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Carrinho Food Processing Factory
Benguela, Angola

2:01 P.M. WAT

MR. HOCHSTEIN: Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Amos Hochstein. I’m a senior adviser to President Biden. It’s an honor to be here with all of you.

I want to open first by saying thank you to Nelson Carrinho and the staff of this facility for opening it up for this event and providing the tour and the facilities for this discussion this afternoon.

Without further ado, I’d like to introduce our host and our leading partner, President Lourenço.

Mr. President.

PRESIDENT LOURENÇO: (As interpreted.) Your excellency, Joe Biden, president of United States of America; your excellency, Félix Tshisekedi, president of the Republic — Democratic Republic of Congo; your excellency, Hakainde Hichilema, of the Republic of Zambia; your excellency, Philip Mpango, vice president of the United Republic of Tanzania; distinguished members of the U.S. Congress; distinguished members of the delegations.

Dear guests, ladies and gentlemen, allow me to greet you with great satisfaction for hosting you at the city of Benguela, on which the attention of all Angolans is focused that are happy with the presence of your excellencies in our country and recognize the importance of this summit for integral development of our continent, the interconnection of this project to the rest of the world.

I’d like to thank President Joe Biden, President Tshisekedi, President Hakainde Hichilema, and President Mpango for having attended this event that will be a historical milestone of international trade and logistic chains.

Angola lives in the situation of peace and stability and is committed to keeping up its commitment with international partners, both at institutional level and with investors that have chosen our country as destiny for their businesses.

It’s important to mention the strategic importance of Lobito Corridor, with Lobito port and the Benguela railway, in the 1970s was one of most profitable rails worldwide by transporting 3.3 millions of tons of cargo per year. We are expecting to optimize this important infrastructure as integral part of an international and transcontinental route that is able to connect the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean and, therefore, connect safely the European, African, Asian continents with gains in terms of transportation and cost of maritime and rail freight.

Lobito Corridor has strategic importance given the contribution that it will give to dynamizing intra-African trade within the context of the African Continental Free Trade Area, as well as the global trade in general.

Excellencies, with the presence of the highest level from our partners of DRC and Zambia, we signed, in June 2023, contract of concession of Lobito Corridor to a private consortium made up by recognized companies.

I would like to highlight the holding of U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in December 2022 — in December 2023 in Washington, D.C., whereby Biden administration showed its commitment in the construction of infrastructure in Africa that has been implemented through Lobito Corridor, through the joint declaration U.S.-EU that was made public in the margin on the event on Global Partnership and Infrastructure during the G20 Summit held in India in 2023.

This will be a lynchpin for the economic development that will provide the participation of small and medium enterprise in the business value chain, mainly in agriculture, industry, and mining, in order to increase trade and economic growth of SADC region and the eastern African region, a way that the political commitment of all engaged people in materialization of this big project is a milestone.

It’s important that the African countries involved, the consortium, and the sponsors should promote activities needed in order to materialize this important project that will positively impact the maritime and rail transport in international trade, as well energy transition and safety — food safety and, in general, in the global economy.

Thank you for your attention and wish you fruitful deliberations.

MR. HOCHSTEIN: Thank you, Mr. President. It’s now my honor to introduce President Biden, who set the vision for this corridor during the Africa Leaders Summit and implementing it ever since.

Mr. President.

PRESIDENT BIDEN: Thank you very much.

Mr. President, thank you very much for your hospitality.

Fellow leaders and friends, I can’t think of a better way to end my trip to Angola than coming here to the Lobito Corridor.

And I want to thank all of you — all of you for being here today, including the presidents of the Democratic Republic of the Congo; Zambia; Tanzania; and our partner, the CEO of the American Finance Corporation.

It’s great to — to be here with all of you. And I mean that sincerely. I think we’re at one of those transition points in world history where what we do in the next several years is going to affect what the next six, seven, eight decades looks like, and I think this is one of those milestones.

Our partner, the CEO of the Fi- — American Finance Corporation, is going to take care of everything for us. No- — nothing to worry about. But all kidding aside, it’s great to be with you all.

When I launched this project with our G7 partners last year, I said our goal was to build a better future. And, folks, the future is here. It’s now. The future is here.

The fact is I wish everyone could see what I saw today: tracks that will form America’s fir- — or Africa’s first intercontinental railroad — transcontinental railroad; a railcar that will cut travel from days to hours; and the — grain silos that are going to help transform the region from a food importers to food exporters; businesses that are investing across the corridor in 5G, solar panels, steel bridges made near my hometown back in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

And I want to be clear about something. All these projects’ investments are designed to have high impact and meet the highest standards for workers, for the environment, and for their communities, because the United States understands how we invest in Africa is just as important as how much we invest in Africa.

That’s what the PGI is part of, which is — I started a program early on — calling it Build Back Better, but we’ve changed it to PGI. And that’s why, today, I’m proud to announce the United States will invest nearly $600 million in additional investment to expand agriculture infrastructure, to build high-speed mobile networks, and to continue upgrading the Lobito Atlantic Railway.

A few months ago, the DRC sent the first copper shipment on this railway for transit onward to the United States. The trip used to take 45 days to get to the United States from that. But now it takes 45 — less than 45 hours — 45 hours because of the changes you made. It’s a game changer.

Imagine how transformative this will be for technology, clean energy, for farming, for food security as a whole. It’s faster, it’s cleaner, it’s cheaper, and — most importantly, I think — it’s just plain common sense.

So, my message today is simple: Let’s keep it up.

All told, the United States has invested nearly $4 billion across the length of the Lobito Corridor. But we’re not alone. Collectively, this group mobilized over $6 billion in private and public investments. But these aren’t just investments in the region; they’re investments in all of our futures, no matter where you are in the world.

Think about it. Critical minerals our world needs for electric vehicles and semiconductors can be found here. Clean energy we need to power artificial intelligence data centers and economic growth can be built here. Food we need to end hunger can be grown and transported and exported from all across the corri- — this corridor.

Put simply, as all of you know well, nations across the Lobito Corridor have solutions to some of the world’s toughest problems.

We just need to keep working together — and I believe this from the bottom of my heart — if we work together — to mobilize more capital, to build more infrastructure to help make these solutions real, to help Africa — help Africa lead the way.

I’ve said to these guys and my colleagues here for a while, the last two days, you know, by 2070, the continent of Africa is going to have half the world’s population. How can that survive without having the most — the greatest infrastructure in the world? It has to happen.

To help Africa lead the way, we need more capital, more infrastructure to deal with these real solutions. And that’s why we’re here today. I want to make sure I get to hear from all of you.

So, let me close with this. When we talk about the PGI, we often talk about the big picture: investment numbers, rising exports, national prosperity. But it’s important to remember, at its core, what we’re doing is about our people. I mean, it’s simple pra- — about individuals, about our people. That’s what this is about. And if I — it’s about the farmer who can get more food on more tables because of what we’re doing; the worker who can count on a living wage and safe working conditions; the entrepreneur who is finally empowered to lead, innovate, and build.

It matters. It matters. So, thank you again for being here today and allowing me to be here. And let’s get started getting this done.

Back to you, Amos.

MR. HOCHSTEIN: Thank you, Mr. President.

Next, we’ll turn to President Tshisekedi of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the largest deposits of copper and cobalt that are now going to be switching direction on this corridor. So, would be grateful to hear your reflections on how this is proceeding and what we need to do in the future for the DRC.

PRESIDENT TSHISEKEDI: (As interpreted.) Thank you, Amos.

Your excellence, President João Lourenço. Excellency, President Hakainde Hichilema of Zambia. Your excellency, President Joe Biden of the United States of America. Your excellency, Mr. Mpango, vice president of Zambia. Distinguished ministers. Distinguished guests. Ladies and gentlemen.

It is a true pleasure for me to speak here today at this meeting focused on the development of the Lobito Corridor. This is a project that is full of hope for our countries and our region.

I would like to warmly thank President João Lourenço for his leadership and hospitality.

The corridor is way more than just a transportation axis. It is a unique opportunity for regional integration, economic transformation, and to improve the living conditions of our fellow citizens.

This railway that connects the mining regions of the DRC and Zambia to the Port of Lobito is conceived in order to transport as much as 20 million metric tons of goods per year by 2030.

This is not just an infrastructure project; it is also a link between our three countries — the DRC, Zambia, and Angola. It is the symbol of our collective will to convert the potential of our countries into a tangible prosperity for our peoples by fostering a harmonious interdependence between our countries where our economies can blossom.

For the DRC, the Lobito Corridor is a strategic opportunity to make sure that we get value out of our natural resources, mostly copper and cobalt, because this makes up to 70 tho- — 70 percent of the global demand for the current energy transition. With a production — a combined production of 3 million tons a year between DRC and Zambia, this project will significantly reduce the logistics cost, as well as it will improve and increase our export revenues.

This is a unique opportunity to access — to access, rather, the global markets through the Port of Lobito, and this gives us a strategic alternative to the other exportation corridors.

With its 1,739 kilometers, this railroad is connected to our roads and — and other rails, and it will play an important role in regional integration and continental integration.

The human impact is potentially enormous. It will catalyze the creation of about 30,000 jobs, direct and indirect, and it will reduce poverty and foster exchanges within Africa, in line with Agenda 2063 of the AU.

Today, transit can take up to 30 days or more, and it will be down to 10 days. This will increase our competitiveness on the international market. This is not just a logistical project, but it is a driving force for economic and social transformation for millions of our people.

The DRC is fully committed to this project. As such, we have implemented a number of concrete actions in order to modernize our rail, road, and port infrastructures. We are trying to establish fluid and strategic connections between our main mining sites, like Kolwezi and Likasi, and the rail corridor — the rail corridor.

In parallel, we’ve put local transformation or processing of our natural resources at the heart of our economic strategy. It is imperative that the wealth contained in our ground contribute directly to the well-being of our peoples. This means that we need to develop industrial value chains locally so we can add value before we export.

Inga 3, our project, as well as other renewable energy projects, are essential to provide reliable energy supply that is sustainable and adapted to the demands of our expanding industry.

These efforts will make our investments more competitive, and we will be able to respect our environmental commitments.

Also, we will continue to strengthen the legal framework and the institutional framework to foster private investments and to guarantee transparency and good governance. These remain utmost priorities to foster a climate of trust and to make sure that our partnerships are win-win partnerships.

However, to fully realize the potential of the Lobito Corridor, peace and security in the region remain paramount.

We would like to thank Angola for its determining role in Luanda Process, and we reaffirm our engagement to working for a definitive return to peace in the east of our country, and security will be the bedrock of any sustainable development.

Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to thank our international partners, including the United States of America, for their technical and financial support through strategic initiatives like Power Africa and PGI. This support is a testimony to the geostrategic importance of the Lobito Corridor in the global supply chains and potential for it to be a catalyst for development.

In order to seize this opportunity and to invest in development of rail, energy, and port infrastructures, we will need investments. This will help make this sustainable.

The Lobito Corridor is surely an element that can be leveraged for growth. It is a model for regional integration, and it is a shared source of prosperity.

I believe firmly that, thanks to our cooperation and our determination, this project will go beyond expectations and will change the trajectory of our region for good.

The DRC stands ready to play its role in this. With our brothers and sisters in the region, we will move forward with this common vision — joined vision and unfailing will to have a better future for our people.

Thank you.

MR. HOCHSTEIN: Thank you, Mr. President.

President Hichilema of Zambia, two years ago, during Vice President Harris’ visit to Zambia, you helped draw — literally, draw the map and the line for the greenfield project for the — the newest part of phase two for the Lobito Corridor rail. We’re very happy that you’re here to be able to share some thoughts on how this could really be transformational for — for Zambia.

Mr. President.

PRESIDENT HICHILEMA: Tha- — thank you very much, Amos, moderator.

Let me just recognize President Biden and President Lourenço, our host. Thank you for hosting us.

President Tshisekedi, our neighbor, regional partner; Vice President Mpango, recognize you. Chief executive AFC, my dear friend here. And chief executive KoBold, our partner in Zambia. And also, the CEO American corporation.

Amos, first it’s — it’s my duty, really, on behalf of the people of Zambia, to appreciate this initiative, the Lobito Corridor; to thank President Biden for his effort, he — his government, American people for the recognition of the importance of this corridor, and, obviously, the origination being in Angola here, through DRC, through Zambia — the map that we drew in my dingy office in Lusaka when Amos visited.

And through that connection from — from Angola, which we believe will be (inaudible) on to Chingola, and then connecting that — very important — connecting that to the TAZARA corridor, which will really mean that we can connect our continent, this part of Africa, from the west coast in Lobito here, where we are, through DRC, Zambia, into Tanzania.

It’s a huge, huge opportunity, not just for Zambia. Angola, DRC, Tanzania — happens that these countries are all SADC countries. It’s good for SADC. It’s good for individual countries. It’s good for SADC.

Not just us; it’s good for Africa — the Africa free trade area we are talking about, with the building blocks of our regional bodies — individual countries, regional bodies — SADC, East African community, West African community.

The Africa free-trade ar- — free-trade area we are envisaging, this corridor is of vital importance to opening up our countries, to opening up our regions, the continent, and, truly, the global economy — the U.S., yes; Europe; other parts of the global community, if I may say that.

So, I am aware that, at this stage, not many will see what we are discussing today and how valuable it will be 10 years down the road. But this is really a fundamental, if you like, change to our countries, to our economies, to our people.

I must say that this project is a huge opportunity for investment, for trade. We are talking about the rail infrastructure but also auxiliary infrastructure: the roads that would feed into this corridor; the opportunities for us to invest in the critical minerals; to apply our technology, the global technology — capital, of course, as President Biden said, but the technologies to exploit the resource endowments in our countries, to start with, in critical minerals to make our global economy greener, safer for us, for the future generations, so we can pass on a world that is able to raise children in a healthier environment, because the air will be reasonably cleaner than what it is today.

And the resource endowments that we have that we can exploit through this corridor in an efficient way, a way that will shorten the distances — connect, yes — but shorten the distances to trade — to invest, to trade. It is extremely — very, very, very important.

But also, I want to indicate that it’s not just the rail infrastructure. It’s not just the critical minerals. It’s also the opportunities to invest in energy — energy itself — diversification of our energy portfolios in these countries, in our regions, on our continent, which, yet again, will contribute to a greener — greener world, to meet our carbon emissions targets, which we simply talk about every COP — COP25, 27, to whatever. I think this is walking the talk, in our view.

Solar, geothermal, wind, and others. This project will make it an imperative for us to invest in the energy that is required to exploit the critical minerals. We need (inaudible).

What else? Agriculture. Very important. Food security. In our countries, with the climate change, the need for us to water harvest, to irrigate — precision irrigation — to increase our productivity per hectare of land we have so we don’t cut more trees to create fields. But for the same hectare, instead of producing, I’d say, corn, two tons per hectare, we can move to 12, 13, 14, 15 tons per hectare. This corridor delivers benefits in those areas.

I can go on, but let me just encapsulate it this way. This opportunity really will deliver efficiencies. This project, this opportunity will deliver growth in our individual economies on our continent, contribute to global growth — positive growth, cleaner growth; jobs; food security.

I already said green economies. What else? Business opportunities. We were taken around, first, just the place where we are here. Look at this facility. This facility now — and I’m very enthused. Where is my colleague there? I think that family is doing a great job. This is what Africa needs.

Our young people go out to study. They choose to come back home. They choose to invest here, working with the global capital, working with global technological advancements.

This facility will now be able not just to take in raw materials from the (inaudible) growers in a scheme, small-scale farmers having input supplied to them, having an offtake, assured market, a fair price improves their lives — this is great — but also be able to export beyond Angola and beyond Africa. This is what Africa needs today.

It also is important for treasury income. I don’t have to ask the question, my president here, how much this business contributes to the Angola’s treasury income, which is essential for Angola and for our economies to look after the weak, the sick, the old, the young in our communities.

And this is the connection, President Biden, that we see — your initiative, our collective effort, AFC here, KoBold here. It just took a visit. One of the times you invited me to the States, (inaudible) states were able to contrive a partnership. Now we have a mine that we are developing with KoBold — an American investment in partnership with Zambia, and we’ll do great things together.

This corridor will make it easier to do that business for — for all.

I think I want to end here to say this is good for our countries. This is good for our region, for our continent. This is good for America. This is good for the global community.

Thank you very much for this opportunity. Thank
you.

MR. HOCHSTEIN: Thank you, Mr. President.

I’d like to turn to Vice President Mpango of Tanzania.

President Biden has often talked about the Lobito Corridor not just as a corridor for the three countries — of DRC and Zambia — but as a transcontinental, and going from ocean to ocean, the end point being Tanzania.

So, we’re very glad to have you here. The floor is yours, Mr. President.

VICE PRESIDENT MPANGO: His excellency, João Lourenço, president of the Republic of Angola, and our gracious host. His excellency, Joe Biden, president of the United States of America. His excellency, Hakainde Hichilema, president of the Republic of Zambia, and my neighbor. His excellency, Hakainde Hichilem- — his excellency, Félix Antoine Tshisekedi, president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The high-level dignitaries around the table, distinguished guests.

On behalf of her excellency, Samia Suluhu Hassan, president of the United Republic of Tanzania, I am honored to join this high-level meeting on the Lobito Corridor, which is a regional interconnection project of immense significance not just to Angola, the DRC, and Zambia, but to the broader SADC region and beyond.

Tanzania commends Angola and partners for this bold initiative to unlock the economic potential of Central and Southern Africa by linking this region to the Atlantic Ocean.

The Lobito Corridor, therefore, demonstrates how infrastructure can be a catalyst for social economic integration, trade facilitation, technology transfer, and regional development.

By bolstering connectivity, the Lobito Corridor will not only facilitate the movement of people, goods, and services, but will also promote shared prosperity and inclusive growth across the region.

Tanzania is no stranger to such aspirations, as it already links landlocked countries in Central Africa with the — with the Middle East, Asia, and the Far East. The Tanzania-Zambia railway — or, in short, TAZARA — and the oil pipeline TAZAMA, all connecting the hinterland to the Indian Ocean, have facilitated connectivity, cooperation and shared prosperity since the 1970s.

And through the SADC Protocols on Transport, Communication, and Meteorology, Tanzania is already linked to her neighbors and the wider region, enhancing the movement of people, goods, and opportunities across borders.

TAZARA is an interstate rail link, which allows trains to move from Tanzania to some SADC member states, including Zambia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa.

Tanzania extends profound gratitude to the United States for its steadfast support in advancing the development of the Lobito Corridor. The U.S. commitment to this transformative project reflects its enduring partnership with Africa and its recognition of the catalytic role of infrastructure in development.

In the same vein, we would like to commend the support of AFC and other partners for partnering with the U.S. in support of the development of the Lobito Corridor.

Tanzania views the Lobito Corridor as an integral part of a broader strategy to enhance connectivity in Africa.

We also appreciate the fact that the implementation of the project will provide important opportunities for Africa’s development in sectors such as agriculture, renewable energy, digital transformation, trade, and logistics along the corridor.

Tanzania is already undertaking in- — internal consultations aiming at aligning this project with national priorities and other bilateral and regional commitments.

In closing, allow me to reiterate Tanzania’s commitment to regional integration and shared prosperity. We note the progress made on the development of the Lobito Corridor and commend the visionary leadership that has brought this initiative to life. And it is through such partnerships and innovations that Africa’s Agenda 2063 will be realized.

I thank you.

MR. HOCHSTEIN: Thank you, Mr. Vice President.

I’d like to turn it over to the AFC — the Africa Finance Corporation. Mr. Samaila Zubairu has been a fantastic partner to this project. The AFC has invested across the many projects across the corridor and has been a great partner to making this — to realize this — of investment together, having a partnership with the United States, together with you, in promoting this project as an investable, bankable, and commercial project.

Mr. Zubairu.

MR. ZUBAIRU: Thank you.

Your excellencies, President João Lourenço of Angola, our gracious host. President Joseph R. Biden of United States of America. President Félix Tshisekedi of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. President Hakainde Hichilema of Zambia. Vice President Philip Mpango of Tanzania. Honorable ministers. Members of the consortium. Distinguished guests.

It is my honor and privilege to stand before you here today.

Our purpose at the Africa Finance Corporation is to build the infrastructure that will catalyze Africa’s industrialization and structural economic transformation.

The Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor is exactly the project we are made for and what the founders envisaged when they created AFC 17 years ago.

