[Debate] CCS seminar on African economic crisis, 25 April, with Ransom Lekunze

[Patrick Bond]

*CCS Seminar: Implications of global economic crisis for Africa*

*
Speaker: Ransom Lekunze*

*Date: Wednesday 25 April 2012*

*Venue: CCS Seminar Room 602, 6^th Floor, MTB, Howard College*

*Time: 12:30-14:00*

**

*Topic:*African countries individually and collectively chose to boost 
their economic activity through international trade even though the 
world recently experienced its worst economic crisis in seventy years. 
Durable problems include volatile commodity prices, export-driven 
investment that distorts economies and societies, infrastructure and 
debt sustainability, macroeconomic imbalances, exchange rate 
fluctuation, trade finance, and credit for export-oriented production. 
African vulnerability is high because export--GDP measures are much 
higher than the average of the same measures for industrialized 
economies. In most of Africa, the crisis was preceded by a trade boom 
which failed to lay strong foundations for financial stability and 
capital accumulation. Yet as the financial crisis took hold, state 
policy tended to neglect trade problems, such as market access, halting 
protectionism, the WTO's controversial 2001 Doha Agenda, and the lack of 
meaningful reforms to internal and external financial structures that 
support trade. Civil society should advocate integration of economic 
policies in order to ensure that trade supports greater domestic 
financial stability.

*Speaker: *Ransom Lekunze is an associate professor at the Metropolitan 
University College, Copenhagen, specializing in fair trade, sustainable 
development, environmental policy, consumption, markets and Corporate 
Social Responsibility. Originally from Cameroon, Ransom is a Swedish 
citizen with a PhD in Development Economics from Lund University. He was 
a researcher at the South Centre, an intergovernmental organization 
based in Geneva in 2008 -09 and also worked as consultant for the Center 
of Concern in Washington, on the effects of global financial crisis on 
Africa. During the 1990s, Ransom spent several years working with civil 
society organizations in Cameroon, and he founded the Environmental 
Management Forum, a youth NGO that won the African Commonwealth Youth 
Service Awards in 1998. He is currently visiting lecturer at the UKZN.**

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