African and Latin American countries have accumulated at least $152 billion in debt to Chinese banks, backed by oil and other mineral resources, a study from non-profit the Natural Resource Governance Institute has revealed. Chinese loans represented 77 percent of the total $164 billion in resource-backed loans taken out by African and Latin American countries between 2004 and 2018. While the size of this debt load may not be that worrying in itself, spread across 52 loan deals inked by 30 sub-Saharan African countries and 22 Latin American states, the fact that little detail about the terms of these loans has been made public is worrying, the NRGI report notes. Of the total 52 loan deals, 38 were made with Chinese state policy banks, seven were made with commodity trading companies, four were made with other Chinese state companies, one came from South Korea, another from Russia’s Rosneft, and […]