I have three key messages today: the partnership that got us here, what this project means, and our commitment to deliver this project for future generations.

I recall our first meeting with Amos Hochstein on the margins of the 2022 year’s Africa Leaders Summit convened by President Biden almost two years ago. Amos, at that time, was special presidential coordinator of the newly formed G7 PGI. We agreed, in not so many words, that we’ll do something together that will have a generational impact on our two continents.

I stand here today as lead developer of the Lobito-Zambia greenfield rail corridor, doing exactly what we said we will do. Since that meeting in December 2022, we signed an MOU formally constituting the project consortium in October 2023, comprising the governments of Angola, Zambia, and the DRC, alongside the United States, the European Commission, and the African Development Bank.

In February 2024, we commissioned a feasibility study with CPCS as technical consultant. That same month, we cohosted the Lobito Corridor private sector investment forum in Lusaka, alongside President Hichilema and the U.S. government.

In April 2024, we commenced the legal work stream with Linklaters.

In June 2024, we welcomed the government of Italy to the consortium and their commitment to — of $320 million. Thanks to President Biden for making that happen.

In September 2024, we completed a feasibility study and signed a $2 million grant agreement with USTDA in support of the enviro- — social impact assessment, which has been commissioned for delivery by decision analysis.

On the margins of UNGA this September, we signed the concession agreement with the governments of Angola and Zambia in the sec- — in the ceremony hosted by Secretary Blinken.

With thanks to President Lourenço, we have commenced — who has given (inaudible) instructions for the demanding efforts, we have taken a fundamental step towards unlocking the cultural value chain around the rail corridor.

We are now on track to break ground by early ‘26 in both Zambia and Angola. We plan to break ground at the same time from two different locations.

We have done all this while acting as financial adviser for the Lobito Atlantic Rail consortium, concessionaire of the Benguela rail line, which runs from the Port of Lobito here to Luau in DRC.

The rapid pace at which we are moving reflects the urgency of the type of development Africans are demanding from their leaders and the conviction of this consortium to execute. In particular, the resolve of the minister of transport of Angola, Ricardo Viegas D’Abreu, and the minister of transport and logistics for Zambia, Honorable Frank Tayali.

What this project means — we’ve heard about what this project means. I’ll just mention a key — a few statements. The Lobito Corridor is more than just a rail line. It is an economic corridor that provides lower cost, lower carbon gateway to African integration and global competitiveness, cutting travel time from the Copperbelt to international markets from 45 days to 45 hours, as we heard President Biden mention recently.

Shifting freight from road to rail will cut emissions by a minimum of 300,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually, underscoring Africa’s primacy in the global energy transition and efforts to decarbonize the battery minerals value chain, particularly in producing battery precursors for both our industries here and in America.

It al- — it will also catalyze opportunities in ecotourism, agribusiness, and power transmission lines.

Earlier this week, President Lourenço offered us an opportunity to help build transmission lines and interconnectors to the Copperbelt and the South African Power Pool, as well as to the Lobito Atlantic Rail Corridor.

Our commitment: Here today, we celebrate our decision to step in as project developers for this greenfield railway.

But this is just the beginning. I am delighted to announce AFC’s commitment of $500 million in financing for the Lobito-Zambia greenfield rail. This investment reflects our confidence in the project’s transformative potential to deliver economic benefits that transcend borders.

We will mobilize African pension funds to invest alongside us, ensuring generational sustainability. We will also partner with other MDBs and financial institutions to cocreate instruments that crowd in global institutional capital, as was successfully done in markets such as Japan and the Gulf.

In addition, we have signed a memorandum of understanding with KoBold Metals as our anchor client, guaranteeing a minimum of 300,000 tons of copper and related freight per year. We have also pledged $100 million to Kobaloni Energy for Zambia’s first battery-grade copper sulfate facility.

Excellencies, distinguished guests, this project symbolizes what Africa’s leadership, together with our global partners, can achieve when we unite behind a shared vision. It is not just about railways or minerals or food security. It is about forging partnerships, creating jobs, and driving a sustainable future for Africa and the rest of the world.

Together, let us seize this moment and make history. Thank you.

MR. HOCHSTEIN: Thank you, Mr. Zubairu. And let me repeat again: Thank you, again, on behalf of everyone, for just making today’s announcement of committing an additional $500 million for the project and starting it at the same time between Zambia and Angola is a great step forward.

You mentioned KoBold Metals. And all of this is not possible without the private sector coming and making the investments in the countries of the corridor. KoBold is literally the company that connects the 20th century and the 21st century. It’s a technology company that’s gone into the mining industry for products that will go into chips and electric vehicles.

So, very glad that you’re here with us. And thank you, Josh, for being here and for your words.

MR. GOLDMAN: Your excellencies, President Biden, President Lourenço, President Hichilema, President Tshisekedi, Vice President Mpango, Director Ebong, CEO Zubairu, thank you very much. It’s really an honor to be here.

KoBold is the world’s most advanced mineral exploration company. The next phase of global economic growth is going to require significantly expanding supply of metals like copper and lithium to make everything from cars to data centers for AI.

But the mining industry keeps getting worse at finding more deposits of these metals — ten times less successful today than a generation ago. And the problem just keeps getting harder. The mines in production today, the vast majority were easily discovered and they were discovered many years ago.

So, at KoBold, we invent technology to improve exploration and discover the next generation of ore deposits. And we use our technology to go out and explore all over the world, at scale, using a powerful combination of artificial intelligence and human intelligence.

And then, when we make discoveries, we develop mines in ways that deliver lasting benefits to the countries and the communities where we operate.

In Zambia, we’re developing the Mingomba deposit, which will be one of the largest copper mines in the world. And we are very proud to be an anchor partner of the — the new Zambia-DRC-Angola Lobito rail, because the Lobito Corridor fits the way that we do business.

First, we move fast. The economic impact and the creation of good jobs needs to happen now, not later. CEO Zubairu said that there will be shovels in the ground on the greenfield Zambia-Angola portion of the Lobito rail, and that’s great news, because at KoBold, we’re working to start major construction on the Mingomba mine also in 2026.

We will ship at least 300,000 tons per year of copper on the Lobito rail so that our investments at Mingomba can accelerate development across the region. And the faster we all move, the better for everyone.

Second, we succeed because of our partnerships. We work every day with our most important partners throughout the Zambian government and with our joint venture partners at ZCM-IH. Together, we’ll create thousands of good jobs that will last for generations and will in- — increase intra-African trade. And our partnerships succeed because KoBold follows the rules and government supports our investments with actions that are fair, transparent, and fast.

Third, we raise the standards, as CEO Zubairu said. To succeed where industry is failing at finding more metals, we have to do better science, and we’re equally committed to raising the standards for protecting communities, the environment, and the rule of law. We’re committed to the Lobito Corridor because the standards are high, and that’s how KoBold works.

Lastly, the private sector can step up and deliver. This year, KoBold’s investors, our shareholders, came to Africa. They saw Mingomba. They met with key policy makers. We see the value that Lobito can create for the Mingomba mine, for our future discoveries. So, it will help enable the next round of investment and the next one.

And we’re building the foundation of — for success of our business and for the region, and we’ll be your partners every step of the way. Thank you.

MR. HOCHSTEIN: Thank you, Josh. In the United States, we’ve been proud of the fact that the government — we’ve been working towards government-enabled and private-sector led.

And under President Biden’s leadership, we have sought to expand the ability of the finance corporations of the United States — EXIM Bank, DFC, the MCC — these are all acronyms — for our export-supporting agencies.

And with us today is one of those agency heads, Enoh Ebong of the U.S. Trade and Development Agency, to be able to talk about what the United States, over the last few years, in a very short period of time since President Biden not only launched this initiative but addressed the Africa Leaders Summit and made the commitment of turning the support from not only assistance but also investment.

So, with us, Enoh Ebong will be able to address how we’ve been able to do that and what the United States wants to do further.

Enoh.

MS. EBONG: Thank you. Your excellencies, President Lourenço, President Tshisekedi, President Hichilema, Vice President Mpango, our own President Biden, private-sector partners, when President Biden launched the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, he called upon our government to prioritize working with like-minded partners on the development of their infrastructure priorities. PGI has since become a critical global platform for the work of more than a dozen U.S. government agencies.

We are here because of your vision for connecting a region and its citizens to the life-changing opportunities that the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor can offer.

Through PGI, we are delivering game-changing deals and harnessing what no other country can: the innovation of our private sector.

For our part, the U.S. Trade and Development Agency helps mobilize capital by working alongside U.S. industry to prepare infrastructure projects through grant-based funding for feasibility studies, technical assistance, and pilot projects.

The Export-Import Bank of the United States, the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the Agen- — the — the U.S. In- — Agency for International Development are all funding significant commitments to sustainable infrastructure in your countries, including rail, clean energy, digital access, and opening the door for sectors like agribusiness.

Through PGI, we are using the full U.S. government tool kit to catalyze private investment and deliver innovative U.S. technology, high-quality infrastructure, and inclusive economic growth in the communities along the Lobito Corridor.

Our partnership with you is generating results — results that will endure for decades to come. We are at a hopeful inflection point in our shared history — one which calls to mind the Angolan national motto, “Virtus Unita Fortior”, which is a call for strength through unity.

We are inspired to convene in Lobito, a gateway to the world, to solidify our momentum and celebrate the strength of the partnership that we have built together. Thank you.

MR. HOCHSTEIN: Thank you, Enoh.

And as we come to a close, President Lourenço, none of what we’ve heard today or what we’ve done over the last couple of years would have been possible without your partnership, your leadership, your friendship, and your commitment to this corridor.

I’d like to turn to you for any closing remarks that you may have. Mr. President.

PRESIDENT LOURENÇO: (As interpreted.) Thank you very much. I would like to thank the presence of everyone, not only that of head of states, but also all our partners, private-sector financial institutions, and particularly thank President Joe Biden for — for the seriousness in keeping up to the promise made at the U.S. Leaders — U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit that has said — is now being implemented.

So, this big project of Lobito Corridor is an infrastructure that we, as African statesmen, have been claiming for so that it can ensure the development of our continent. So, without connectivity, without (inaudible), we cannot ensure food security and development of a continent.

So, once again, thank you very much to all of you. Feel yourselves at home while you remain in the Angolan territory, and you are mostly welcome at any time you would wish to visit Angola.

Thank you very much.

MR. HOCHSTEIN: Thank you, Mr. President. President Biden has told me that he is not a patient man and that, when he wants to deal with infrastructure, he wants it to happen as soon as possible. That is true in the United States. It is surely true here as well.

Mr. President, you heard today that shovels are already in the ground and working here in Angola. It is already cutting the time since your announcement in the DRC. And you heard again today that the shovels will be in the ground for the greenfield project. You promised that the beginning of 2026 in the — for the greenfield.

Mr. President, I hope that what you’ve seen and heard today from the private sector and from the other leaders is a demonstration of the transformative impact of your commitment that you made and the commitment that has been now delivered through the last couple of years, since the — since you launched this project a year and a half ago and since your commitment at the Africa Leaders Summit.

Mr. President, I hope you can — closing remarks to adjourn this meeting.

PRESIDENT BIDEN: Mr. President, I’m coming back to ride on the train, all the way, from end to end.

I — as they say, if you — when we — on the Senate floor of the United States Senate, “Excuse a point of personal privilege.” I’ve ridden an awful lot on trains. I commute every day 212 miles a day on Amtrak from Washington to my hometown to Wilmington, Delaware, as a senator. And so, I — I like trains a lot. (Laughs.) So, I’m coming back. You’re stuck with me.

I want to close with one final thought. It’s almost exactly this day, just over 160 years ago, my country, the United States, broke ground on America’s first transcontinental railroad.

President Abraham Lincoln called it, quote, “the proudest thing of his life.” “The proudest thing of his life.” And — and he hoped that when he retired as president, he said, he’d be able to take a trip on that rail line.

I want to take a trip on this rail line, if I can.

Folks, PGI is one of the things that I’m most proud of in my presidency. The Lobito Corridor and all the work you all are doing proves why.

Because, like Lincoln, we’re not just laying tracks; we’re laying the groundwork for a better future for our people — ordinary people, people that’s going to create jobs. It’s going to create good-paying jobs for people. It’s going to put them in a position where they can have the benefits people around the world have without having to long for them and actually get them.

And so, you know, laying the groundwork for better a future is what we’re all doing here, in my view — a future of innovation, a future of opportunity, and, quite frankly, a future of pride.

Back home in the United States, I often say that when people see big infrastructure projects in their hometown — when they see cranes in the air, shovels in the ground — it literally gives them hope. It gives them hope and brings pride back to communities that have left behind for too long, communities that used to have industry but no longer have it.

And — and Africa has been left behind for much too long beyond that, but not anymore.

Africa is the future. I’m not being solicitous. Those of you who’ve had to deal with me, I’ve been focusing on Africa since I was a kid in the United States Senate heading the Africa Affairs subcommittee. It is the future, and we have to step up.

And I could not be prouder that our governments, our businesses, and our workers — (coughs) — excuse me — are working together to seize that future — that future — to build something that will deliver for the region and, quite frankly, deliver to the whole world — deliver to the whole world.

Going to get your coba- — your — your materials — instead of them coming in, you know, 45 days, they’ll come in 48 hours now. No, I’m serious. It’s a — it’s a big deal, as we say where I come from.

To build something that will deliver for the region and the world — something that, if done right, will outlast all of us and keep delivering for our people for generations to come.

So, thank you again for your partnership.

Thank you, Mr. President, and all of you for your leadership.

And I can’t wait to see all of you will continue to accomplish here in the Lobito Corridor in years ahead, and I think it’s going to set a standard for the rest of the world.

So, thank you, thank you, thank you. And I really appreciate being able to work with you and what you’re doing. Appreciate it. (Applause.)

2:59 P.M. WAT

The post Remarks by President Biden Participating in the Lobito Corridor Trans-Africa Summit | Benguela, Angola appeared first on The White House.

Carrinho Food Processing Factory
Benguela, Angola

2:01 P.M. WAT

MR. HOCHSTEIN: Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Amos Hochstein. I’m a senior adviser to President Biden. It’s an honor to be here with all of you.

I want to open first by saying thank you to Nelson Carrinho and the staff of this facility for opening it up for this event and providing the tour and the facilities for this discussion this afternoon.

Without further ado, I’d like to introduce our host and our leading partner, President Lourenço.

Mr. President.

PRESIDENT LOURENÇO: (As interpreted.) Your excellency, Joe Biden, president of United States of America; your excellency, Félix Tshisekedi, president of the Republic — Democratic Republic of Congo; your excellency, Hakainde Hichilema, of the Republic of Zambia; your excellency, Philip Mpango, vice president of the United Republic of Tanzania; distinguished members of the U.S. Congress; distinguished members of the delegations.

Dear guests, ladies and gentlemen, allow me to greet you with great satisfaction for hosting you at the city of Benguela, on which the attention of all Angolans is focused that are happy with the presence of your excellencies in our country and recognize the importance of this summit for integral development of our continent, the interconnection of this project to the rest of the world.

I’d like to thank President Joe Biden, President Tshisekedi, President Hakainde Hichilema, and President Mpango for having attended this event that will be a historical milestone of international trade and logistic chains.

Angola lives in the situation of peace and stability and is committed to keeping up its commitment with international partners, both at institutional level and with investors that have chosen our country as destiny for their businesses.

It’s important to mention the strategic importance of Lobito Corridor, with Lobito port and the Benguela railway, in the 1970s was one of most profitable rails worldwide by transporting 3.3 millions of tons of cargo per year. We are expecting to optimize this important infrastructure as integral part of an international and transcontinental route that is able to connect the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean and, therefore, connect safely the European, African, Asian continents with gains in terms of transportation and cost of maritime and rail freight.

Lobito Corridor has strategic importance given the contribution that it will give to dynamizing intra-African trade within the context of the African Continental Free Trade Area, as well as the global trade in general.

Excellencies, with the presence of the highest level from our partners of DRC and Zambia, we signed, in June 2023, contract of concession of Lobito Corridor to a private consortium made up by recognized companies.

I would like to highlight the holding of U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in December 2022 — in December 2023 in Washington, D.C., whereby Biden administration showed its commitment in the construction of infrastructure in Africa that has been implemented through Lobito Corridor, through the joint declaration U.S.-EU that was made public in the margin on the event on Global Partnership and Infrastructure during the G20 Summit held in India in 2023.

This will be a lynchpin for the economic development that will provide the participation of small and medium enterprise in the business value chain, mainly in agriculture, industry, and mining, in order to increase trade and economic growth of SADC region and the eastern African region, a way that the political commitment of all engaged people in materialization of this big project is a milestone.

It’s important that the African countries involved, the consortium, and the sponsors should promote activities needed in order to materialize this important project that will positively impact the maritime and rail transport in international trade, as well energy transition and safety — food safety and, in general, in the global economy.

Thank you for your attention and wish you fruitful deliberations.

MR. HOCHSTEIN: Thank you, Mr. President. It’s now my honor to introduce President Biden, who set the vision for this corridor during the Africa Leaders Summit and implementing it ever since.

Mr. President.

PRESIDENT BIDEN: Thank you very much.

Mr. President, thank you very much for your hospitality.

Fellow leaders and friends, I can’t think of a better way to end my trip to Angola than coming here to the Lobito Corridor.

And I want to thank all of you — all of you for being here today, including the presidents of the Democratic Republic of the Congo; Zambia; Tanzania; and our partner, the CEO of the American Finance Corporation.

It’s great to — to be here with all of you. And I mean that sincerely. I think we’re at one of those transition points in world history where what we do in the next several years is going to affect what the next six, seven, eight decades looks like, and I think this is one of those milestones.

Our partner, the CEO of the Fi- — American Finance Corporation, is going to take care of everything for us. No- — nothing to worry about. But all kidding aside, it’s great to be with you all.

When I launched this project with our G7 partners last year, I said our goal was to build a better future. And, folks, the future is here. It’s now. The future is here.

The fact is I wish everyone could see what I saw today: tracks that will form America’s fir- — or Africa’s first intercontinental railroad — transcontinental railroad; a railcar that will cut travel from days to hours; and the — grain silos that are going to help transform the region from a food importers to food exporters; businesses that are investing across the corridor in 5G, solar panels, steel bridges made near my hometown back in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

And I want to be clear about something. All these projects’ investments are designed to have high impact and meet the highest standards for workers, for the environment, and for their communities, because the United States understands how we invest in Africa is just as important as how much we invest in Africa.

That’s what the PGI is part of, which is — I started a program early on — calling it Build Back Better, but we’ve changed it to PGI. And that’s why, today, I’m proud to announce the United States will invest nearly $600 million in additional investment to expand agriculture infrastructure, to build high-speed mobile networks, and to continue upgrading the Lobito Atlantic Railway.

A few months ago, the DRC sent the first copper shipment on this railway for transit onward to the United States. The trip used to take 45 days to get to the United States from that. But now it takes 45 — less than 45 hours — 45 hours because of the changes you made. It’s a game changer.

Imagine how transformative this will be for technology, clean energy, for farming, for food security as a whole. It’s faster, it’s cleaner, it’s cheaper, and — most importantly, I think — it’s just plain common sense.

So, my message today is simple: Let’s keep it up.

All told, the United States has invested nearly $4 billion across the length of the Lobito Corridor. But we’re not alone. Collectively, this group mobilized over $6 billion in private and public investments. But these aren’t just investments in the region; they’re investments in all of our futures, no matter where you are in the world.

Think about it. Critical minerals our world needs for electric vehicles and semiconductors can be found here. Clean energy we need to power artificial intelligence data centers and economic growth can be built here. Food we need to end hunger can be grown and transported and exported from all across the corri- — this corridor.

Put simply, as all of you know well, nations across the Lobito Corridor have solutions to some of the world’s toughest problems.

We just need to keep working together — and I believe this from the bottom of my heart — if we work together — to mobilize more capital, to build more infrastructure to help make these solutions real, to help Africa — help Africa lead the way.

I’ve said to these guys and my colleagues here for a while, the last two days, you know, by 2070, the continent of Africa is going to have half the world’s population. How can that survive without having the most — the greatest infrastructure in the world? It has to happen.

To help Africa lead the way, we need more capital, more infrastructure to deal with these real solutions. And that’s why we’re here today. I want to make sure I get to hear from all of you.

