Speech by Deputy Minister Bernice Swarts: South Africa’s intervention at the Heads of State Summit for the 1st Africa Biodiversity Summit

5 November 2025, Gaborone

Madam Chair, Excellencies, distinguished delegates, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Today marks the beginning of an end of an era where Africa’s rich natural resources were predestined and pre-routed to specific Colonial Powers following the Berlin Conference in 1884. It was in this Conference that the Colonisers sought to create pseudo borders of ownership, allowing various Foreign Powers to claim almost the entire African Continent and her resources.

Your Excellencies, Africa’s combined GDP is conservatively estimated at USD 2,8 trillion but however remain the poorest Continent in the world by purchase power parity (PPP). A study by a well renown academic and an economic anthropologist Prof Jason Hickel et al shows that there remains an unequal exchange of economic growth in the “advanced economies” which largely depends on the cheap large net appropriation of resources and labour from the “developing economies”. Hickel study asserts that between 1960 and 2021, the advanced economies raked in natural resources from the developing economies worth over 152 Trillion USD in raw material form.

The above study is a rude awakening to the African Continent whose average debt-to-GDP ratio is estimated at around 61-64% to GDP in 2025 and yet considered by the Rating Agencies to be a more riskier investment platform. Meanwhile, debt to GDPs of advanced economies ranges from 59% to over 100% to their GDP and yet they are found to be stable platform for investment and thus qualify for lower interests repayments rates for their debts.

Your Excellencies, we are at a pivotal moment where biodiversity offers solutions for climate adaptation, where nature is our beacon of hope, and where we must protect ecosystems so that they continue to provide essential services. It is imperative that we build momentum from this Summit to strengthen our resolve for self-sufficiency as a Continent. Africa must innovate, industrialise and participate at all levels of the value chain of her natural resources, whilst applying economic modalities that support thriving people and nature.