking.

First, we found clear patterns of unequal exchange over the period 1990-2015, with France net-appropriating large quantities from the CFA zone, particularly land and water. For instance, France net-appropriated 226 million hectares of embodied land and 122 billion cubic meters of water from the CFA zone through direct trade, mostly in the form of agricultural products. This allows France to devote its own agricultural capacities to higher-value-added products such as the dairy and wines for which it is famous.

Second, we found that other Eurozone economies also appropriated large quantities from the CFA zone, much more than other core economies like the USA or UK, apparently benefitting from the Françafrique monetary system, which is pegged to the Euro.

Third, we found that – contrary to common Western narratives – China’s appropriation from the CFA zone is tiny by comparison. The core economies are by far the biggest appropriators, in both absolute and per capita terms. Here we provide two new figures using extra data from the study, to further illustrate this dynamic.

The figure below shows total cumulative appropriation (net imports) from the CFA zone, in both direct trade and final demand, with the latter capturing resources that transit through a third country. We can see that the core economies have appropriated on average about 20x more than China across materials, land and water. Meanwhile, China provides a net-transfer of embodied energy and labour to the CFA zone, representing a degree of reciprocity that is not evident in the case of the core.

Note that the core here represents a smaller population than China: about 1.1 billion people in 2015, compared to China’s 1.4 billion people in the same year. Therefore, the disparities are even starker in per capita terms. This is illustrated in the figure below, focusing on final demand. Here we can see how the Eurozone enjoys much greater appropriation from the CFA zone than the rest of the core does (except in the case of energy), and on average 56x more than China across materials, land and water.

In sum, the Françafrique system remains very much intact, the rest of the Eurozone benefits from it, and Western narratives about China being the main exploiter of Africa are not supported by evidence from the CFA zone. Of course, to draw stronger conclusions we would want to know how trends have evolved over time, including in more recent years, and for the rest of the continent – that work is done and will be published soon.

In the meantime, if you want to know more about unequal exchange you can read Samir Amin, Arghiri Emmanuel, and recent empirical studies here and here, which provide more information on the underlying political economy and also address the question of productivity differences.

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