So, let me close with this. When we talk about the PGI, we often talk about the big picture: investment numbers, rising exports, national prosperity. But it’s important to remember, at its core, what we’re doing is about our people. I mean, it’s simple pra- — about individuals, about our people. That’s what this is about. And if I — it’s about the farmer who can get more food on more tables because of what we’re doing; the worker who can count on a living wage and safe working conditions; the entrepreneur who is finally empowered to lead, innovate, and build.

It matters. It matters. So, thank you again for being here today and allowing me to be here. And let’s get started getting this done.

Back to you, Amos.

MR. HOCHSTEIN: Thank you, Mr. President.

Next, we’ll turn to President Tshisekedi of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the largest deposits of copper and cobalt that are now going to be switching direction on this corridor. So, would be grateful to hear your reflections on how this is proceeding and what we need to do in the future for the DRC.

PRESIDENT TSHISEKEDI: (As interpreted.) Thank you, Amos.

Your excellence, President João Lourenço. Excellency, President Hakainde Hichilema of Zambia. Your excellency, President Joe Biden of the United States of America. Your excellency, Mr. Mpango, vice president of Zambia. Distinguished ministers. Distinguished guests. Ladies and gentlemen.

It is a true pleasure for me to speak here today at this meeting focused on the development of the Lobito Corridor. This is a project that is full of hope for our countries and our region.

I would like to warmly thank President João Lourenço for his leadership and hospitality.

The corridor is way more than just a transportation axis. It is a unique opportunity for regional integration, economic transformation, and to improve the living conditions of our fellow citizens.

This railway that connects the mining regions of the DRC and Zambia to the Port of Lobito is conceived in order to transport as much as 20 million metric tons of goods per year by 2030.

This is not just an infrastructure project; it is also a link between our three countries — the DRC, Zambia, and Angola. It is the symbol of our collective will to convert the potential of our countries into a tangible prosperity for our peoples by fostering a harmonious interdependence between our countries where our economies can blossom.

For the DRC, the Lobito Corridor is a strategic opportunity to make sure that we get value out of our natural resources, mostly copper and cobalt, because this makes up to 70 tho- — 70 percent of the global demand for the current energy transition. With a production — a combined production of 3 million tons a year between DRC and Zambia, this project will significantly reduce the logistics cost, as well as it will improve and increase our export revenues.

This is a unique opportunity to access — to access, rather, the global markets through the Port of Lobito, and this gives us a strategic alternative to the other exportation corridors.

With its 1,739 kilometers, this railroad is connected to our roads and — and other rails, and it will play an important role in regional integration and continental integration.

The human impact is potentially enormous. It will catalyze the creation of about 30,000 jobs, direct and indirect, and it will reduce poverty and foster exchanges within Africa, in line with Agenda 2063 of the AU.

Today, transit can take up to 30 days or more, and it will be down to 10 days. This will increase our competitiveness on the international market. This is not just a logistical project, but it is a driving force for economic and social transformation for millions of our people.

The DRC is fully committed to this project. As such, we have implemented a number of concrete actions in order to modernize our rail, road, and port infrastructures. We are trying to establish fluid and strategic connections between our main mining sites, like Kolwezi and Likasi, and the rail corridor — the rail corridor.

In parallel, we’ve put local transformation or processing of our natural resources at the heart of our economic strategy. It is imperative that the wealth contained in our ground contribute directly to the well-being of our peoples. This means that we need to develop industrial value chains locally so we can add value before we export.

Inga 3, our project, as well as other renewable energy projects, are essential to provide reliable energy supply that is sustainable and adapted to the demands of our expanding industry.

These efforts will make our investments more competitive, and we will be able to respect our environmental commitments.

Also, we will continue to strengthen the legal framework and the institutional framework to foster private investments and to guarantee transparency and good governance. These remain utmost priorities to foster a climate of trust and to make sure that our partnerships are win-win partnerships.

However, to fully realize the potential of the Lobito Corridor, peace and security in the region remain paramount.

We would like to thank Angola for its determining role in Luanda Process, and we reaffirm our engagement to working for a definitive return to peace in the east of our country, and security will be the bedrock of any sustainable development.

Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to thank our international partners, including the United States of America, for their technical and financial support through strategic initiatives like Power Africa and PGI. This support is a testimony to the geostrategic importance of the Lobito Corridor in the global supply chains and potential for it to be a catalyst for development.

In order to seize this opportunity and to invest in development of rail, energy, and port infrastructures, we will need investments. This will help make this sustainable.

The Lobito Corridor is surely an element that can be leveraged for growth. It is a model for regional integration, and it is a shared source of prosperity.

I believe firmly that, thanks to our cooperation and our determination, this project will go beyond expectations and will change the trajectory of our region for good.

The DRC stands ready to play its role in this. With our brothers and sisters in the region, we will move forward with this common vision — joined vision and unfailing will to have a better future for our people.

Thank you.

MR. HOCHSTEIN: Thank you, Mr. President.

President Hichilema of Zambia, two years ago, during Vice President Harris’ visit to Zambia, you helped draw — literally, draw the map and the line for the greenfield project for the — the newest part of phase two for the Lobito Corridor rail. We’re very happy that you’re here to be able to share some thoughts on how this could really be transformational for — for Zambia.

Mr. President.

PRESIDENT HICHILEMA: Tha- — thank you very much, Amos, moderator.

Let me just recognize President Biden and President Lourenço, our host. Thank you for hosting us.

President Tshisekedi, our neighbor, regional partner; Vice President Mpango, recognize you. Chief executive AFC, my dear friend here. And chief executive KoBold, our partner in Zambia. And also, the CEO American corporation.

Amos, first it’s — it’s my duty, really, on behalf of the people of Zambia, to appreciate this initiative, the Lobito Corridor; to thank President Biden for his effort, he — his government, American people for the recognition of the importance of this corridor, and, obviously, the origination being in Angola here, through DRC, through Zambia — the map that we drew in my dingy office in Lusaka when Amos visited.

And through that connection from — from Angola, which we believe will be (inaudible) on to Chingola, and then connecting that — very important — connecting that to the TAZARA corridor, which will really mean that we can connect our continent, this part of Africa, from the west coast in Lobito here, where we are, through DRC, Zambia, into Tanzania.

It’s a huge, huge opportunity, not just for Zambia. Angola, DRC, Tanzania — happens that these countries are all SADC countries. It’s good for SADC. It’s good for individual countries. It’s good for SADC.

Not just us; it’s good for Africa — the Africa free trade area we are talking about, with the building blocks of our regional bodies — individual countries, regional bodies — SADC, East African community, West African community.

The Africa free-trade ar- — free-trade area we are envisaging, this corridor is of vital importance to opening up our countries, to opening up our regions, the continent, and, truly, the global economy — the U.S., yes; Europe; other parts of the global community, if I may say that.

So, I am aware that, at this stage, not many will see what we are discussing today and how valuable it will be 10 years down the road. But this is really a fundamental, if you like, change to our countries, to our economies, to our people.

I must say that this project is a huge opportunity for investment, for trade. We are talking about the rail infrastructure but also auxiliary infrastructure: the roads that would feed into this corridor; the opportunities for us to invest in the critical minerals; to apply our technology, the global technology — capital, of course, as President Biden said, but the technologies to exploit the resource endowments in our countries, to start with, in critical minerals to make our global economy greener, safer for us, for the future generations, so we can pass on a world that is able to raise children in a healthier environment, because the air will be reasonably cleaner than what it is today.

And the resource endowments that we have that we can exploit through this corridor in an efficient way, a way that will shorten the distances — connect, yes — but shorten the distances to trade — to invest, to trade. It is extremely — very, very, very important.

But also, I want to indicate that it’s not just the rail infrastructure. It’s not just the critical minerals. It’s also the opportunities to invest in energy — energy itself — diversification of our energy portfolios in these countries, in our regions, on our continent, which, yet again, will contribute to a greener — greener world, to meet our carbon emissions targets, which we simply talk about every COP — COP25, 27, to whatever. I think this is walking the talk, in our view.

Solar, geothermal, wind, and others. This project will make it an imperative for us to invest in the energy that is required to exploit the critical minerals. We need (inaudible).

What else? Agriculture. Very important. Food security. In our countries, with the climate change, the need for us to water harvest, to irrigate — precision irrigation — to increase our productivity per hectare of land we have so we don’t cut more trees to create fields. But for the same hectare, instead of producing, I’d say, corn, two tons per hectare, we can move to 12, 13, 14, 15 tons per hectare. This corridor delivers benefits in those areas.

I can go on, but let me just encapsulate it this way. This opportunity really will deliver efficiencies. This project, this opportunity will deliver growth in our individual economies on our continent, contribute to global growth — positive growth, cleaner growth; jobs; food security.

I already said green economies. What else? Business opportunities. We were taken around, first, just the place where we are here. Look at this facility. This facility now — and I’m very enthused. Where is my colleague there? I think that family is doing a great job. This is what Africa needs.

Our young people go out to study. They choose to come back home. They choose to invest here, working with the global capital, working with global technological advancements.

This facility will now be able not just to take in raw materials from the (inaudible) growers in a scheme, small-scale farmers having input supplied to them, having an offtake, assured market, a fair price improves their lives — this is great — but also be able to export beyond Angola and beyond Africa. This is what Africa needs today.

It also is important for treasury income. I don’t have to ask the question, my president here, how much this business contributes to the Angola’s treasury income, which is essential for Angola and for our economies to look after the weak, the sick, the old, the young in our communities.

And this is the connection, President Biden, that we see — your initiative, our collective effort, AFC here, KoBold here. It just took a visit. One of the times you invited me to the States, (inaudible) states were able to contrive a partnership. Now we have a mine that we are developing with KoBold — an American investment in partnership with Zambia, and we’ll do great things together.

This corridor will make it easier to do that business for — for all.

I think I want to end here to say this is good for our countries. This is good for our region, for our continent. This is good for America. This is good for the global community.

Thank you very much for this opportunity. Thank
you.

MR. HOCHSTEIN: Thank you, Mr. President.

I’d like to turn to Vice President Mpango of Tanzania.

President Biden has often talked about the Lobito Corridor not just as a corridor for the three countries — of DRC and Zambia — but as a transcontinental, and going from ocean to ocean, the end point being Tanzania.

So, we’re very glad to have you here. The floor is yours, Mr. President.

VICE PRESIDENT MPANGO: His excellency, João Lourenço, president of the Republic of Angola, and our gracious host. His excellency, Joe Biden, president of the United States of America. His excellency, Hakainde Hichilema, president of the Republic of Zambia, and my neighbor. His excellency, Hakainde Hichilem- — his excellency, Félix Antoine Tshisekedi, president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The high-level dignitaries around the table, distinguished guests.

On behalf of her excellency, Samia Suluhu Hassan, president of the United Republic of Tanzania, I am honored to join this high-level meeting on the Lobito Corridor, which is a regional interconnection project of immense significance not just to Angola, the DRC, and Zambia, but to the broader SADC region and beyond.

Tanzania commends Angola and partners for this bold initiative to unlock the economic potential of Central and Southern Africa by linking this region to the Atlantic Ocean.

The Lobito Corridor, therefore, demonstrates how infrastructure can be a catalyst for social economic integration, trade facilitation, technology transfer, and regional development.

By bolstering connectivity, the Lobito Corridor will not only facilitate the movement of people, goods, and services, but will also promote shared prosperity and inclusive growth across the region.

Tanzania is no stranger to such aspirations, as it already links landlocked countries in Central Africa with the — with the Middle East, Asia, and the Far East. The Tanzania-Zambia railway — or, in short, TAZARA — and the oil pipeline TAZAMA, all connecting the hinterland to the Indian Ocean, have facilitated connectivity, cooperation and shared prosperity since the 1970s.

And through the SADC Protocols on Transport, Communication, and Meteorology, Tanzania is already linked to her neighbors and the wider region, enhancing the movement of people, goods, and opportunities across borders.

TAZARA is an interstate rail link, which allows trains to move from Tanzania to some SADC member states, including Zambia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa.

Tanzania extends profound gratitude to the United States for its steadfast support in advancing the development of the Lobito Corridor. The U.S. commitment to this transformative project reflects its enduring partnership with Africa and its recognition of the catalytic role of infrastructure in development.

In the same vein, we would like to commend the support of AFC and other partners for partnering with the U.S. in support of the development of the Lobito Corridor.

Tanzania views the Lobito Corridor as an integral part of a broader strategy to enhance connectivity in Africa.

We also appreciate the fact that the implementation of the project will provide important opportunities for Africa’s development in sectors such as agriculture, renewable energy, digital transformation, trade, and logistics along the corridor.

Tanzania is already undertaking in- — internal consultations aiming at aligning this project with national priorities and other bilateral and regional commitments.

In closing, allow me to reiterate Tanzania’s commitment to regional integration and shared prosperity. We note the progress made on the development of the Lobito Corridor and commend the visionary leadership that has brought this initiative to life. And it is through such partnerships and innovations that Africa’s Agenda 2063 will be realized.

I thank you.

MR. HOCHSTEIN: Thank you, Mr. Vice President.

I’d like to turn it over to the AFC — the Africa Finance Corporation. Mr. Samaila Zubairu has been a fantastic partner to this project. The AFC has invested across the many projects across the corridor and has been a great partner to making this — to realize this — of investment together, having a partnership with the United States, together with you, in promoting this project as an investable, bankable, and commercial project.

Mr. Zubairu.

MR. ZUBAIRU: Thank you.

Your excellencies, President João Lourenço of Angola, our gracious host. President Joseph R. Biden of United States of America. President Félix Tshisekedi of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. President Hakainde Hichilema of Zambia. Vice President Philip Mpango of Tanzania. Honorable ministers. Members of the consortium. Distinguished guests.

It is my honor and privilege to stand before you here today.

Our purpose at the Africa Finance Corporation is to build the infrastructure that will catalyze Africa’s industrialization and structural economic transformation.

The Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor is exactly the project we are made for and what the founders envisaged when they created AFC 17 years ago.

I have three key messages today: the partnership that got us here, what this project means, and our commitment to deliver this project for future generations.

I recall our first meeting with Amos Hochstein on the margins of the 2022 year’s Africa Leaders Summit convened by President Biden almost two years ago. Amos, at that time, was special presidential coordinator of the newly formed G7 PGI. We agreed, in not so many words, that we’ll do something together that will have a generational impact on our two continents.

I stand here today as lead developer of the Lobito-Zambia greenfield rail corridor, doing exactly what we said we will do. Since that meeting in December 2022, we signed an MOU formally constituting the project consortium in October 2023, comprising the governments of Angola, Zambia, and the DRC, alongside the United States, the European Commission, and the African Development Bank.

In February 2024, we commissioned a feasibility study with CPCS as technical consultant. That same month, we cohosted the Lobito Corridor private sector investment forum in Lusaka, alongside President Hichilema and the U.S. government.

In April 2024, we commenced the legal work stream with Linklaters.

In June 2024, we welcomed the government of Italy to the consortium and their commitment to — of $320 million. Thanks to President Biden for making that happen.

In September 2024, we completed a feasibility study and signed a $2 million grant agreement with USTDA in support of the enviro- — social impact assessment, which has been commissioned for delivery by decision analysis.

On the margins of UNGA this September, we signed the concession agreement with the governments of Angola and Zambia in the sec- — in the ceremony hosted by Secretary Blinken.

With thanks to President Lourenço, we have commenced — who has given (inaudible) instructions for the demanding efforts, we have taken a fundamental step towards unlocking the cultural value chain around the rail corridor.

We are now on track to break ground by early ‘26 in both Zambia and Angola. We plan to break ground at the same time from two different locations.

We have done all this while acting as financial adviser for the Lobito Atlantic Rail consortium, concessionaire of the Benguela rail line, which runs from the Port of Lobito here to Luau in DRC.

The rapid pace at which we are moving reflects the urgency of the type of development Africans are demanding from their leaders and the conviction of this consortium to execute. In particular, the resolve of the minister of transport of Angola, Ricardo Viegas D’Abreu, and the minister of transport and logistics for Zambia, Honorable Frank Tayali.

What this project means — we’ve heard about what this project means. I’ll just mention a key — a few statements. The Lobito Corridor is more than just a rail line. It is an economic corridor that provides lower cost, lower carbon gateway to African integration and global competitiveness, cutting travel time from the Copperbelt to international markets from 45 days to 45 hours, as we heard President Biden mention recently.

Shifting freight from road to rail will cut emissions by a minimum of 300,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually, underscoring Africa’s primacy in the global energy transition and efforts to decarbonize the battery minerals value chain, particularly in producing battery precursors for both our industries here and in America.

It al- — it will also catalyze opportunities in ecotourism, agribusiness, and power transmission lines.

Earlier this week, President Lourenço offered us an opportunity to help build transmission lines and interconnectors to the Copperbelt and the South African Power Pool, as well as to the Lobito Atlantic Rail Corridor.

Our commitment: Here today, we celebrate our decision to step in as project developers for this greenfield railway.

But this is just the beginning. I am delighted to announce AFC’s commitment of $500 million in financing for the Lobito-Zambia greenfield rail. This investment reflects our confidence in the project’s transformative potential to deliver economic benefits that transcend borders.

We will mobilize African pension funds to invest alongside us, ensuring generational sustainability. We will also partner with other MDBs and financial institutions to cocreate instruments that crowd in global institutional capital, as was successfully done in markets such as Japan and the Gulf.

In addition, we have signed a memorandum of understanding with KoBold Metals as our anchor client, guaranteeing a minimum of 300,000 tons of copper and related freight per year. We have also pledged $100 million to Kobaloni Energy for Zambia’s first battery-grade copper sulfate facility.

Excellencies, distinguished guests, this project symbolizes what Africa’s leadership, together with our global partners, can achieve when we unite behind a shared vision. It is not just about railways or minerals or food security. It is about forging partnerships, creating jobs, and driving a sustainable future for Africa and the rest of the world.

Together, let us seize this moment and make history. Thank you.

MR. HOCHSTEIN: Thank you, Mr. Zubairu. And let me repeat again: Thank you, again, on behalf of everyone, for just making today’s announcement of committing an additional $500 million for the project and starting it at the same time between Zambia and Angola is a great step forward.

You mentioned KoBold Metals. And all of this is not possible without the private sector coming and making the investments in the countries of the corridor. KoBold is literally the company that connects the 20th century and the 21st century. It’s a technology company that’s gone into the mining industry for products that will go into chips and electric vehicles.

So, very glad that you’re here with us. And thank you, Josh, for being here and for your words.

MR. GOLDMAN: Your excellencies, President Biden, President Lourenço, President Hichilema, President Tshisekedi, Vice President Mpango, Director Ebong, CEO Zubairu, thank you very much. It’s really an honor to be here.

KoBold is the world’s most advanced mineral exploration company. The next phase of global economic growth is going to require significantly expanding supply of metals like copper and lithium to make everything from cars to data centers for AI.

But the mining industry keeps getting worse at finding more deposits of these metals — ten times less successful today than a generation ago. And the problem just keeps getting harder. The mines in production today, the vast majority were easily discovered and they were discovered many years ago.

So, at KoBold, we invent technology to improve exploration and discover the next generation of ore deposits. And we use our technology to go out and explore all over the world, at scale, using a powerful combination of artificial intelligence and human intelligence.

And then, when we make discoveries, we develop mines in ways that deliver lasting benefits to the countries and the communities where we operate.

In Zambia, we’re developing the Mingomba deposit, which will be one of the largest copper mines in the world. And we are very proud to be an anchor partner of the — the new Zambia-DRC-Angola Lobito rail, because the Lobito Corridor fits the way that we do business.

First, we move fast. The economic impact and the creation of good jobs needs to happen now, not later. CEO Zubairu said that there will be shovels in the ground on the greenfield Zambia-Angola portion of the Lobito rail, and that’s great news, because at KoBold, we’re working to start major construction on the Mingomba mine also in 2026.

We will ship at least 300,000 tons per year of copper on the Lobito rail so that our investments at Mingomba can accelerate development across the region. And the faster we all move, the better for everyone.

Second, we succeed because of our partnerships. We work every day with our most important partners throughout the Zambian government and with our joint venture partners at ZCM-IH. Together, we’ll create thousands of good jobs that will last for generations and will in- — increase intra-African trade. And our partnerships succeed because KoBold follows the rules and government supports our investments with actions that are fair, transparent, and fast.

