The Congo river conservation debate

This is an audio transcript of the FT News Briefing podcast episode: ‘The Congo river conservation debate’

Marc Filippino
Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Friday, July 7th, and this is your FT News Briefing. Investors did not like yesterday’s US job data. And Janet Yellen is in Beijing trying to smooth things over with China. Plus, the FT’s David Pilling explains why conservation in Africa has become contentious. I’m Marc Filippino and here’s the news you need to start your day.

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Investors sold off stocks and bonds yesterday, and the yield on the two-year US Treasury reached its highest level since 2007. The sell-off happened after the ADP Research Institute released strong June job figures. The data showed that the US gained nearly half a million private sector jobs last month. That’s roughly double what economists expected, and it’s the biggest rise in more than a year. Because of those figures, investors are anticipating more interest rate rises from the Federal Reserve and bigger cracks in the economy. Official government jobs data for June is set to come out today.

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US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen is in China. Her visit comes just weeks after secretary of state Antony Blinken was in Beijing. Yellen, like Blinken, is there to try and rebuild a relationship that’s gone particularly sour recently. Here’s the FT’s Beijing bureau chief, Joe Leahy.

Joseph Leahy
The Yellen visit comes just after China has imposed restrictions on two metals that are used in advanced technologies. And this follows US restrictions on Chinese companies, you know, in the semiconductor area and in other areas. So these kinds of tit-for-tat restrictions are continuing, and both sides are stepping them up. And China has actually promised more. And yet the hope on both sides, I think, is that we’ll get some sort of dialogue, which we haven’t had for such a long time that might actually reduce the risk of, you know, things blowing up into a bigger crisis at some point.

Marc Filippino
Joe says Yellen will meet with her Chinese counterparts, but she’s not expected to meet with President Xi Jinping.

Joseph Leahy
She’s expected to say again that the US is not seeking to decouple from China, but she’ll continue to emphasise that US values such as human rights and US national security — these will be a priority. From the China side, I think China will be pushing her to begin to negotiate on some of the export controls and high technology, and they’ll press her on trying to lift some of the Trump-era tariffs on Chinese goods. But of course, you know, China won’t be expecting the US to budge on these things. It will probably complain about them and hope that perhaps in the future these things could be discussed in more depth.

Marc Filippino
That’s the FT’s Beijing bureau chief Joe Leahy.

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All this week, Africa editor David Pilling has taken News Briefing listeners on a journey into the Congo river basin in central Africa. There we met elephants and gorillas, as well as the rangers who protect the animals from poachers and protect the forest itself. Now, from far away, you might think, of course, we should preserve this beautiful forest. But it’s not that simple. David joins us now to discuss the controversies around conservation. Hi, David.

David Pilling
Hi, Marc. Thanks for having me back.

Marc Filippino
It was quite a trip. I really enjoyed listening to it. But I am curious, why would anyone be against protecting wonderful habitats and the animals and the plants that live there? What is the pushback on this idea?

David Pilling
I mean, the first is that conservation in Africa is regarded by many in a sense as a white person’s hobby. And it can be all too easy to slip into this cliché, this idea that conservation is foreigners coming to tell Africans how to look after their wildlife and their habitats. And of course, their habitats and the wildlife that exist exist precisely because they’ve been, you know, well looked after over history before white people showed up. So I think there is a pushback of this whole idea of the, you know, if you want to call it the white saviour coming in to tell people how to do this.

Marc Filippino
So what are some of the other issues that you’ve come across besides the white saviour concern?

David Pilling
Well, another of the big concerns is that conservationists are charged by some people with really prioritising animals over people. I mean some of the game parks that we know of, certainly Bwindi National Park in Uganda where gorillas have thrived, people have been moved out of these parks. In Bwindi, you’ve got the Batwa community that live around the park in really a state of poverty. They, you know, may have lived in the forest for tens of thousands of years, you know, now not being able to live in the forest that was their preserve. Now, this has been good for gorillas, but you could argue it’s been not very good for the people that lived in that forest all that time.

