The first sessions of the annual meeting of the African Development Bank were held today in Maputo, Mozambique. The “official meetings” – when the board of governors meets – are on Wednesday and Thursday (May 14-15). Until then there are a few seminars and report-launches.

I ventured over to the Joaquim Chissano Convention Center this afternoon hoping to attend a long-advertised session on the “Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa” (AGRA), the controversial initiative of the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations to facilitate more productive agriculture in Africa. (The controversy arises from the very mixed results of the Asian “green revolution,” with its high-input techniques, which plunged many farmers into deep debt and caused environmental damage in the process of increasing crop yields. It seems clear that AGRA will be pushing genetically-engineered seeds, but its first round of projects seem largely positive, or at least benign.)

Alas, no one at the convention center knew anything about the session, despite it being in the program (which I was to note later was labeled “provisional”). So I sat at a lovely beachfront restaurant across the road from the venue and had some of Mozambique’s very good beer, and some rather mediocre pizza.

I then attended the launch of the “African Development Report 2007” (I’m not sure why they’re a year late). “Natural Resources for Sustainable Development” is its title. The motivation for the topic, said the AfDB’s research director, Louis Kasekende, was the commodity boom of the last few years and the concern arising from the memory of previous booms, which ended up creating more problems than they solved. The idea was to say that the “resource curse” need not be the inevitable outcome of resource-wealth.

It was rather alarming to see the presenter list, via powerpoint slide, the continent’s main “renewable resources” as water, forests, and land. A few slides later we learned that “by 2025, 50% of Africans will live in areas with water scarcity or water stress.” Given that and the impending effects of climate change (e.g. the melting of the snowcaps on Africa’s mountains), it was not clear how useful it would be to see water as one of the continent’s exploitable “renewable resources.” Describing forests in that way was likewise not encouraging, since the multilateral institutions have all too frequently made common cause with logging companies, who are prone to define forestry as renewable when they clear old-growth trees and plant eucalyptus plantations as compensation. And land? I suppose they mean agriculture, but it seems a clumsy way to say it, given the intense passions that question of land ownership ignite in many African countries.

There was considerable discussion of how the report’s authors classified African countries. ”Resource-rich countries” are those where mineral wealth accounts for 20% or more of GDP. Several people in the audience objected to the outcome of using this gauge, since Zambia, with so many big mines in its Copperbelt region, was placed in the “resource-scarce” category, while Central African Republic, for example, was judged “resource-rich.” The methodology may indeed be rather too crude; it appears that fluctuating market prices and the size of the rest of the country’s overall economy can produce skewed results. Prices for copper and other Zambian exports were at all-time lows a few years ago, presumably the period this study draws on, and CAR’s mineral sector only looks large in relation to its poor economy and small population.

They also emphasized the difference between landlocked and coastal countries, saying the former are four times poorer than the latter. When they combined the two categories, they concluded that the best performers overall are resource-scarce coastal countries.

The speakers credited the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) as a positive force in ensuring greater revenues and more equitable use of them in producing countries. But they also emphasized how poorly Africa does in comparison to other regions in terms of earning money from mineral wealth. Middle East countries, we were told, generally earn rents (royalties, taxes, etc.) of between 50 and 80 percent for their products, while the average in Africa is between 10 and 20 percent. While no one mentioned Zambia’s recent moves to increase taxes on its minerals or the recent move toward contract reviews, such as in the mining sector of Democratic Republic of Congo, AfDB staff did say that they have recently resolved to assist countries that want to become better negotiators with mining and oil companies.

During the question-and-answer session, a representative of the UN Economic Commission on Africa (UN-ECA), based in Addis Ababa, mentioned that his organization is hosting an “international working group” that will review mining codes in African countries. As another audience member said, these codes were created during a period of low commodity prices, when governments felt they had to compete with each other to attract investment. Now that it’s more a “seller’s market,” changes to the mining codes are overdue. If a statistic cited by one of the panelists is correct – that Africa has about 65% of the world’s remaining natural resources – such moves can’t come too soon. But as another questioner pointed out, the World Bank was partly responsible for designing the old mining codes. Will the AfDB do a better job of protecting Africa’s interests?