Third, we raise the standards, as CEO Zubairu said. To succeed where industry is failing at finding more metals, we have to do better science, and we’re equally committed to raising the standards for protecting communities, the environment, and the rule of law. We’re committed to the Lobito Corridor because the standards are high, and that’s how KoBold works.

Lastly, the private sector can step up and deliver. This year, KoBold’s investors, our shareholders, came to Africa. They saw Mingomba. They met with key policy makers. We see the value that Lobito can create for the Mingomba mine, for our future discoveries. So, it will help enable the next round of investment and the next one.

And we’re building the foundation of — for success of our business and for the region, and we’ll be your partners every step of the way. Thank you.

MR. HOCHSTEIN: Thank you, Josh. In the United States, we’ve been proud of the fact that the government — we’ve been working towards government-enabled and private-sector led.

And under President Biden’s leadership, we have sought to expand the ability of the finance corporations of the United States — EXIM Bank, DFC, the MCC — these are all acronyms — for our export-supporting agencies.

And with us today is one of those agency heads, Enoh Ebong of the U.S. Trade and Development Agency, to be able to talk about what the United States, over the last few years, in a very short period of time since President Biden not only launched this initiative but addressed the Africa Leaders Summit and made the commitment of turning the support from not only assistance but also investment.

So, with us, Enoh Ebong will be able to address how we’ve been able to do that and what the United States wants to do further.

Enoh.

MS. EBONG: Thank you. Your excellencies, President Lourenço, President Tshisekedi, President Hichilema, Vice President Mpango, our own President Biden, private-sector partners, when President Biden launched the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, he called upon our government to prioritize working with like-minded partners on the development of their infrastructure priorities. PGI has since become a critical global platform for the work of more than a dozen U.S. government agencies.

We are here because of your vision for connecting a region and its citizens to the life-changing opportunities that the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor can offer.

Through PGI, we are delivering game-changing deals and harnessing what no other country can: the innovation of our private sector.

For our part, the U.S. Trade and Development Agency helps mobilize capital by working alongside U.S. industry to prepare infrastructure projects through grant-based funding for feasibility studies, technical assistance, and pilot projects.

The Export-Import Bank of the United States, the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the Agen- — the — the U.S. In- — Agency for International Development are all funding significant commitments to sustainable infrastructure in your countries, including rail, clean energy, digital access, and opening the door for sectors like agribusiness.

Through PGI, we are using the full U.S. government tool kit to catalyze private investment and deliver innovative U.S. technology, high-quality infrastructure, and inclusive economic growth in the communities along the Lobito Corridor.

Our partnership with you is generating results — results that will endure for decades to come. We are at a hopeful inflection point in our shared history — one which calls to mind the Angolan national motto, “Virtus Unita Fortior”, which is a call for strength through unity.

We are inspired to convene in Lobito, a gateway to the world, to solidify our momentum and celebrate the strength of the partnership that we have built together. Thank you.

MR. HOCHSTEIN: Thank you, Enoh.

And as we come to a close, President Lourenço, none of what we’ve heard today or what we’ve done over the last couple of years would have been possible without your partnership, your leadership, your friendship, and your commitment to this corridor.

I’d like to turn to you for any closing remarks that you may have. Mr. President.

PRESIDENT LOURENÇO: (As interpreted.) Thank you very much. I would like to thank the presence of everyone, not only that of head of states, but also all our partners, private-sector financial institutions, and particularly thank President Joe Biden for — for the seriousness in keeping up to the promise made at the U.S. Leaders — U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit that has said — is now being implemented.

So, this big project of Lobito Corridor is an infrastructure that we, as African statesmen, have been claiming for so that it can ensure the development of our continent. So, without connectivity, without (inaudible), we cannot ensure food security and development of a continent.

So, once again, thank you very much to all of you. Feel yourselves at home while you remain in the Angolan territory, and you are mostly welcome at any time you would wish to visit Angola.

Thank you very much.

MR. HOCHSTEIN: Thank you, Mr. President. President Biden has told me that he is not a patient man and that, when he wants to deal with infrastructure, he wants it to happen as soon as possible. That is true in the United States. It is surely true here as well.

Mr. President, you heard today that shovels are already in the ground and working here in Angola. It is already cutting the time since your announcement in the DRC. And you heard again today that the shovels will be in the ground for the greenfield project. You promised that the beginning of 2026 in the — for the greenfield.

Mr. President, I hope that what you’ve seen and heard today from the private sector and from the other leaders is a demonstration of the transformative impact of your commitment that you made and the commitment that has been now delivered through the last couple of years, since the — since you launched this project a year and a half ago and since your commitment at the Africa Leaders Summit.

Mr. President, I hope you can — closing remarks to adjourn this meeting.

PRESIDENT BIDEN: Mr. President, I’m coming back to ride on the train, all the way, from end to end.

I — as they say, if you — when we — on the Senate floor of the United States Senate, “Excuse a point of personal privilege.” I’ve ridden an awful lot on trains. I commute every day 212 miles a day on Amtrak from Washington to my hometown to Wilmington, Delaware, as a senator. And so, I — I like trains a lot. (Laughs.) So, I’m coming back. You’re stuck with me.

I want to close with one final thought. It’s almost exactly this day, just over 160 years ago, my country, the United States, broke ground on America’s first transcontinental railroad.

President Abraham Lincoln called it, quote, “the proudest thing of his life.” “The proudest thing of his life.” And — and he hoped that when he retired as president, he said, he’d be able to take a trip on that rail line.

I want to take a trip on this rail line, if I can.

Folks, PGI is one of the things that I’m most proud of in my presidency. The Lobito Corridor and all the work you all are doing proves why.

Because, like Lincoln, we’re not just laying tracks; we’re laying the groundwork for a better future for our people — ordinary people, people that’s going to create jobs. It’s going to create good-paying jobs for people. It’s going to put them in a position where they can have the benefits people around the world have without having to long for them and actually get them.

And so, you know, laying the groundwork for better a future is what we’re all doing here, in my view — a future of innovation, a future of opportunity, and, quite frankly, a future of pride.

Back home in the United States, I often say that when people see big infrastructure projects in their hometown — when they see cranes in the air, shovels in the ground — it literally gives them hope. It gives them hope and brings pride back to communities that have left behind for too long, communities that used to have industry but no longer have it.

And — and Africa has been left behind for much too long beyond that, but not anymore.

Africa is the future. I’m not being solicitous. Those of you who’ve had to deal with me, I’ve been focusing on Africa since I was a kid in the United States Senate heading the Africa Affairs subcommittee. It is the future, and we have to step up.

And I could not be prouder that our governments, our businesses, and our workers — (coughs) — excuse me — are working together to seize that future — that future — to build something that will deliver for the region and, quite frankly, deliver to the whole world — deliver to the whole world.

Going to get your coba- — your — your materials — instead of them coming in, you know, 45 days, they’ll come in 48 hours now. No, I’m serious. It’s a — it’s a big deal, as we say where I come from.

To build something that will deliver for the region and the world — something that, if done right, will outlast all of us and keep delivering for our people for generations to come.

So, thank you again for your partnership.

Thank you, Mr. President, and all of you for your leadership.

And I can’t wait to see all of you will continue to accomplish here in the Lobito Corridor in years ahead, and I think it’s going to set a standard for the rest of the world.

So, thank you, thank you, thank you. And I really appreciate being able to work with you and what you’re doing. Appreciate it. (Applause.)

2:59 P.M. WAT

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Center for Strategic and International Studies

Washington, D.C.

MR. SULLIVAN:  Well, good afternoon.  And thank you, John.  It’s a pleasure for me to be here, and it’s a pleasure for me to come talk about what is, yes, a technical topic, but also a deeply strategic topic for the future of U.S. defense and deterrence and for the future of American statecraft.

Earlier this week, President Biden signed his 71st security assistance package for Ukraine.  It was the latest step in a massive effort, on a scale not seen since the Second World War, to equip a partner with the military capability it needs to defend its sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity against a brutal invasion by a larger neighbor.

And in the process of providing that support, we have also modernized our own arsenal.  With every package, the Department of Defense provides Ukraine older equipment it has on the shelf, and then uses congressionally appropriated funding to purchase new, more modern equipment for our own stockpiles.  This approach has enabled Ukraine to stand up against an adversary with an economy 10 times larger, a population three times bigger, and a military once ranked the second best in the world.

But at no stage was this historic undertaking a sure thing. In fact, in a matter of eight weeks of war in 2022, Ukraine burned through a year’s worth of U.S. 155-millimeter artillery production.

I hold a daily meeting on Russia and Ukraine in my office at the White House, and in those early months, in those daily meetings, we reviewed Ukraine’s run rate in excruciating detail, and we confronted a startling reality: The American arsenal of democracy was fundamentally underequipped for the task at hand. So, President Biden issued a straightforward order: Exponentially ramp up the production of 155-millimeter artillery munitions.  It turned out, executing on that was not so straightforward.

At a stretch, we could only immediately add about 400 rounds on top of the 14,000 rounds we produced each month, enough for Ukraine to defend itself for a few extra hours.  Our industrial capacity simply wasn’t there.  We lacked supplies of critical precursor materials.  We had to dig ourselves out of a deep hole.

Now, to offset their early munition shortage, Ukraine began to leverage drones and autonomous systems.  And this is the second part of the story, one that continues to evolve today on the frontlines.  They used off-the-shelf technology and cheap, mass-produced platforms to rapidly build an army of drones. 

But even as Ukraine demonstrated success on the battlefield with these new systems, we were behind the curve in innovating, acquiring, and fielding those types of systems ourselves, and that was just the tip of the iceberg.  The deeper we looked, the clearer it became that we needed larger stocks of many critical munitions and weapons platforms, both to maintain U.S. readiness and to equip a partner under attack.

Now, the men and women of our national security and defense communities are extraordinary, and they can pull rabbits out of hats.  I’ve seen it done.  But decades of under-investment and consolidation had seriously eroded our defense industrial base, and there was no way around it.

Now, in some respects, we had recognized this challenge from the moment we entered office, and in fact, we started taking steps to fix it in the President’s very first budget request.  But Russia’s war against Ukraine sharpened the stakes and clarified the scope of the challenge.  It was a strategic warning.

America’s defense industrial base, the one we inherited, was not up to the task that we face in a new age of strategic competition, including how we have to prepare for and deter future conflicts in Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific.

So we had to act, and we did act.  We did so thanks to the President’s clear direction, the able leadership of Secretary Austin and Deputy Secretary Hicks, and strong bipartisan congressional support. 

By the time we leave office, our defense industrial base will be producing 55,000 155-millimeter artillery rounds per month, almost a 400 percent increase, and we’ve put it on track to double again, reaching 100,000 per month by early 2026.

But this effort extends way beyond 155-millimeter ammunition rounds.  As we’ve drawn down our older stockpiles to support Ukraine of other weapons, we’ve invested in new weapons and platforms to replace them.  Industry has responded and reoriented to meet our demand signal.  New production lines have opened and increased output.  We’re now building more javelins in Alabama and Arizona; tanks in Ohio; armored vehicles in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin; HIMARS in Arkansas; rockets in West Virginia.  And our investments, all told, reach dozens of states. 

We’ve galvanized defense industries, commercial companies, startups, and venture capital firms to focus increasingly on developing low-cost, uncrewed systems for our allies, and countering those of our adversaries and competitors.  

The story also extends well beyond Ukraine, from our efforts to revitalize the submarine industrial base to a groundbreaking initiative with Canada and Finland to spur the production of polar icebreakers. 

All told, the Biden administration has made major investments across four defense budgets and multiple supplemental funding bills to strengthen the U.S. defense industrial base, devoting almost $1.3 trillion to the research, development, and acquisition of capabilities that is driving production and driving industrial capacity.

In real dollars spent, this is more than the United States investment in procurement and R&D in any four-year period throughout the entire Cold War. 

But this challenge is not one that can be met in a single term in office.  There is still so much work to do.  This has to be a generational project. 

So, today I want to do two things.  First, I want to share the steps that we’ve taken to modernize, invigorate, and expand our defense industrial base.  And then, second, I want to offer a roadmap for the next Congress and the next administration to carry this work forward on a bipartisan basis.

But let me provide a little bit of context. 

Over the past several years, we’ve seen a tectonic shift in the global landscape.  We’ve seen the rise of a peer competitor in the PRC.  We’ve seen patterns of cooperation deepen between the PRC, Russia, North Korea, and Iran.  We’ve seen the proliferation of low-cost lethal technologies to a number of state and non-state actors across multiple continents. 

Against this backdrop, a strong defense industrial base is essential to effective statecraft.  This means not just more investment, but smarter investment, production, innovation, and integration with allies.

A stronger defense industrial base is necessary for us to deter military aggression against NATO or our Indo-Pacific allies and partners.  It’s necessary for us to equip our partners when they come under attack.  It’s necessary for us to respond to threats to the global commons, including freedom of navigation.  And it’s necessary to strengthen our hand at the negotiating table as we pursue diplomacy to end conflicts like we recently have done with the war that raged across the border between Israel and Lebanon.

In the Cold War era, our DIB was formidable, but it took a long time to build up.  We understood then, almost intuitively, that our production capacity was central to our military capability and, therefore, to our deterrence.  When the Iron Curtain fell, we turned the page.  In the decades that followed, we enjoyed a brief moment without a peer competitor to pace us, and our defense enterprise atrophied. 

In part due to the urging from the government, mergers collapsed significant defense companies into each other, from 50 to the five major prime contractors that we have today.  Factories closed.  Production lines shut down.  Our skilled workforce declined.  The number of defense suppliers shrank.  And many of our supply lines migrated overseas. 

Now, I’m not suggesting we need to retool for a new Cold War, but we once again face a dangerous, complex, and contested global landscape.  Our adversaries and competitors are taking more risks, and importantly, they’re working together to strengthen each other’s defense capacity. 

So, today, once again, we need to heed the maxim that industrial might is deterrence.  Given the DIB we inherited, our task has been to reverse years of decline while simultaneously increasing agility, innovation, and integration. 

So we’ve made three big pushes to try to strengthen our defense industrial base:

First, as I’ve described, by boosting production of munitions and weapons platforms and creating the infrastructure to sustain that boost in production.  This has meant new factories, new lines, accelerated delivery times on the weapons and munitions we need most. 

The Department of Defense released its first-ever National Defense Industrial Strategy.  We’re strengthening supply chain resilience and increasing stockpiles of key inputs, like the solid rocket motors that power our most advanced missiles.  We’ve made notable progress on our air defenses, another critical component of our global defense architecture, which is in high and increasing demand across Europe, the Middle East, and the Pacific.

Germany, the Netherlands, Romania, and Spain are working together to procure almost $6 billion worth of Patriot missiles that are now being produced through a joint venture between a U.S. and German company. 

At the same time, we’re working to expand joint production deals with Japan to strengthen our air defense umbrella in the Indo-Pacific.

On long-range fires, another essential element of deterrence in the modern era, we’ve made big strides towards modernization.  We’re investing heavily in the next generation of ground attack missiles, what we call PrSM, to rapidly increase production capacity. 

We’re taking similar steps to expand production of several kinds of anti-ship missiles across a variety of ranges. 

And we’ve made significant investments across the American shipbuilding supply chain — that entire supply chain.  The challenge there on shipbuilding has been especially immense.  We’ve sought to recover from an erosion that actually traces its decline to decades of erosion in the overall American manufacturing base.

Over the last 40 years, in the submarine industrial base alone, five shipyards closed, the workforce shrank, suppliers left the market.  Our approach to production was built on post-Cold War assumptions about a global security environment and just-in-time supply chains that, frankly, have not borne out. 

To give you a sense of the scale of the problem, we need an additional 140,000 more skilled workers — 140,000 — machinists, welders, pipe fitters, electricians — than we currently have to meet submarine production demand over the next 10 years. 

Now, we can’t fix four decades of challenges in four years, but we have surged to invest in our submarine industrial base.  With billions of dollars in new funding, we’re developing new suppliers across more than 30 states to reduce bottlenecks, expand the use of robotics and additive manufacturing, and upgrade and expand shipyards. 

These investments will leave the submarine industrial base in a stronger position, but frankly, more is needed.  And so, we’re seeking more funds from Congress, especially for more manufacturing technology, for more infrastructure improvements, and for wage increases to ensure we can retain the workers we have while we work to hire thousands more. 

The second big push we’ve made is to try to leverage and unleash the potential of innovative technologies and the power and speed of our commercial sector.

On the battlefield in Ukraine, we’re seeing the character of war evolve before our eyes as Ukraine pairs artificial intelligence with low-cost drones to create powerful and cheap alternatives to precision-guided munitions. 

Ukraine’s missile and drone manufacturers are among the most innovative on the planet, a product of both necessity and Ukrainian resolve and ingenuity.  They bring groundbreaking, state-of-the-art capabilities to the fight at costs that are an order of magnitude lower than our traditional munitions. 

By facilitating collaboration between American and Ukrainian industry, we’re ensuring that our own companies are pioneering new technologies to complement our more exquisite capabilities.  Our firms are learning what technologies work best and how to use them and iterate them during conflict. 

We’re creating a feedback loop that prizes and enshrines innovation.  And that way, the American military can get to and remain on the cutting edge of these new forms of warfighting technology.

Here at home, the Department of Defense’s Replicator initiative is just one example of how we’re trying to adapt more institutionally to the future character of warfare.  Through Replicator, DOD is procuring and fielding attributable [attritable] autonomous capabilities at speed and scale — thousands of systems across air, land, and sea — in less than 24 months. 

And we’re establishing the processes to be able to adopt and scale new technologies as needed in the future, including from non-traditional defense companies and from the commercial sector, because we need to keep pushing the envelope in terms of speed and scale.

Recognizing the power of responsible AI to transform the way militaries fight, we released our first-ever National Security Memorandum on Artificial Intelligence.  It provides a blueprint for harnessing the power and managing the risks of AI to advance our national security.

Now, all this we’re doing at home, but we recognize that we can’t and shouldn’t do this alone.  As strategic competition intensifies, as the global environment becomes more contested, we have to take bold steps in concert with our allies and partners to integrate and strengthen deterrence across the major theaters of the Indo-Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East. 

And that leads to the third big push we’ve been making: laying the foundation to build an integrated defense industrial base for the free world. 

In the first year of our administration, we launched one of the most ambitious defense projects in modern history, the trilateral security partnership, AUKUS.  Under AUKUS, we joined forces with the UK and Australia to support Australia’s acquisition of a conventionally armed, nuclear-powered submarine capability in ways that will strengthen our collective submarine industrial bases. 

And we’re creating opportunities for innovation and collaboration through AUKUS on cutting-edge technologies in advanced cyber, undersea capabilities, electronic warfare, quantum, AI, and hypersonics. 

Just this year, we held trilateral exercises in Australia, with Japan in attendance, conducting tests on the collective use of autonomous and uncrewed systems in maritime operations. 

And this push for an integrated DIB for the free world extends way beyond AUKUS.  Over the past four years, we’ve ramped up efforts to expand and accelerate what we call global defense production, a catch-all term for co-development, co-production, and co-sustainment of platforms and munitions with allies and partners. 

Similarly, we’ve worked with our NATO Allies to follow our example and overhaul their defense industrial bases.  And this was a major line of effort and set of outcomes at the NATO Summit President Biden hosted here in Washington for the 75th anniversary of NATO this summer. 

As part of this effort, we’ve had to rethink our strategic technology controls to account for today’s realities.  The fact is our non-proliferation and export control regimes, especially when it comes to allies, were formulated in a different era.  The risks were different.  The nature of technology diffusion was different.  These outdated restrictions have actually caused us to withhold critical technologies from close partners and close allies.  And without a significant change in the way we do business, our friends could be left behind as our adversaries march forward with deeper technology-sharing among themselves.  So we can’t let that happen. 

Through AUKUS, we began the hard work of driving major reforms in our export control regime to strengthen cooperation with Australia and the UK. 

And now, our team is finalizing a National Security Memorandum on Missile Technology Exports to modernize our implementation of the MTCR, the Missile Technology Control Regime. 

We will renew our commitment to a strong non-proliferation regime to keep these technologies out of the hands of bad actors, but we will also add flexibility to transfer this technology to certain partners with strong export control systems.  That means we can now boost our friends’ production of advanced missiles to increase the global availability and interoperability of long-range and precision-guided munitions that can strengthen our collective deterrence.