Marc Filippino
Now, David, has anyone come up with something to reconcile these competing interests?

David Pilling
The conservationists will say what has to happen is that the wildernesses and the animals have to become sort of moneymaking opportunities for the communities that live around. So people charge very high amounts of money to go and see a gorilla. In Rwanda, they charge $1,500 to see a gorilla for an hour. A small part of that money will go to communities who live around. Most conservationists now, at the very least, pay lip service to the idea that the communities around must be served. But I think there’s two things we should be aware of. One is that we in the west did not do this very well. We did chop down our forests; we did kill lots of our big animals. So we can’t be too preachy. And the other is that there are genuine trade-offs, and it could be that some sorts of conservation done in certain ways may impede development, at least in the short term.

Marc Filippino
So what do you think, David, was the forest series that we listened to over the past few days a good example of the way conservation can work? Does it provide a good model for other conservation efforts?

David Pilling
I think it has some good things. The way that, you know, you have Congolese who have become part of a conservation movement, you know, that is very positive. In another sense, I think the Republic of Congo is not a very densely populated country. So I don’t think the things that I saw in this remote protected area of the forest without roads offers that many lessons for other parts of the forest that are perhaps more like, you know, what we’ve seen in the Amazon in Brazil, where the pressure for development, the pressure for farming, the pressure for forestry comes against the counterpressure to preserve these incredible places.

Marc Filippino
David Pilling is the FT’s Africa editor. Thanks so much for the series, David.

David Pilling
Thank you, Marc. Pleasure.

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Marc Filippino
People have been looking for an alternative to Twitter ever since Elon Musk bought the company last year, and it looks like there is now a legitimate competitor. Facebook’s parent company, Meta, launched its rival to Twitter on Wednesday. It’s called Threads, and Meta says that more than 30mn people have already signed up. That figure is without anyone in the European Union joining. Meta hasn’t launched the app there because it’s not sure about the bloc’s new privacy regulations. The FT’s global tech correspondent Tim Bradshaw, has been poking around Threads, and so far he says it’s a throwback to the early days of Twitter.

Tim Bradshaw
It’s quite fun at the moment. It’s got that sort of first day of school sort of vibe to it, and it’s got energy, which is a thing that, except when people on Twitter were attacking Twitter, didn’t really have lately.

Marc Filippino
Tim was, like, one of the first people who joined Twitter back in 2006. Let’s put it this way. He was on Twitter so early that he was able to nab the username @Tim. This time it’s a little different. Threads imports your contacts from Instagram, which is also owned by Meta, so it’s a little less wild west. Threads may be a legitimate rival to Twitter. Tim wonders, though, is this the kind of product that’s still relevant?

Tim Bradshaw
My worry is I don’t know how many people still want a Twitter-like thing at this point in the history of the social web in 2023. We’ve become a very visual audio-first social community. Text posts seem kind of antiquated. I mean, they belong in 2006 when the web wasn’t as capable of posting multimedia. It sounds like a very long time ago to age myself, but it was a product that was built for text messaging effectively, and we’re a long way beyond that now. We have 5G on all of our phones and we can zap around all of these different types of content. And so although it’s a very serviceable substitute for Twitter, I’m not sure whether that’s enough to build a sort of hundreds-of-millions-of-user business off the back of right now.

Marc Filippino
Tim Bradshaw is the FT’s global tech correspondent.

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You can learn more about all of these stories by clicking the links in the shownotes. They are all free to read for a limited time. This has been your daily FT News Briefing. Make sure you check back next week for the latest business news. The FT News Briefing is produced by Sonja Hutson, Fiona Symon and me, Marc Filippino. We had help this week from Sam Giovinco, Josh Gabert-Doyon, Manuela Saragosa, Saffeya Ahmed, Katie McMurran, David da Silva, Michael Lello and Gavin Kallmann. Special thanks to Jess Smith and Fiona for their work on our Congo series. Our executive producer is Topher Forhecz. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio, and our theme song is by Metaphor Music.