Uganda President Museveni to Putin:
"One facet of neo-colonialism and colonialism was Africa being confined to producing only raw materials, crops, like coffee, and minerals. I can give you an example: the global business for coffee is worth $460 billion. That is the value of the coffee business in the world. But of those $460 billion the coffee producing countries of the whole world share only $25 billion and Africa shares only $2.4 billion out of $460 billion.
This issue is the biggest stunting factor why the African economies are stunted; they do not grow, because all the value is taken by other people. Germany earns more from coffee than the whole of Africa. Germany earns $6.85 billion from coffee, while Africa earns only $2.4 โ 2.5 billion. This is the big scandal.
So, what I want to propose to Russia and China is to discourage as a policy the importing of raw materials from Africa, to instead work with the Africans to add value at source. This would within a very short time transform the economies of Africa from low- and mid-income to high- and middle-high income because we see from the example of Uganda that everything is depressed now; production is high but we are still producing raw materials."