And this cooperation with our allies and partners enhances not just our national security but, frankly, our joint economic prosperity.  We’re creating jobs for American workers, opening new markets for American businesses, all while reaping the clear national security benefits of this work. 

Those are the three big pushes, and we’ve made progress over the last four years.  But frankly, we need progress over the next 40.  We need a roadmap for the future that builds on what we’ve done, because there is still a lot left to do.  I’m not here to report that the job is finished.  I’m here to report the job has started, and now it needs to continue in a big and sustained and bipartisan way. 

Now, there will be important debates over the size of the defense budget in the new administration and the new Congress.  Wherever the defense topline lands, I see at least four critical pieces of work that demand the sustained effort of the next administration, the next Congress, the armed forces, and industry all working in common purpose.

First, and most fundamentally, we’ve got to keep ramping up and accelerating production and procurement of the things that we need most.  This includes long-range critical munitions, vital air defense capabilities, and attritable and autonomous systems that are shaping the future of warfare.  Because no budget will be unlimited, this is going to require that we make hard trade-offs, prioritizing these key capabilities in particular. 

The bottom line here is that we’ve got to keep growing our magazine depth.  Future conflicts are going to consume munitions and equipment at a rate we have not seen in a very long time.  That means stockpiling both the vital munitions we know we’ll need in sufficient quantities and the components needed to produce them on short notice. 

We actually asked Congress for a critical munitions acquisition fund that would have guaranteed an ongoing demand signal to industry and enabled us to stockpile munitions that are in high demand, both at home and among our partners. 

Despite bipartisan support for that fund, Congress didn’t ultimately come through with the appropriation.  I urge Congress to work with the next administration to get this done.

When it comes to funding our defense needs, we also need Congress to return to regular order.  The practice of relying on continuing resolutions to equip our forces creates uncertainty and instability for both DOD and the industries we rely on. 

Pentagon leaders, and leaders from both parties across multiple administrations, have continually raised the alarm about this.  On a bipartisan basis, Congress should fund the defense enterprise — and, frankly, the rest of the U.S. government — responsibly and on time. 

And we also need industry to do its part to grow our magazine depth, by moving beyond the current cycle in which they hedge against uncertainty and do just enough to meet current demand, even when DOD is prepared to sign multiyear contracts. 

This calls for a new era of public-private partnership to build and sustain more commercial facilities, to maintain warm production lines, and to invest in a long-term effort to shore up our DIB workforce so that we have surge capacity when we need it. 

And while we’re doing that, we need to expand the shipyards, the armories, and the plants owned by DOD as well, to make our defense industrial base more resilient. 

Second, we need to accelerate major acquisition reform at DOD to prize innovation agility and to encourage a degree of risk taking.  This requires rethinking our requirements process to ensure that even tech companies outside the traditional defense orbit can understand and provide what DOD needs.  It requires adapting our system to allow flexibility for innovation mid-cycle in the development of a new system or platform. 

We also need to make it even easier for the defense enterprise to absorb more technological solutions from the commercial sector, and to do so quickly and at scale.

Today, collaboration among DOD, Silicon Valley, and America’s wider innovation ecosystem is better than it’s been in decades.  And that’s been met with significant bipartisan funding and support from Congress.  We’ve got to keep up this virtuous cycle. 

Two years ago, Congress created a bipartisan commission that examined ways to improve the Pentagon’s six-decade-old process for how it plans budgets and spends.  They put forward dozens of smart recommendations that DOD is already in the process of implementing.  But to really make that report work, we need new authorities from Congress too.  The critical munitions acquisition fund is one example of that.  Providing DOD with department-wide resources that can be used to meet emergent requirements is another.

Third, we have to institutionalize the work we’re doing, in concert with our allies and partners, to integrate our defense industrial bases. 

Working together boosts our collective readiness.  It allows us to dramatically expand our total production.  It creates resilience in our supply chains and manufacturing bases.  And most importantly, it strengthens deterrence as our adversaries learn that they will have to deal with the combined industrial might and fighting capacity of the U.S. and our allies and partners around the world. 

And finally, we can produce all the military hardware in the world, but it will mean nothing without our people, the talented men and women of the joint force.  They are the ones who ensure the equipment we buy translates into the capability we need.  They underwrite our deterrence and security, and we have to continue to invest in them and ensure that we’re recruiting and retaining the talent and leadership that we rely on to field the best military in the world, the best military in history. 

Now, none of this will be easy.  We don’t know what the future holds.  But we do know that the best way to preserve peace and protect American interests is to maintain a force that is strong enough to deter a future conflict.  That has been at the front of the President’s mind for nearly four years, and it will have to remain so for the next administration as well. 

We’ve laid the foundation to renew our great arsenal of democracy, but the work will have to continue to ensure we have the munitions and capabilities we need to navigate a myriad of contingencies.  After all, history teaches us that the adversary rarely chooses to start the war that we are most prepared for, but it also teaches us that when we galvanize the collective power of American national security and defense communities, American workers, American businesses, and American ingenuity, we will prevail. 

Thank you for listening to me on what can be a dense subject but I believe a subject of profound consequence for hearing now both on what we have done and what we need to do.  And I look forward to taking a few questions.  Thank you very much.  (Applause.) 

MR. JONES:  Thank you.  And for those who have not read the FDR speech on the arsenal of democracy, it is well worth going back and rereading that from the early days of World War Two. 

Thanks for coming to CSIS.  I wanted to start, actually, not with our industrial base — defense industrial base, but with the Chinese defense industrial base.  Part of the need, I think, for a strong industrial base is that we have adversaries that are building their own. 

So I wonder if you could start off with your sense of where the Chinese are at on their defense industrial base.  What is of particular concern?  Where do you see vulnerabilities?  The new DOD report on China also highlights major corruption within the Chinese industrial base.  So how would you characterize the industrial base?  And what’s the significance, then, as we look at continuing to build ours?

MR. SULLIVAN:  So, first, China has been growing its defense budget year on year, closing the gap in terms of their outlays and ours.  Second, because they have a state-directed system with state-owned enterprises working hand in glove with the PLA, with their military, they’re able to direct production and expand production at rates much more rapidly than we historically have been able to.

And they’ve also increased their innovation capacity, going beyond merely stealing technology, and then copying it, to developing new systems. 

So I think we have to take the overall industrial base capacity of China very seriously, and it is a key factor in the way that we think about what we’ve got to tool up to do ourselves and along with our allies and partners. 

At the same time, I think that there are three areas where the U.S. has inherent advantages.  One of them is: The same state-owned enterprises that are able to very rapidly send the demand signal and generate the production of key munitions and weapons platforms, they’re also — they can put brakes on or limits around innovation. 

And so we continue, I believe, to have an edge.  And watching how Ukraine in particular has dealt with this uncrewed, autonomous system issue, this is something that the U.S. is uniquely capable of being able to iterate, evolve, adapt over time, and that’s an advantage of ours that we need to continue to nurture. 

Second is this corruption problem you described.  I think it is — the reports that you’re referring to and other public reporting on this has shown that throughout the entire PLA, you have major problems of corruption in terms of the acquisition, the testing, and the reporting on the defense capabilities that they have, which raise real questions about whether there’s a gap between reality and advertisement. 

And then, the third goes to the issue of workforce and people, both the people operating the systems and the people building the systems.  And the United States has always had a huge advantage when it comes to people.  Now, we have a shortage of them, but the ones we have are the best in the world and the most tested in the world, because they’ve had to go through building the systems, having them end up in conflict, and then learning lessons from them, adapting them, and so forth.  The PLA really hasn’t, and the entire Chinese defense industrial base really hasn’t had to do that. 

So we’ve got to double down on our advantages.  And where they have the single biggest advantage, the sheer scope and scale of production, we have to close the gap in the ways that I describe by increasing our magazine depth. 

The final point I’ll make is that God forbid we end up in a full-scale war with the PRC, but any war with a country like the PRC, a military like the PRC, is going to involve the exhaustion of munition stockpiles very rapidly.  So, a big part of the answer to a healthy defense industrial base over time is the ability to regenerate, to surge, to build during a conflict, not just to build before to prepare for a conflict.  And that’s got to be a key lesson that we take away from what we’ve seen over the last three years on the battlefield in Ukraine. 

MR. JONES:  So, one follow-up on this.  Your sense and level of concern as we’ve seen greater integration or coordination of the industrial bases of the North Koreans, the Iranians, the Russians, and the Chinese.  What does that say about cooperation between them and their industrial bases?  And what’s the implication then for us?

MR. SULLIVAN:  I’m glad you mention that.  And when you asked the question, I made a mental note in my head to get to that point, because it’s a critical point.  I didn’t do so, although I spoke about it in my remarks.

We are seeing concerning flows of capability and know-how among these various actors.  You’ve got Iranian drones going to Russia; now Russia is indigenizing that capability.  You’ve got North Korean munitions going to Russia, and in return, Russia is sending back know-how and capacity in some of the more high-end capabilities that North Korea is trying to develop.  Going both ways between Russia and the PRC, you see both dual-use capacity going from the PRC to Russia that is helping fuel Russia’s war machine, and Russia is reciprocating by providing certain types of technological capabilities to China that they’ve been behind on. 

So this is something that is going to be a feature of the landscape as we go forward, and it means we’re going to have to get better ourselves, and we’re going to have to get more integrated with our allies and partners so that our collective industrial might exceeds that of our competitors and adversaries.  And then we are also going to have to look for ways, through sanctions, export controls, and other restrictive measures, to try to put a drag on or reduce or restrict or disrupt that flow that I just described among these actors. 

But this is a feature of the modern landscape that, in my view, only reinforces the various calls to action that I made in my remarks today.

MR. JONES:  One of the issues that you mentioned in your remarks is on the subject of munition stockpiles.  And if you look at some of the war games that have happened, whether it’s here at CSIS or some of the ones that have happened within the Pentagon, one of the things that’s interesting with current stockpiles is that with, say, some of our long-range anti-ship missiles, LRASMs, or our extended-range JASSMs, we run out pretty quickly in a conflict. 

So, two questions along those lines.  And again, you mentioned this a little bit earlier, but how serious of an issue is this?  How are you thinking about addressing and dealing with addressing it?  And, you know, along the latter lines too, how does this impact deterrence if we’re not effectively able to increase those stockpiles?

MR. SULLIVAN:  This is, I think, a significant learning experience for all of us.  And, by the way, that goes for the U.S., our friends, and our adversaries, out of what we’ve seen unfold in the course of the war against Ukraine. 

First, it means that we need deeper magazine depth now, which means accelerating and ramping production and trying to reduce what are, kind of, eye-poppingly long timelines to generate what you and I might not think are a huge number of these high-end systems, LRASMs or JASSMs or what have you, or PrSM, for that matter, which I referred to in my remarks.  So we’ve got to build the stockpile, build the magazine depth.

Second, and the point I made just a minute ago, we have to have the production lines and the skilled workforce ready for surge capacity so that, in a conflict situation, we’ve got a warm, kind of turn-key ability to dramatically increase production on demand. 

I started my speech by talking about our desire to do that with 155-millimeter artillery production.  On demand was another 400 rounds a month.  I mean, we didn’t have it.  So part of the defense industrial base has to build that.

Third, we have to recognize, as the Ukrainians did, that we’re also going to need substitutes for the highest and most exquisite capabilities, and those substitutes will be cheaper autonomous systems that just come in much greater scale, quantity that can actually be, to a certain extent, a fill-in for delivering effects, battlefield effects that aren’t identical to what an LRASM could deliver, but at sufficient quantity can help sustain the fight even as you’re drawing down your magazine depth. 

Fourth, we have to think not just about the most high-end, most exquisite capabilities.  We also have to think about cheap, attritable stuff; more dumb munitions, frankly, as part of any conflict going forward; and get out of a mindset that says everything has to be the most whiz-bang thing ever. 

And then the final point that I would make is that another key lesson from Ukraine is the EW environment, the electronic warfare environment in which all of this is happening, and the way in which this is a very dynamic, iterative game where defense gets better, then offense adjusts to overwhelm it, then defense gets better. 

And so, the other thing we have to think about across all of the four lines I just described — stockpile, surging, attritable systems, dumb munitions — we have to think about how are we building a feedback loop so that everything we built doesn’t get neutralized, we actually can adapt it to overcome whatever defenses that we happen to be up against.  That has been another critical lesson from Ukraine.

MR. JONES:  Yeah, it was interesting, my last trip a few months ago to Ukraine.  As several folks in Zelenskyy’s office were briefing on the speed with which the battlefield was rapidly evolving on the electronic warfare, the UAV — counter- UAV dimension, just the speed with which things were changing was dramatic, and, you know, the need to be very adaptive in how to respond. 

One of the issues you mentioned in your talk was the submarine industrial base.  We had — a couple of months ago, we had Mike Waltz and Senator Kelly; it was a bipartisan discussion on the maritime industrial base.  And one of the issues that they have highlighted, and others have as well, is more broadly shipbuilding. 

So I want to read you just briefly the bipartisan congressional report, just one sentence from it, sort of the topline conclusions: “Decades of neglect by the U.S. government and private industry had weakened our shipbuilding capacity and maritime workforce, contributing to a declining U.S. flag-shipping fleet to bring American goods to market and support the U.S. military during wartime.” 

There have been other assessments.  The U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, unclassified assessment: The Chinese have 230 times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States.  That’s one assessment.  That’s not how much they’re producing; that’s a capacity issue. 

So where do we stand on the broader shipbuilding side, not just the submarine base?  And where do we have to go?

MR. SULLIVAN:  Well, first, just diagnosing the problem, a big part of the problem is a skilled workforce issue, where we’ve just lost a skilled workforce in shipbuilding that we need to rebuild, and this administration has put a series of initiatives in place to begin to build that back. 

Second, we have a huge supply chain problem.  Suppliers of the necessary components for ships have disappeared from the United States, and — or there’s one, and we have to rely on that one for any shipbuilding we do, whether it’s a U.S. flag commercial carrier, of which we build very, very few, or it’s a ship that we’re building for a defense requirement. 

And then, third, there are major problems we have in being able to adjust to changes in design over the course of the life of a — you know, of a ship line, and our ability to just, like, have a design, execute it, and churn it out.  This is something the Chinese are very good at.  We have not proven to be very good at this. 

Now, part of this is so fundamental and so structural, and it goes back to the early 1980s when the bottom fell out of the American shipbuilding industry, commercial shipbuilding industry.  That’s not going to reverse overnight.  But there are steps that we can take to push back against unfair practices.  We, the Biden administration, accepted a petition for a 301 investigation of Chinese shipbuilding practices that are putting downward pressure on our ability to compete effectively.

And then part of it is pick spots where you can get wins and build step by step to get back some of that lost ground over the last few decades.  I mentioned very briefly in my remarks something called the ICE Pact, which we entered into with Norway — I’m sorry, with Finland and with Canada.  Finland and Canada are at the cutting edge of polar icebreaker construction and production.  The United States has one producer producing, basically, one cutter for our Coast Guard. 

We have the capacity to do so much more than that on something that, for our allies and partners, the other places they can go are Russia and China; where we really could build this out in concert with Finland and Canada, and, for that specialty capability, reinvigorate an aspect of the American shipbuilding base that then we could take to other specialty areas, and over time build back a larger capability that would have amazing knock-on effects for our capacity to do naval shipbuilding much more rapidly, at much greater scale and at cheaper cost. 

Because anyone who knows, you know, when we contract for a given ship or line of ships, by the third one being turned out, the cost has gone up dramatically for a variety of reasons that get to supply chain, workforce, and other things.  But part of it is we don’t have the backbone of a healthy commercial shipbuilding base to rest our naval shipbuilding on top of.  And that’s part of the fragility of what we’re contending with and why this is going to be such a generational project to fix.

We’ve taken these beginning steps on it, and particularly focused on the submarine industrial base because of the centrality of that to our deterrence.  But it is a larger issue that Secretary Del Toro has been passionate about, Secretary Austin.

I have dug into the details of workforce development initiatives in this area because it’s something that’s so core to our national security over time.

MR. JONES:  So, last question before we get to a few audience questions here.  Role of other allies and partners.  If you look at the shipbuilding industry, both the Koreans and the Japanese have major capabilities.  We’ve got some regulations, we’ve got some congressional acts, including the Jones Act, that make some of that more difficult.  Should we rethink make it easier for us to collaborate with some of our partners?  That’s the first question.

And two is, AUKUS — how do you think about expanding — or do you think about expanding AUKUS to include more than just the UK and Australia in the future?

MR. SULLIVAN:  So, on the first question, I think, you know, I’ll leave it to others to debate the relative merits of some of the, kind of, domestic regulations.

I’ll just make one, I think, really important point, which is: In semiconductors, in clean energy technologies, we’ve developed a suite of industrial policy tools that are stimulating a revolution in the manufacturing capacity of the United States in these critical sectors.  I believe that those same tools, in some cases those same pots of money, could actually attract a Hanwa or another Korean or Japanese shipbuilder to the United States the same way that we’ve attracted a Samsung or an LG to the United — or a Hyundai to the United States.

And so, we should have a theory of stimulating American shipbuilding that is in part about attracting our allies to invest here in building out their capabilities. 

How we then get into the regulatory landscape for what will work and what wouldn’t in the puts and takes of that is harder for me to speak to, but I think the overall theory of the case that we’ve applied in these other critical sectors could be applied to shipbuilding.  There are some green shoots of that in the maritime initiative that Secretary Del Toro has underway.  We really need to build on that because that, ultimately, is going to be an important part of the long-term answer to revitalizing the American shipbuilding industry.

MR. JONES:  Yeah, and I think it is an area where I think we’ve got to close that gap with the Chinese.

So, one question —

MR. SULLIVAN:  Oh, you said AUKUS.  We don’t have any plans to expand pillar one of AUKUS, which is the conventionally armed nuclear-powered subs.

MR. JONES:  Subs.  Yeah.

MR. SULLIVAN:  We do see other partners coming in to work with us on pillar two, which are all these other advanced —

MR. JONES:  I’ve seen the aperture already start to open a bit.  Yeah.

On — questions for the audience.  This has nothing to do with the subject of the discussion here, the industrial base. But first question here from someone in the audience is: “South Korea’s president declared martial law, which he then lifted. What has been the White House response?  It looked a little slow from our vantage point.”  How would you — I mean, what has been your response?  How concerned have you been with the unfolding events in South Korea?

MR. SULLIVAN:  You know, it’s — you know you’re living in a modern information age when an entire episode like this unfolds over the course of less than a day, and the characterization of the White House response is slow.  (Laughs.)

MR. JONES:  Too slow.  Yes.

MR. SULLIVAN:  But it’s a fair question.

I mean, we were not consulted in any way.  We learned about this from the announcement on television the same way the rest of the world did.  It raised deep concern for us, this declaration of martial law.  The National Assembly worked according to constitutional processes and procedures.  The president retracted martial law.  Now there’s, you know, a series of procedures in place to kind of react to what happened there, and they’ll be toing and froing between the main parties in Korea.

What we want to see is just the proper functioning of the democratic institutions of the ROK.  And after this rather dramatic announcement that raised alarm bells everywhere, including here in Washington, we have seen those processes and procedures work.  South Korea’s democracy is robust and resilient, and we’re going to continue to speak out publicly and engage privately with South Korean counterparts to reinforce the importance of that continuing as we go forward.

MR. JONES:  Thanks.

This question is about the industrial base, which — and it’s an interesting one because it deals with critical minerals. “China has banned exports to the U.S. of gallium, germanium, antimony, which have significant military applications in the industrial base.  How significant are these actions?  And probably more importantly, what are U.S. options to decrease reliance from China on critical minerals?”

MR. SULLIVAN:  The most important thing about this is that it is a continuing reminder of the need of the United States to have diverse and resilient supply chains for critical minerals with national security applications, and not to be reliant on any single country, especially a competitor like the PRC.  We knew that.  We know that.  We are reminded of that when they take steps like this.

Now, we, in particular, anticipated this step because they had already moved to restrict germanium and gallium in the past, before taking the full move this week to say no more exports to the United States.  There are other sources of germanium and gallium in the world.  But as we look at the wider aperture of critical minerals, not just for military purposes, but for strategic purposes — semiconductor manufacturing, clean energy transition technologies, et cetera — we need to get together with likeminded producers, processors, and users of these critical minerals for a high-standards critical mineral marketplace that ensures that China can’t, for example, crash the price of a given critical mineral, drive mines out of business, reduce the overall global supply, and operate as a chokehold.  That’s, ultimately, the logic we need to break.

We’ve taken some really important steps on this in the last few years.  It has allowed us to diversify and make more resilient our supply chains.  But that, too, just like the defense industrial base, is a work in progress, and we need the next administration to continue it, working with the Congress and private industry.  And I will be the biggest cheerleader of that ongoing effort, because it’s something we’ve devoted a lot of attention to over the last four years and something that is going to take, you know, at least the next decade to get ourselves in a position where we can really breathe a sigh of relief. 

We’re there.  We’re doing better.  We have solutions to a lot of these issues, but this is going to be a highly contested space, and there’s a lot more work to be done.

MR. JONES:  Thanks.

And last question.  Can be brief.  From Time Magazine: “Is DOGE friend or foe in an effort to revitalize the defense industrial base?”  I mean, what would you say to an effort to look at the Elon Musk initiative?

MR. SULLIVAN:  I just don’t know.  I mean, I’ve read, but I don’t know what it actually is.  Do we need more government efficiency?  Of course, we can all use more government efficiency.  So at a very macro level, finding ways, as I described in my speech, to modernize, streamline, make more effective procurement and all of the decades-long rules and regulations of the Defense Department.  I laid out a whole list of things in the speech that we should do.  Whether this initiative is about that or about something else, I just don’t know, so it’s hard for me to speak to.

MR. JONES:  Well, thank you. If you can all join me in thanking Jake for coming to CSIS.  (Applause.)  And if you could briefly just stay put as we get out, that’d be great.  Just 30 seconds or so.  Really appreciate everyone taking the time to come.  Thanks.

The post Remarks by APNSA Jake Sullivan on Fortifying the U.S. Defense Industrial Base appeared first on The White House.

Center for Strategic and International Studies

Washington, D.C.

MR. SULLIVAN:  Well, good afternoon.  And thank you, John.  It’s a pleasure for me to be here, and it’s a pleasure for me to come talk about what is, yes, a technical topic, but also a deeply strategic topic for the future of U.S. defense and deterrence and for the future of American statecraft.

Earlier this week, President Biden signed his 71st security assistance package for Ukraine.  It was the latest step in a massive effort, on a scale not seen since the Second World War, to equip a partner with the military capability it needs to defend its sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity against a brutal invasion by a larger neighbor.

And in the process of providing that support, we have also modernized our own arsenal.  With every package, the Department of Defense provides Ukraine older equipment it has on the shelf, and then uses congressionally appropriated funding to purchase new, more modern equipment for our own stockpiles.  This approach has enabled Ukraine to stand up against an adversary with an economy 10 times larger, a population three times bigger, and a military once ranked the second best in the world.

But at no stage was this historic undertaking a sure thing. In fact, in a matter of eight weeks of war in 2022, Ukraine burned through a year’s worth of U.S. 155-millimeter artillery production.

I hold a daily meeting on Russia and Ukraine in my office at the White House, and in those early months, in those daily meetings, we reviewed Ukraine’s run rate in excruciating detail, and we confronted a startling reality: The American arsenal of democracy was fundamentally underequipped for the task at hand. So, President Biden issued a straightforward order: Exponentially ramp up the production of 155-millimeter artillery munitions.  It turned out, executing on that was not so straightforward.

At a stretch, we could only immediately add about 400 rounds on top of the 14,000 rounds we produced each month, enough for Ukraine to defend itself for a few extra hours.  Our industrial capacity simply wasn’t there.  We lacked supplies of critical precursor materials.  We had to dig ourselves out of a deep hole.

Now, to offset their early munition shortage, Ukraine began to leverage drones and autonomous systems.  And this is the second part of the story, one that continues to evolve today on the frontlines.  They used off-the-shelf technology and cheap, mass-produced platforms to rapidly build an army of drones. 

But even as Ukraine demonstrated success on the battlefield with these new systems, we were behind the curve in innovating, acquiring, and fielding those types of systems ourselves, and that was just the tip of the iceberg.  The deeper we looked, the clearer it became that we needed larger stocks of many critical munitions and weapons platforms, both to maintain U.S. readiness and to equip a partner under attack.

Now, the men and women of our national security and defense communities are extraordinary, and they can pull rabbits out of hats.  I’ve seen it done.  But decades of under-investment and consolidation had seriously eroded our defense industrial base, and there was no way around it.

Now, in some respects, we had recognized this challenge from the moment we entered office, and in fact, we started taking steps to fix it in the President’s very first budget request.  But Russia’s war against Ukraine sharpened the stakes and clarified the scope of the challenge.  It was a strategic warning.

America’s defense industrial base, the one we inherited, was not up to the task that we face in a new age of strategic competition, including how we have to prepare for and deter future conflicts in Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific.

So we had to act, and we did act.  We did so thanks to the President’s clear direction, the able leadership of Secretary Austin and Deputy Secretary Hicks, and strong bipartisan congressional support. 

By the time we leave office, our defense industrial base will be producing 55,000 155-millimeter artillery rounds per month, almost a 400 percent increase, and we’ve put it on track to double again, reaching 100,000 per month by early 2026.

But this effort extends way beyond 155-millimeter ammunition rounds.  As we’ve drawn down our older stockpiles to support Ukraine of other weapons, we’ve invested in new weapons and platforms to replace them.  Industry has responded and reoriented to meet our demand signal.  New production lines have opened and increased output.  We’re now building more javelins in Alabama and Arizona; tanks in Ohio; armored vehicles in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin; HIMARS in Arkansas; rockets in West Virginia.  And our investments, all told, reach dozens of states. 

We’ve galvanized defense industries, commercial companies, startups, and venture capital firms to focus increasingly on developing low-cost, uncrewed systems for our allies, and countering those of our adversaries and competitors.  

The story also extends well beyond Ukraine, from our efforts to revitalize the submarine industrial base to a groundbreaking initiative with Canada and Finland to spur the production of polar icebreakers. 

All told, the Biden administration has made major investments across four defense budgets and multiple supplemental funding bills to strengthen the U.S. defense industrial base, devoting almost $1.3 trillion to the research, development, and acquisition of capabilities that is driving production and driving industrial capacity.

In real dollars spent, this is more than the United States investment in procurement and R&D in any four-year period throughout the entire Cold War. 

But this challenge is not one that can be met in a single term in office.  There is still so much work to do.  This has to be a generational project. 

So, today I want to do two things.  First, I want to share the steps that we’ve taken to modernize, invigorate, and expand our defense industrial base.  And then, second, I want to offer a roadmap for the next Congress and the next administration to carry this work forward on a bipartisan basis.

But let me provide a little bit of context. 

Over the past several years, we’ve seen a tectonic shift in the global landscape.  We’ve seen the rise of a peer competitor in the PRC.  We’ve seen patterns of cooperation deepen between the PRC, Russia, North Korea, and Iran.  We’ve seen the proliferation of low-cost lethal technologies to a number of state and non-state actors across multiple continents. 

Against this backdrop, a strong defense industrial base is essential to effective statecraft.  This means not just more investment, but smarter investment, production, innovation, and integration with allies.

A stronger defense industrial base is necessary for us to deter military aggression against NATO or our Indo-Pacific allies and partners.  It’s necessary for us to equip our partners when they come under attack.  It’s necessary for us to respond to threats to the global commons, including freedom of navigation.  And it’s necessary to strengthen our hand at the negotiating table as we pursue diplomacy to end conflicts like we recently have done with the war that raged across the border between Israel and Lebanon.

In the Cold War era, our DIB was formidable, but it took a long time to build up.  We understood then, almost intuitively, that our production capacity was central to our military capability and, therefore, to our deterrence.  When the Iron Curtain fell, we turned the page.  In the decades that followed, we enjoyed a brief moment without a peer competitor to pace us, and our defense enterprise atrophied. 

In part due to the urging from the government, mergers collapsed significant defense companies into each other, from 50 to the five major prime contractors that we have today.  Factories closed.  Production lines shut down.  Our skilled workforce declined.  The number of defense suppliers shrank.  And many of our supply lines migrated overseas. 

Now, I’m not suggesting we need to retool for a new Cold War, but we once again face a dangerous, complex, and contested global landscape.  Our adversaries and competitors are taking more risks, and importantly, they’re working together to strengthen each other’s defense capacity. 

So, today, once again, we need to heed the maxim that industrial might is deterrence.  Given the DIB we inherited, our task has been to reverse years of decline while simultaneously increasing agility, innovation, and integration. 

So we’ve made three big pushes to try to strengthen our defense industrial base:

First, as I’ve described, by boosting production of munitions and weapons platforms and creating the infrastructure to sustain that boost in production.  This has meant new factories, new lines, accelerated delivery times on the weapons and munitions we need most. 

The Department of Defense released its first-ever National Defense Industrial Strategy.  We’re strengthening supply chain resilience and increasing stockpiles of key inputs, like the solid rocket motors that power our most advanced missiles.  We’ve made notable progress on our air defenses, another critical component of our global defense architecture, which is in high and increasing demand across Europe, the Middle East, and the Pacific.

Germany, the Netherlands, Romania, and Spain are working together to procure almost $6 billion worth of Patriot missiles that are now being produced through a joint venture between a U.S. and German company. 

At the same time, we’re working to expand joint production deals with Japan to strengthen our air defense umbrella in the Indo-Pacific.

On long-range fires, another essential element of deterrence in the modern era, we’ve made big strides towards modernization.  We’re investing heavily in the next generation of ground attack missiles, what we call PrSM, to rapidly increase production capacity. 

We’re taking similar steps to expand production of several kinds of anti-ship missiles across a variety of ranges. 

And we’ve made significant investments across the American shipbuilding supply chain — that entire supply chain.  The challenge there on shipbuilding has been especially immense.  We’ve sought to recover from an erosion that actually traces its decline to decades of erosion in the overall American manufacturing base.

Over the last 40 years, in the submarine industrial base alone, five shipyards closed, the workforce shrank, suppliers left the market.  Our approach to production was built on post-Cold War assumptions about a global security environment and just-in-time supply chains that, frankly, have not borne out. 

To give you a sense of the scale of the problem, we need an additional 140,000 more skilled workers — 140,000 — machinists, welders, pipe fitters, electricians — than we currently have to meet submarine production demand over the next 10 years. 

Now, we can’t fix four decades of challenges in four years, but we have surged to invest in our submarine industrial base.  With billions of dollars in new funding, we’re developing new suppliers across more than 30 states to reduce bottlenecks, expand the use of robotics and additive manufacturing, and upgrade and expand shipyards. 

These investments will leave the submarine industrial base in a stronger position, but frankly, more is needed.  And so, we’re seeking more funds from Congress, especially for more manufacturing technology, for more infrastructure improvements, and for wage increases to ensure we can retain the workers we have while we work to hire thousands more. 

The second big push we’ve made is to try to leverage and unleash the potential of innovative technologies and the power and speed of our commercial sector.

On the battlefield in Ukraine, we’re seeing the character of war evolve before our eyes as Ukraine pairs artificial intelligence with low-cost drones to create powerful and cheap alternatives to precision-guided munitions. 

Ukraine’s missile and drone manufacturers are among the most innovative on the planet, a product of both necessity and Ukrainian resolve and ingenuity.  They bring groundbreaking, state-of-the-art capabilities to the fight at costs that are an order of magnitude lower than our traditional munitions. 

By facilitating collaboration between American and Ukrainian industry, we’re ensuring that our own companies are pioneering new technologies to complement our more exquisite capabilities.  Our firms are learning what technologies work best and how to use them and iterate them during conflict. 

We’re creating a feedback loop that prizes and enshrines innovation.  And that way, the American military can get to and remain on the cutting edge of these new forms of warfighting technology.

Here at home, the Department of Defense’s Replicator initiative is just one example of how we’re trying to adapt more institutionally to the future character of warfare.  Through Replicator, DOD is procuring and fielding attributable [attritable] autonomous capabilities at speed and scale — thousands of systems across air, land, and sea — in less than 24 months. 

And we’re establishing the processes to be able to adopt and scale new technologies as needed in the future, including from non-traditional defense companies and from the commercial sector, because we need to keep pushing the envelope in terms of speed and scale.

Recognizing the power of responsible AI to transform the way militaries fight, we released our first-ever National Security Memorandum on Artificial Intelligence.  It provides a blueprint for harnessing the power and managing the risks of AI to advance our national security.

Now, all this we’re doing at home, but we recognize that we can’t and shouldn’t do this alone.  As strategic competition intensifies, as the global environment becomes more contested, we have to take bold steps in concert with our allies and partners to integrate and strengthen deterrence across the major theaters of the Indo-Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East. 

And that leads to the third big push we’ve been making: laying the foundation to build an integrated defense industrial base for the free world. 

In the first year of our administration, we launched one of the most ambitious defense projects in modern history, the trilateral security partnership, AUKUS.  Under AUKUS, we joined forces with the UK and Australia to support Australia’s acquisition of a conventionally armed, nuclear-powered submarine capability in ways that will strengthen our collective submarine industrial bases. 

And we’re creating opportunities for innovation and collaboration through AUKUS on cutting-edge technologies in advanced cyber, undersea capabilities, electronic warfare, quantum, AI, and hypersonics. 

Just this year, we held trilateral exercises in Australia, with Japan in attendance, conducting tests on the collective use of autonomous and uncrewed systems in maritime operations. 

And this push for an integrated DIB for the free world extends way beyond AUKUS.  Over the past four years, we’ve ramped up efforts to expand and accelerate what we call global defense production, a catch-all term for co-development, co-production, and co-sustainment of platforms and munitions with allies and partners. 

Similarly, we’ve worked with our NATO Allies to follow our example and overhaul their defense industrial bases.  And this was a major line of effort and set of outcomes at the NATO Summit President Biden hosted here in Washington for the 75th anniversary of NATO this summer. 

As part of this effort, we’ve had to rethink our strategic technology controls to account for today’s realities.  The fact is our non-proliferation and export control regimes, especially when it comes to allies, were formulated in a different era.  The risks were different.  The nature of technology diffusion was different.  These outdated restrictions have actually caused us to withhold critical technologies from close partners and close allies.  And without a significant change in the way we do business, our friends could be left behind as our adversaries march forward with deeper technology-sharing among themselves.  So we can’t let that happen. 

Through AUKUS, we began the hard work of driving major reforms in our export control regime to strengthen cooperation with Australia and the UK. 

And now, our team is finalizing a National Security Memorandum on Missile Technology Exports to modernize our implementation of the MTCR, the Missile Technology Control Regime. 

We will renew our commitment to a strong non-proliferation regime to keep these technologies out of the hands of bad actors, but we will also add flexibility to transfer this technology to certain partners with strong export control systems.  That means we can now boost our friends’ production of advanced missiles to increase the global availability and interoperability of long-range and precision-guided munitions that can strengthen our collective deterrence.

And this cooperation with our allies and partners enhances not just our national security but, frankly, our joint economic prosperity.  We’re creating jobs for American workers, opening new markets for American businesses, all while reaping the clear national security benefits of this work. 

Those are the three big pushes, and we’ve made progress over the last four years.  But frankly, we need progress over the next 40.  We need a roadmap for the future that builds on what we’ve done, because there is still a lot left to do.  I’m not here to report that the job is finished.  I’m here to report the job has started, and now it needs to continue in a big and sustained and bipartisan way. 

Now, there will be important debates over the size of the defense budget in the new administration and the new Congress.  Wherever the defense topline lands, I see at least four critical pieces of work that demand the sustained effort of the next administration, the next Congress, the armed forces, and industry all working in common purpose.

First, and most fundamentally, we’ve got to keep ramping up and accelerating production and procurement of the things that we need most.  This includes long-range critical munitions, vital air defense capabilities, and attritable and autonomous systems that are shaping the future of warfare.  Because no budget will be unlimited, this is going to require that we make hard trade-offs, prioritizing these key capabilities in particular. 

The bottom line here is that we’ve got to keep growing our magazine depth.  Future conflicts are going to consume munitions and equipment at a rate we have not seen in a very long time.  That means stockpiling both the vital munitions we know we’ll need in sufficient quantities and the components needed to produce them on short notice. 

We actually asked Congress for a critical munitions acquisition fund that would have guaranteed an ongoing demand signal to industry and enabled us to stockpile munitions that are in high demand, both at home and among our partners. 

Despite bipartisan support for that fund, Congress didn’t ultimately come through with the appropriation.  I urge Congress to work with the next administration to get this done.

When it comes to funding our defense needs, we also need Congress to return to regular order.  The practice of relying on continuing resolutions to equip our forces creates uncertainty and instability for both DOD and the industries we rely on. 

Pentagon leaders, and leaders from both parties across multiple administrations, have continually raised the alarm about this.  On a bipartisan basis, Congress should fund the defense enterprise — and, frankly, the rest of the U.S. government — responsibly and on time. 

And we also need industry to do its part to grow our magazine depth, by moving beyond the current cycle in which they hedge against uncertainty and do just enough to meet current demand, even when DOD is prepared to sign multiyear contracts. 

This calls for a new era of public-private partnership to build and sustain more commercial facilities, to maintain warm production lines, and to invest in a long-term effort to shore up our DIB workforce so that we have surge capacity when we need it. 

And while we’re doing that, we need to expand the shipyards, the armories, and the plants owned by DOD as well, to make our defense industrial base more resilient. 

Second, we need to accelerate major acquisition reform at DOD to prize innovation agility and to encourage a degree of risk taking.  This requires rethinking our requirements process to ensure that even tech companies outside the traditional defense orbit can understand and provide what DOD needs.  It requires adapting our system to allow flexibility for innovation mid-cycle in the development of a new system or platform. 

We also need to make it even easier for the defense enterprise to absorb more technological solutions from the commercial sector, and to do so quickly and at scale.

Today, collaboration among DOD, Silicon Valley, and America’s wider innovation ecosystem is better than it’s been in decades.  And that’s been met with significant bipartisan funding and support from Congress.  We’ve got to keep up this virtuous cycle. 

Two years ago, Congress created a bipartisan commission that examined ways to improve the Pentagon’s six-decade-old process for how it plans budgets and spends.  They put forward dozens of smart recommendations that DOD is already in the process of implementing.  But to really make that report work, we need new authorities from Congress too.  The critical munitions acquisition fund is one example of that.  Providing DOD with department-wide resources that can be used to meet emergent requirements is another.

Third, we have to institutionalize the work we’re doing, in concert with our allies and partners, to integrate our defense industrial bases. 

Working together boosts our collective readiness.  It allows us to dramatically expand our total production.  It creates resilience in our supply chains and manufacturing bases.  And most importantly, it strengthens deterrence as our adversaries learn that they will have to deal with the combined industrial might and fighting capacity of the U.S. and our allies and partners around the world. 

And finally, we can produce all the military hardware in the world, but it will mean nothing without our people, the talented men and women of the joint force.  They are the ones who ensure the equipment we buy translates into the capability we need.  They underwrite our deterrence and security, and we have to continue to invest in them and ensure that we’re recruiting and retaining the talent and leadership that we rely on to field the best military in the world, the best military in history. 

Now, none of this will be easy.  We don’t know what the future holds.  But we do know that the best way to preserve peace and protect American interests is to maintain a force that is strong enough to deter a future conflict.  That has been at the front of the President’s mind for nearly four years, and it will have to remain so for the next administration as well. 

We’ve laid the foundation to renew our great arsenal of democracy, but the work will have to continue to ensure we have the munitions and capabilities we need to navigate a myriad of contingencies.  After all, history teaches us that the adversary rarely chooses to start the war that we are most prepared for, but it also teaches us that when we galvanize the collective power of American national security and defense communities, American workers, American businesses, and American ingenuity, we will prevail. 

Thank you for listening to me on what can be a dense subject but I believe a subject of profound consequence for hearing now both on what we have done and what we need to do.  And I look forward to taking a few questions.  Thank you very much.  (Applause.) 

MR. JONES:  Thank you.  And for those who have not read the FDR speech on the arsenal of democracy, it is well worth going back and rereading that from the early days of World War Two. 

Thanks for coming to CSIS.  I wanted to start, actually, not with our industrial base — defense industrial base, but with the Chinese defense industrial base.  Part of the need, I think, for a strong industrial base is that we have adversaries that are building their own. 

So I wonder if you could start off with your sense of where the Chinese are at on their defense industrial base.  What is of particular concern?  Where do you see vulnerabilities?  The new DOD report on China also highlights major corruption within the Chinese industrial base.  So how would you characterize the industrial base?  And what’s the significance, then, as we look at continuing to build ours?

MR. SULLIVAN:  So, first, China has been growing its defense budget year on year, closing the gap in terms of their outlays and ours.  Second, because they have a state-directed system with state-owned enterprises working hand in glove with the PLA, with their military, they’re able to direct production and expand production at rates much more rapidly than we historically have been able to.

And they’ve also increased their innovation capacity, going beyond merely stealing technology, and then copying it, to developing new systems. 

So I think we have to take the overall industrial base capacity of China very seriously, and it is a key factor in the way that we think about what we’ve got to tool up to do ourselves and along with our allies and partners. 

At the same time, I think that there are three areas where the U.S. has inherent advantages.  One of them is: The same state-owned enterprises that are able to very rapidly send the demand signal and generate the production of key munitions and weapons platforms, they’re also — they can put brakes on or limits around innovation. 

And so we continue, I believe, to have an edge.  And watching how Ukraine in particular has dealt with this uncrewed, autonomous system issue, this is something that the U.S. is uniquely capable of being able to iterate, evolve, adapt over time, and that’s an advantage of ours that we need to continue to nurture. 

Second is this corruption problem you described.  I think it is — the reports that you’re referring to and other public reporting on this has shown that throughout the entire PLA, you have major problems of corruption in terms of the acquisition, the testing, and the reporting on the defense capabilities that they have, which raise real questions about whether there’s a gap between reality and advertisement. 

And then, the third goes to the issue of workforce and people, both the people operating the systems and the people building the systems.  And the United States has always had a huge advantage when it comes to people.  Now, we have a shortage of them, but the ones we have are the best in the world and the most tested in the world, because they’ve had to go through building the systems, having them end up in conflict, and then learning lessons from them, adapting them, and so forth.  The PLA really hasn’t, and the entire Chinese defense industrial base really hasn’t had to do that. 

So we’ve got to double down on our advantages.  And where they have the single biggest advantage, the sheer scope and scale of production, we have to close the gap in the ways that I describe by increasing our magazine depth. 

The final point I’ll make is that God forbid we end up in a full-scale war with the PRC, but any war with a country like the PRC, a military like the PRC, is going to involve the exhaustion of munition stockpiles very rapidly.  So, a big part of the answer to a healthy defense industrial base over time is the ability to regenerate, to surge, to build during a conflict, not just to build before to prepare for a conflict.  And that’s got to be a key lesson that we take away from what we’ve seen over the last three years on the battlefield in Ukraine. 

MR. JONES:  So, one follow-up on this.  Your sense and level of concern as we’ve seen greater integration or coordination of the industrial bases of the North Koreans, the Iranians, the Russians, and the Chinese.  What does that say about cooperation between them and their industrial bases?  And what’s the implication then for us?

MR. SULLIVAN:  I’m glad you mention that.  And when you asked the question, I made a mental note in my head to get to that point, because it’s a critical point.  I didn’t do so, although I spoke about it in my remarks.

We are seeing concerning flows of capability and know-how among these various actors.  You’ve got Iranian drones going to Russia; now Russia is indigenizing that capability.  You’ve got North Korean munitions going to Russia, and in return, Russia is sending back know-how and capacity in some of the more high-end capabilities that North Korea is trying to develop.  Going both ways between Russia and the PRC, you see both dual-use capacity going from the PRC to Russia that is helping fuel Russia’s war machine, and Russia is reciprocating by providing certain types of technological capabilities to China that they’ve been behind on. 

So this is something that is going to be a feature of the landscape as we go forward, and it means we’re going to have to get better ourselves, and we’re going to have to get more integrated with our allies and partners so that our collective industrial might exceeds that of our competitors and adversaries.  And then we are also going to have to look for ways, through sanctions, export controls, and other restrictive measures, to try to put a drag on or reduce or restrict or disrupt that flow that I just described among these actors. 

But this is a feature of the modern landscape that, in my view, only reinforces the various calls to action that I made in my remarks today.

MR. JONES:  One of the issues that you mentioned in your remarks is on the subject of munition stockpiles.  And if you look at some of the war games that have happened, whether it’s here at CSIS or some of the ones that have happened within the Pentagon, one of the things that’s interesting with current stockpiles is that with, say, some of our long-range anti-ship missiles, LRASMs, or our extended-range JASSMs, we run out pretty quickly in a conflict. 

So, two questions along those lines.  And again, you mentioned this a little bit earlier, but how serious of an issue is this?  How are you thinking about addressing and dealing with addressing it?  And, you know, along the latter lines too, how does this impact deterrence if we’re not effectively able to increase those stockpiles?

MR. SULLIVAN:  This is, I think, a significant learning experience for all of us.  And, by the way, that goes for the U.S., our friends, and our adversaries, out of what we’ve seen unfold in the course of the war against Ukraine. 

First, it means that we need deeper magazine depth now, which means accelerating and ramping production and trying to reduce what are, kind of, eye-poppingly long timelines to generate what you and I might not think are a huge number of these high-end systems, LRASMs or JASSMs or what have you, or PrSM, for that matter, which I referred to in my remarks.  So we’ve got to build the stockpile, build the magazine depth.

Second, and the point I made just a minute ago, we have to have the production lines and the skilled workforce ready for surge capacity so that, in a conflict situation, we’ve got a warm, kind of turn-key ability to dramatically increase production on demand. 

I started my speech by talking about our desire to do that with 155-millimeter artillery production.  On demand was another 400 rounds a month.  I mean, we didn’t have it.  So part of the defense industrial base has to build that.

Third, we have to recognize, as the Ukrainians did, that we’re also going to need substitutes for the highest and most exquisite capabilities, and those substitutes will be cheaper autonomous systems that just come in much greater scale, quantity that can actually be, to a certain extent, a fill-in for delivering effects, battlefield effects that aren’t identical to what an LRASM could deliver, but at sufficient quantity can help sustain the fight even as you’re drawing down your magazine depth. 

Fourth, we have to think not just about the most high-end, most exquisite capabilities.  We also have to think about cheap, attritable stuff; more dumb munitions, frankly, as part of any conflict going forward; and get out of a mindset that says everything has to be the most whiz-bang thing ever. 

And then the final point that I would make is that another key lesson from Ukraine is the EW environment, the electronic warfare environment in which all of this is happening, and the way in which this is a very dynamic, iterative game where defense gets better, then offense adjusts to overwhelm it, then defense gets better. 

And so, the other thing we have to think about across all of the four lines I just described — stockpile, surging, attritable systems, dumb munitions — we have to think about how are we building a feedback loop so that everything we built doesn’t get neutralized, we actually can adapt it to overcome whatever defenses that we happen to be up against.  That has been another critical lesson from Ukraine.

MR. JONES:  Yeah, it was interesting, my last trip a few months ago to Ukraine.  As several folks in Zelenskyy’s office were briefing on the speed with which the battlefield was rapidly evolving on the electronic warfare, the UAV — counter- UAV dimension, just the speed with which things were changing was dramatic, and, you know, the need to be very adaptive in how to respond. 

One of the issues you mentioned in your talk was the submarine industrial base.  We had — a couple of months ago, we had Mike Waltz and Senator Kelly; it was a bipartisan discussion on the maritime industrial base.  And one of the issues that they have highlighted, and others have as well, is more broadly shipbuilding. 

So I want to read you just briefly the bipartisan congressional report, just one sentence from it, sort of the topline conclusions: “Decades of neglect by the U.S. government and private industry had weakened our shipbuilding capacity and maritime workforce, contributing to a declining U.S. flag-shipping fleet to bring American goods to market and support the U.S. military during wartime.” 

There have been other assessments.  The U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, unclassified assessment: The Chinese have 230 times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States.  That’s one assessment.  That’s not how much they’re producing; that’s a capacity issue. 

So where do we stand on the broader shipbuilding side, not just the submarine base?  And where do we have to go?

MR. SULLIVAN:  Well, first, just diagnosing the problem, a big part of the problem is a skilled workforce issue, where we’ve just lost a skilled workforce in shipbuilding that we need to rebuild, and this administration has put a series of initiatives in place to begin to build that back. 

Second, we have a huge supply chain problem.  Suppliers of the necessary components for ships have disappeared from the United States, and — or there’s one, and we have to rely on that one for any shipbuilding we do, whether it’s a U.S. flag commercial carrier, of which we build very, very few, or it’s a ship that we’re building for a defense requirement. 

And then, third, there are major problems we have in being able to adjust to changes in design over the course of the life of a — you know, of a ship line, and our ability to just, like, have a design, execute it, and churn it out.  This is something the Chinese are very good at.  We have not proven to be very good at this. 

Now, part of this is so fundamental and so structural, and it goes back to the early 1980s when the bottom fell out of the American shipbuilding industry, commercial shipbuilding industry.  That’s not going to reverse overnight.  But there are steps that we can take to push back against unfair practices.  We, the Biden administration, accepted a petition for a 301 investigation of Chinese shipbuilding practices that are putting downward pressure on our ability to compete effectively.

And then part of it is pick spots where you can get wins and build step by step to get back some of that lost ground over the last few decades.  I mentioned very briefly in my remarks something called the ICE Pact, which we entered into with Norway — I’m sorry, with Finland and with Canada.  Finland and Canada are at the cutting edge of polar icebreaker construction and production.  The United States has one producer producing, basically, one cutter for our Coast Guard. 

We have the capacity to do so much more than that on something that, for our allies and partners, the other places they can go are Russia and China; where we really could build this out in concert with Finland and Canada, and, for that specialty capability, reinvigorate an aspect of the American shipbuilding base that then we could take to other specialty areas, and over time build back a larger capability that would have amazing knock-on effects for our capacity to do naval shipbuilding much more rapidly, at much greater scale and at cheaper cost. 

Because anyone who knows, you know, when we contract for a given ship or line of ships, by the third one being turned out, the cost has gone up dramatically for a variety of reasons that get to supply chain, workforce, and other things.  But part of it is we don’t have the backbone of a healthy commercial shipbuilding base to rest our naval shipbuilding on top of.  And that’s part of the fragility of what we’re contending with and why this is going to be such a generational project to fix.

We’ve taken these beginning steps on it, and particularly focused on the submarine industrial base because of the centrality of that to our deterrence.  But it is a larger issue that Secretary Del Toro has been passionate about, Secretary Austin.

I have dug into the details of workforce development initiatives in this area because it’s something that’s so core to our national security over time.

MR. JONES:  So, last question before we get to a few audience questions here.  Role of other allies and partners.  If you look at the shipbuilding industry, both the Koreans and the Japanese have major capabilities.  We’ve got some regulations, we’ve got some congressional acts, including the Jones Act, that make some of that more difficult.  Should we rethink make it easier for us to collaborate with some of our partners?  That’s the first question.

And two is, AUKUS — how do you think about expanding — or do you think about expanding AUKUS to include more than just the UK and Australia in the future?

MR. SULLIVAN:  So, on the first question, I think, you know, I’ll leave it to others to debate the relative merits of some of the, kind of, domestic regulations.

I’ll just make one, I think, really important point, which is: In semiconductors, in clean energy technologies, we’ve developed a suite of industrial policy tools that are stimulating a revolution in the manufacturing capacity of the United States in these critical sectors.  I believe that those same tools, in some cases those same pots of money, could actually attract a Hanwa or another Korean or Japanese shipbuilder to the United States the same way that we’ve attracted a Samsung or an LG to the United — or a Hyundai to the United States.

And so, we should have a theory of stimulating American shipbuilding that is in part about attracting our allies to invest here in building out their capabilities. 

How we then get into the regulatory landscape for what will work and what wouldn’t in the puts and takes of that is harder for me to speak to, but I think the overall theory of the case that we’ve applied in these other critical sectors could be applied to shipbuilding.  There are some green shoots of that in the maritime initiative that Secretary Del Toro has underway.  We really need to build on that because that, ultimately, is going to be an important part of the long-term answer to revitalizing the American shipbuilding industry.

MR. JONES:  Yeah, and I think it is an area where I think we’ve got to close that gap with the Chinese.

So, one question —

MR. SULLIVAN:  Oh, you said AUKUS.  We don’t have any plans to expand pillar one of AUKUS, which is the conventionally armed nuclear-powered subs.

MR. JONES:  Subs.  Yeah.

MR. SULLIVAN:  We do see other partners coming in to work with us on pillar two, which are all these other advanced —

MR. JONES:  I’ve seen the aperture already start to open a bit.  Yeah.

On — questions for the audience.  This has nothing to do with the subject of the discussion here, the industrial base. But first question here from someone in the audience is: “South Korea’s president declared martial law, which he then lifted. What has been the White House response?  It looked a little slow from our vantage point.”  How would you — I mean, what has been your response?  How concerned have you been with the unfolding events in South Korea?

MR. SULLIVAN:  You know, it’s — you know you’re living in a modern information age when an entire episode like this unfolds over the course of less than a day, and the characterization of the White House response is slow.  (Laughs.)

MR. JONES:  Too slow.  Yes.

MR. SULLIVAN:  But it’s a fair question.

I mean, we were not consulted in any way.  We learned about this from the announcement on television the same way the rest of the world did.  It raised deep concern for us, this declaration of martial law.  The National Assembly worked according to constitutional processes and procedures.  The president retracted martial law.  Now there’s, you know, a series of procedures in place to kind of react to what happened there, and they’ll be toing and froing between the main parties in Korea.

What we want to see is just the proper functioning of the democratic institutions of the ROK.  And after this rather dramatic announcement that raised alarm bells everywhere, including here in Washington, we have seen those processes and procedures work.  South Korea’s democracy is robust and resilient, and we’re going to continue to speak out publicly and engage privately with South Korean counterparts to reinforce the importance of that continuing as we go forward.

MR. JONES:  Thanks.

This question is about the industrial base, which — and it’s an interesting one because it deals with critical minerals. “China has banned exports to the U.S. of gallium, germanium, antimony, which have significant military applications in the industrial base.  How significant are these actions?  And probably more importantly, what are U.S. options to decrease reliance from China on critical minerals?”

MR. SULLIVAN:  The most important thing about this is that it is a continuing reminder of the need of the United States to have diverse and resilient supply chains for critical minerals with national security applications, and not to be reliant on any single country, especially a competitor like the PRC.  We knew that.  We know that.  We are reminded of that when they take steps like this.

Now, we, in particular, anticipated this step because they had already moved to restrict germanium and gallium in the past, before taking the full move this week to say no more exports to the United States.  There are other sources of germanium and gallium in the world.  But as we look at the wider aperture of critical minerals, not just for military purposes, but for strategic purposes — semiconductor manufacturing, clean energy transition technologies, et cetera — we need to get together with likeminded producers, processors, and users of these critical minerals for a high-standards critical mineral marketplace that ensures that China can’t, for example, crash the price of a given critical mineral, drive mines out of business, reduce the overall global supply, and operate as a chokehold.  That’s, ultimately, the logic we need to break.

We’ve taken some really important steps on this in the last few years.  It has allowed us to diversify and make more resilient our supply chains.  But that, too, just like the defense industrial base, is a work in progress, and we need the next administration to continue it, working with the Congress and private industry.  And I will be the biggest cheerleader of that ongoing effort, because it’s something we’ve devoted a lot of attention to over the last four years and something that is going to take, you know, at least the next decade to get ourselves in a position where we can really breathe a sigh of relief. 

We’re there.  We’re doing better.  We have solutions to a lot of these issues, but this is going to be a highly contested space, and there’s a lot more work to be done.

MR. JONES:  Thanks.

And last question.  Can be brief.  From Time Magazine: “Is DOGE friend or foe in an effort to revitalize the defense industrial base?”  I mean, what would you say to an effort to look at the Elon Musk initiative?

MR. SULLIVAN:  I just don’t know.  I mean, I’ve read, but I don’t know what it actually is.  Do we need more government efficiency?  Of course, we can all use more government efficiency.  So at a very macro level, finding ways, as I described in my speech, to modernize, streamline, make more effective procurement and all of the decades-long rules and regulations of the Defense Department.  I laid out a whole list of things in the speech that we should do.  Whether this initiative is about that or about something else, I just don’t know, so it’s hard for me to speak to.

MR. JONES:  Well, thank you. If you can all join me in thanking Jake for coming to CSIS.  (Applause.)  And if you could briefly just stay put as we get out, that’d be great.  Just 30 seconds or so.  Really appreciate everyone taking the time to come.  Thanks.

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On November 15, 2024, the Biden-Harris Administration held the Fourth Annual White House Tribal Youth Forum.  At the Forum, over 100 Native American youth from across the country engaged with Administration officials on key issues impacting their communities, including food sovereignty, climate change, mental health, and missing and murdered Indigenous persons. Discussions touched on themes youth leadership, preservation of culture, and destigmatizing mental illness. Youth were also given a presentation from the White House Internship Program to learn about opportunities available to them within the White House Office.

The Biden-Harris Administration remains committed to strengthening the relationship between the Federal Government and Tribal Nations to advance opportunity for Indigenous people, which includes empowering the future leaders of Indian Country. For the past four years the White House Tribal Youth Forum has provided a unique opportunity for Tribal youth to share their ideas and provide input on policy decisions that impact their communities and future generations.

Tribal youth participants heard directly from Department of the Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Department of Health and Human Services Deputy Secretary Andrea Palm, White House Council on Environmental Quality Chair Brenda Mallory, White House Internship Program Associate Director Jasmin Chavez-Cruz, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration Deputy Assistant Secretary Sonia Chessen, Administration for Native Americans Deputy Commissioner Hope MacDonald Lone Tree, and Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland.  In addition, the Forum included senior White House officials and senior Administration officials from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Department of the Interior, Department of Justice, Department of Health and Human Services, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the White House Council on Environmental Quality, and the White House Domestic Policy Council.

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The post Readout of the 2024 White House Tribal Youth Forum appeared first on The White House.

On November 15, 2024, the Biden-Harris Administration held the Fourth Annual White House Tribal Youth Forum.  At the Forum, over 100 Native American youth from across the country engaged with Administration officials on key issues impacting their communities, including food sovereignty, climate change, mental health, and missing and murdered Indigenous persons. Discussions touched on themes youth leadership, preservation of culture, and destigmatizing mental illness. Youth were also given a presentation from the White House Internship Program to learn about opportunities available to them within the White House Office.

The Biden-Harris Administration remains committed to strengthening the relationship between the Federal Government and Tribal Nations to advance opportunity for Indigenous people, which includes empowering the future leaders of Indian Country. For the past four years the White House Tribal Youth Forum has provided a unique opportunity for Tribal youth to share their ideas and provide input on policy decisions that impact their communities and future generations.

Tribal youth participants heard directly from Department of the Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Department of Health and Human Services Deputy Secretary Andrea Palm, White House Council on Environmental Quality Chair Brenda Mallory, White House Internship Program Associate Director Jasmin Chavez-Cruz, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration Deputy Assistant Secretary Sonia Chessen, Administration for Native Americans Deputy Commissioner Hope MacDonald Lone Tree, and Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland.  In addition, the Forum included senior White House officials and senior Administration officials from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Department of the Interior, Department of Justice, Department of Health and Human Services, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the White House Council on Environmental Quality, and the White House Domestic Policy Council.

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Today, President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. and Angolan President João Lourenço co-hosted African leaders from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia, and Tanzania, as well as private sector CEOs, U.S. development and finance institutions, and the Africa Finance Corporation, to celebrate and highlight progress on the development of the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor and the partnership of the Lobito Corridor consortium. President Biden praised the progress made on the Corridor since its launch under the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGI) at the 2023 G7 Summit, and today announced more than $560 million in new funding, including commitments expected to generate at least $200 million in additional private sector capital, for infrastructure projects along the Corridor, bringing the total for U.S. investments to more than $4 billion. The Leaders discussed the transformative impact the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor has had on enhancing access to the critical minerals needed for the clean energy transition and digital connectivity, strengthening food security, boosting regional trade, and empowering communities all along the Corridor. To date, the United States regional development banks, and international partners have mobilized over $6 billion in high-standard, public and private investments along the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor.

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Today, President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. and Angolan President João Lourenço co-hosted African leaders from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia, and Tanzania, as well as private sector CEOs, U.S. development and finance institutions, and the Africa Finance Corporation, to celebrate and highlight progress on the development of the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor and the partnership of the Lobito Corridor consortium. President Biden praised the progress made on the Corridor since its launch under the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGI) at the 2023 G7 Summit, and today announced more than $560 million in new funding, including commitments expected to generate at least $200 million in additional private sector capital, for infrastructure projects along the Corridor, bringing the total for U.S. investments to more than $4 billion. The Leaders discussed the transformative impact the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor has had on enhancing access to the critical minerals needed for the clean energy transition and digital connectivity, strengthening food security, boosting regional trade, and empowering communities all along the Corridor. To date, the United States regional development banks, and international partners have mobilized over $6 billion in high-standard, public and private investments along the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor.

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President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. met today with President Hakainde Hichilema of Zambia, to discuss the U.S.-Zambian relationship and our shared commitment to economic and democratic progress. The two leaders discussed the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor and the new rail line from the Angola border into Zambia. They discussed how these investments in infrastructure — including through a new $491 million Millennium Challenge Corporation compact with the Government of Zambia in which the United States will invest $458 million and Zambia will commit $33 million — will help catalyze sustainable and inclusive economic growth for the people of Zambia, lower the cost of transporting goods to regional and global markets, and create an incredible legacy for generations to come. They affirmed the need to ensure conditions are in place to attract private sector investments in Zambia, including a conviction that strong, resilient democracies are essential to create quality jobs and inclusive economic growth. The presidents underscored their conviction that countries should not be held back from investing in their development by the need to service unsustainably high debt, and together committed to continue advocating for reform.

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President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. met today with President Hakainde Hichilema of Zambia, to discuss the U.S.-Zambian relationship and our shared commitment to economic and democratic progress. The two leaders discussed the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor and the new rail line from the Angola border into Zambia. They discussed how these investments in infrastructure — including through a new $491 million Millennium Challenge Corporation compact with the Government of Zambia in which the United States will invest $458 million and Zambia will commit $33 million — will help catalyze sustainable and inclusive economic growth for the people of Zambia, lower the cost of transporting goods to regional and global markets, and create an incredible legacy for generations to come. They affirmed the need to ensure conditions are in place to attract private sector investments in Zambia, including a conviction that strong, resilient democracies are essential to create quality jobs and inclusive economic growth. The presidents underscored their conviction that countries should not be held back from investing in their development by the need to service unsustainably high debt, and together committed to continue advocating for reform.

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Gesso, Italy

Buongiorno!

Thank you, Mr. Mayor, for a warmer welcome than I could have imagined.

I’m also grateful to Ms. Prefect Di Stani and to President Schifani for their leadership.

Ambassador Markell, Jack, Carla, thank you for your hospitality and your work to strengthen the special relationship between Italy and the United States.

I know you have an excellent partner in Consul General Roberts-Pounds, Tracy, thank you for your service in Naples.

Dr. Mario Sarica, thank you for researching my family’s history and capturing it in your wonderful book.

My daughter, Ashley, and I just stepped into this beautiful church, where we saw the record of my great-grandmother’s baptism in 1865.

Father Franco Arrigo, thank you for inviting me to visit the church of my great-grandparents.

In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus says that a city set on a hill cannot be hidden—that its light shines for all to see.

I’m here today because the light from the hills of Gesso shines across the world—and it shines brightly within me.

More than a hundred years ago, my great-grandparents, Gaetano and Conchetta Giacoppa, walked the narrow streets of Gesso. They talked with their neighbors and watched the stars wander out at night.

And in the everyday rhythms of life, they were shaped by Italian values: loyalty, hard work, and the belief that there’s always room for one more seat at the table.

Like many in their generation, strengthened by those values, yet seeking better opportunities, my great-grandparents decided to leave their homeland for the promise of an unfamiliar place, and the idea that no matter where you come from, you can find a home and a future in the United States of America.

As they crossed the Atlantic, they prayed for the protection of St. Anthony, who continues to watch over the people of Gesso.

In America, they quickly found that Hammonton, New Jersey was home to fellow immigrants from Gesso. And other neighbors had come from their own Gessos around the world, bringing the light of those homelands to their new nation too.

Step by step, my great-grandparents built a life. Their last name, “Giacoppa,” became Jacobs.

Their son—my grandpop—grew up and got a job moving furniture.

And his son—my father—joined the United States military at age 17, and then went to school to become a banker.

Within two generations, America was no longer an unfamiliar place. It’s where they dreamed bigger with every decade. 

My great-grandparents said goodbye to Gesso and set sail with hope in their hearts.

But they never could have predicted that within three generations, their great-granddaughter would be back in Gesso, standing before you, as the first Italian American First Lady of the United States.

As First Lady, I’ve brought the vibrant Italian American community together to celebrate our culture and sustain our traditions.

I’ve even had the opportunity to serve gnocchi and braciole in the White House!

And the values of loyalty, hard work, and that spirit of generosity that my great-grandparents brought with them to America still live on today.

I am so grateful to be here in Gesso. And as I look out at this beautiful place, and all of you, I feel the warmth of home. Because of your kindness, because of your joyful welcome, I will always remember and cherish this day.

And if my great-grandparents could see all of us here together, I know they would have been happy, not because I have the title of “First Lady,” but because their descendants stayed true to their roots.

I’m returning to Gesso today with gratitude for my great-grandparents, and you. For the culture we cherish. And for the light that shines in the White House, and wherever there is a son or daughter of Gesso.

May God bless you and keep you.

Grazie.

Now, I’ve brought a gift for all of you. Mr. Mayor, could you please join me?

My home, Delaware, has a state tree—the American Holly. So today, I’m giving Gesso a tree that’s closely related: the European Holly.

I hope this tree will stand for generations to come, as a symbol of the enduring bond between Gesso and her children across the ocean. May our roots remain strong, and may we always grow together.

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Gesso, Italy

Buongiorno!

Thank you, Mr. Mayor, for a warmer welcome than I could have imagined.

I’m also grateful to Ms. Prefect Di Stani and to President Schifani for their leadership.

Ambassador Markell, Jack, Carla, thank you for your hospitality and your work to strengthen the special relationship between Italy and the United States.

I know you have an excellent partner in Consul General Roberts-Pounds, Tracy, thank you for your service in Naples.

Dr. Mario Sarica, thank you for researching my family’s history and capturing it in your wonderful book.

My daughter, Ashley, and I just stepped into this beautiful church, where we saw the record of my great-grandmother’s baptism in 1865.

Father Franco Arrigo, thank you for inviting me to visit the church of my great-grandparents.

In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus says that a city set on a hill cannot be hidden—that its light shines for all to see.

I’m here today because the light from the hills of Gesso shines across the world—and it shines brightly within me.

More than a hundred years ago, my great-grandparents, Gaetano and Conchetta Giacoppa, walked the narrow streets of Gesso. They talked with their neighbors and watched the stars wander out at night.

And in the everyday rhythms of life, they were shaped by Italian values: loyalty, hard work, and the belief that there’s always room for one more seat at the table.

Like many in their generation, strengthened by those values, yet seeking better opportunities, my great-grandparents decided to leave their homeland for the promise of an unfamiliar place, and the idea that no matter where you come from, you can find a home and a future in the United States of America.

As they crossed the Atlantic, they prayed for the protection of St. Anthony, who continues to watch over the people of Gesso.

In America, they quickly found that Hammonton, New Jersey was home to fellow immigrants from Gesso. And other neighbors had come from their own Gessos around the world, bringing the light of those homelands to their new nation too.

Step by step, my great-grandparents built a life. Their last name, “Giacoppa,” became Jacobs.

Their son—my grandpop—grew up and got a job moving furniture.

And his son—my father—joined the United States military at age 17, and then went to school to become a banker.

Within two generations, America was no longer an unfamiliar place. It’s where they dreamed bigger with every decade. 

My great-grandparents said goodbye to Gesso and set sail with hope in their hearts.

But they never could have predicted that within three generations, their great-granddaughter would be back in Gesso, standing before you, as the first Italian American First Lady of the United States.

As First Lady, I’ve brought the vibrant Italian American community together to celebrate our culture and sustain our traditions.

I’ve even had the opportunity to serve gnocchi and braciole in the White House!

And the values of loyalty, hard work, and that spirit of generosity that my great-grandparents brought with them to America still live on today.

I am so grateful to be here in Gesso. And as I look out at this beautiful place, and all of you, I feel the warmth of home. Because of your kindness, because of your joyful welcome, I will always remember and cherish this day.

And if my great-grandparents could see all of us here together, I know they would have been happy, not because I have the title of “First Lady,” but because their descendants stayed true to their roots.

I’m returning to Gesso today with gratitude for my great-grandparents, and you. For the culture we cherish. And for the light that shines in the White House, and wherever there is a son or daughter of Gesso.

May God bless you and keep you.

Grazie.

Now, I’ve brought a gift for all of you. Mr. Mayor, could you please join me?

My home, Delaware, has a state tree—the American Holly. So today, I’m giving Gesso a tree that’s closely related: the European Holly.

I hope this tree will stand for generations to come, as a symbol of the enduring bond between Gesso and her children across the ocean. May our roots remain strong, and may we always grow together.

###

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President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. met today with President Felix Tshisekedi of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to discuss the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor and the broader economic partnershipand the bilateral relationship between the United States and the DRC and the Congolese people. The two leaders affirmed the need to ensure conditions are in place to attract private sector investments in the DRC, including good governance, transparency, and a sovereign DRC that is able to harness its immense wealth for the benefit of all its people. President Biden encouraged continued commitment to the Luanda Process to ensure a peaceful resolution to the conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. 

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President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. met today with President Felix Tshisekedi of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to discuss the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor and the broader economic partnershipand the bilateral relationship between the United States and the DRC and the Congolese people. The two leaders affirmed the need to ensure conditions are in place to attract private sector investments in the DRC, including good governance, transparency, and a sovereign DRC that is able to harness its immense wealth for the benefit of all its people. President Biden encouraged continued commitment to the Luanda Process to ensure a peaceful resolution to the conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. 

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Catania, Italy

Thank you, Captain Shoemaker. I’m grateful to you and Lisa for the warm welcome to Sigonella and for your leadership of this base.

And what a beautiful performance from the band!

Ambassador Markell—Jack, Joe could not have asked for a better partner from Delaware to the White House in Italy. It’s so wonderful to be able to spend this special day with you and Carla.

And today is possible because of the work of Consul General Roberts-Pounds.

I’m also grateful to all the Italian officials with us for taking the time to be here.

Thank you all for spending part of your morning with me.

The Bidens are a military family.

As the Captain said, my father was a Navy Signalman in World War II. And our son, Major Beau Biden, served for a year in Iraq as part of the Delaware Army National Guard.

So, 15 years ago, when I took my first overseas trip as Second Lady, I wanted to visit the people who make our freedom possible.

I traveled to meet military families stationed at Bamberg and Schweinfurt over 4th of July weekend.

In the years since, through Joining Forces—my White House initiative to support military and veteran families, caregivers, and survivors—I’ve sat with hundreds more servicemembers and their families—to keep listening.

Today, I’m humbled to be with military families here at Sigonella.

We just began the holiday season at the White House. And, I hope to bring some of that warmth across the ocean to all of you—though you seem to have created a pretty incredible display here too.

This year—Sigonella’s 65th anniversary—you’ve shown the world why you’re the “Hub of the Med.”

The 3rd highest Final Evaluation Problem score in history!

Holding 200 community relations events—more than any other base.

The Jaguars winning the European football championship to end a perfect season!

And every day you successfully weave through the Sicilian traffic.

But I know this life isn’t always easy: deployments that seem too long and phone calls that end too soon, PCSing every few years—leaving behind careers, schools, and communities.

That’s why Joe’s Administration is making sure we do everything we can to support military families

Lowering the cost of child care and bringing universal pre-k to bases—including this one!

Making sure military kids with disabilities can transfer their individualized education programs to their new school.

Signing an historic Executive Order to help military spouses keep their careers, and collaborating with the Italian government to let spouses work remotely here—because we have to do everything we can to make sure spouses have employment opportunities no matter where they’re stationed.

You are the brave and the bold.

You’re the spouses who hug twice as hard and cheer twice as loud at football games to fill that empty space beside you, so that other families can celebrate their milestones together.

The military kids who don’t have a hometown, so that other kids can stay in theirs.

You’re the 1% who serves, so the 99% can know freedom.

You stand on the front lines, protecting Americans around the world and ensuring those at home can feel the peace and light of the holidays year after year.

And we have a duty to make sure you can build good lives.

This is my last overseas trip as First Lady.

Just like all those years ago, I knew I wanted to visit military families—to let you know how much all of you mean to me and to your Commander-in-Chief.

It’s been the honor of this military mom and grandmom’s life to serve as your First Lady—and work to fulfill our sacred obligation to you.

With all my heart, thank you for your service.

May God bless you and your families.

###

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Catania, Italy

Thank you, Captain Shoemaker. I’m grateful to you and Lisa for the warm welcome to Sigonella and for your leadership of this base.

And what a beautiful performance from the band!

Ambassador Markell—Jack, Joe could not have asked for a better partner from Delaware to the White House in Italy. It’s so wonderful to be able to spend this special day with you and Carla.

And today is possible because of the work of Consul General Roberts-Pounds.

I’m also grateful to all the Italian officials with us for taking the time to be here.

Thank you all for spending part of your morning with me.

The Bidens are a military family.

As the Captain said, my father was a Navy Signalman in World War II. And our son, Major Beau Biden, served for a year in Iraq as part of the Delaware Army National Guard.

So, 15 years ago, when I took my first overseas trip as Second Lady, I wanted to visit the people who make our freedom possible.

I traveled to meet military families stationed at Bamberg and Schweinfurt over 4th of July weekend.

In the years since, through Joining Forces—my White House initiative to support military and veteran families, caregivers, and survivors—I’ve sat with hundreds more servicemembers and their families—to keep listening.

Today, I’m humbled to be with military families here at Sigonella.

We just began the holiday season at the White House. And, I hope to bring some of that warmth across the ocean to all of you—though you seem to have created a pretty incredible display here too.

This year—Sigonella’s 65th anniversary—you’ve shown the world why you’re the “Hub of the Med.”

The 3rd highest Final Evaluation Problem score in history!

Holding 200 community relations events—more than any other base.

The Jaguars winning the European football championship to end a perfect season!

And every day you successfully weave through the Sicilian traffic.

But I know this life isn’t always easy: deployments that seem too long and phone calls that end too soon, PCSing every few years—leaving behind careers, schools, and communities.

That’s why Joe’s Administration is making sure we do everything we can to support military families

Lowering the cost of child care and bringing universal pre-k to bases—including this one!

Making sure military kids with disabilities can transfer their individualized education programs to their new school.

Signing an historic Executive Order to help military spouses keep their careers, and collaborating with the Italian government to let spouses work remotely here—because we have to do everything we can to make sure spouses have employment opportunities no matter where they’re stationed.

You are the brave and the bold.

You’re the spouses who hug twice as hard and cheer twice as loud at football games to fill that empty space beside you, so that other families can celebrate their milestones together.

The military kids who don’t have a hometown, so that other kids can stay in theirs.

You’re the 1% who serves, so the 99% can know freedom.

You stand on the front lines, protecting Americans around the world and ensuring those at home can feel the peace and light of the holidays year after year.

And we have a duty to make sure you can build good lives.

This is my last overseas trip as First Lady.

Just like all those years ago, I knew I wanted to visit military families—to let you know how much all of you mean to me and to your Commander-in-Chief.

It’s been the honor of this military mom and grandmom’s life to serve as your First Lady—and work to fulfill our sacred obligation to you.

With all my heart, thank you for your service.

May God bless you and your families.

###

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Luanda, Angola

MODERATOR: Thank you all for joining for this gaggle. Everything will be attributed to a senior administration official, embargoed until 10:00 p.m. local time.

For your awareness, but not for your reporting, our SAO is [senior administration official]. [Senior administration official], we’ll turn it over to you for a few words at the top, after which we’ll take some questions.

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: All right, thank you.

So, as you know, the President is going to travel to Lobito, Angola, tomorrow. I’ll go through kind of a little bit of the schedule and then go into more of the details.

He’ll arrive in Lobito. He’ll be joined by — at the Port of Lobito and be joined by President Lourenço of Angola, as well as the presidents of Zambia and DRC, as well as the vice president of Tanzania.

They will tour the port. From there, they will travel by car to a grain facility — production facility of a company called Carrinho — I’ll explain a little bit later who they are and what they are — where he will tour the facility. It’s an agribusiness company. He’ll tour the facility by the founder and CEO, Nelson Carrinho.

He will then, at that facility, will also meet and get briefed by a number of other company leaders of companies that the United States has financed here in Angola and along the Lobito Corridor, such as Africell, who, if you’ve been traveling around Angola, you’ve seen a lot of their signs. They’re a mobile telecommunications company, a U.S. company that just a couple of — a few years ago, there was only a monopoly here of the state-owned company. They entered with U.S. financing support. Today, they have a significant market share already. They are also expanding beyond Rwanda to make sure that people in rural Angola can go from 2G to 3G. 2G is no data; 3G is with data.

And actually, we’re going to — we will be announcing shortly some financing for them — package financing for them to support their growth into both neighboring countries along the Lobito Corridor and to expanding to 5G here in Angola.

There, he’ll also be greeted by the CEO of Sun Africa, which is a company that has received financing from the Export-Import Bank of the United States. They are building something along approximately 700 megawatts of solar power, in addition to some storage and mini grids. This is the largest U.S. investment in solar power in Africa, here in Angola. It will mean that Angola will have not only a significant portion of its energy from clean sources, but also give the ability to export clean energy to its neighboring countries.

He’ll also be meeting with a leader from a company called KoBold — it’s with a K; K-O-B-O-L-D, as in David — which is a mining company in Zambia. Initially, it’s an American company backed by a number of U.S. well-known financial institutions, including Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Ventures. And they made a discovery, a copper discovery in Zambia. It was one of the largest copper discoveries. As you all know, copper is extremely important for both the chips development, as well as for electric vehicles and expanding the grid, which we will need because of the expansion of data centers.

He will also meet a leader from a company called Acrow Bridge. That’s A-C-R-O-W. They are based in Milton, Pennsylvania. They make pre-fabricated steel bridges, so it’s American steel, American jobs. It’s a unionized company. And they then deliver those bridges here in Angola. I believe the contract is for 186 steel bridges to be delivered here in Angola, and hopefully will expand their operations elsewhere. It’s a great story of creating jobs in America to deliver good commercial benefits here in Angola and in Africa writ large, again, receiving some commercial financing from U.S. government institutions.

After he visits with all these companies, he will then join a roundtable hosted by President Lourenço and President Biden, together with the presidents of Zambia, the DRC, and the vice president of Tanzania, and with, in addition, the CEO of the AFC, which is the Africa Finance Corporation, who is a partner in both leading the project, the Lobito Corridor project, a rail project, and is a — well, my understanding is will likely make a financial announcement — financial commitment announcement to the phase two of the project.

So why are we going to Lobito? Why is the President going to Lobito? So, the Lobito Corridor really is anchored in the Lobito port itself, which is the gateway in and out of Africa for the critical minerals industry and now for agriculture.

The premise behind the corridor is to be able to take American support and financial capabilities that are admittedly limited and to focus them more deeply in one area versus spreading that financial support and effort across many countries. So, instead of a little bit of human and financial resource across the whole continent, choosing corridors where we can have the largest impact.

The Lobito Corridor was the test case for this approach, not just for Africa but globally, and has been a very successful proof point in that theory.

The rail is a refurbishment of a rail that goes from the Lobito port all the way to the border of the Democratic Republic of Congo and nearby the border of Zambia, and extends all the way to eastern Congo. This means that a cargo of cobalt or copper that takes about 45 days to get from eastern Congo or Zambia to the market by going through Durban, South Africa — by truck, it takes about 45 days. This will take somewhere in the 40 to 50 hours to go the same distance. That is a remarkable not only cut in time, but cut in cost and the ability to get to market, which will then serve to cut the cost, eventually, of batteries and EVS or chips, et cetera.

So that is the first piece of what the Lobito Corridor does.

The reason the mining industry is so important in this is because by booking capacity in this rail, it makes it more financeable, more commercial. Nothing in what is happening in the Lobito Corridor is aid. It is all about making things commercial, financeable, and for-profit so that they’re actually sustainable for a long period of time and has the ability to have maintenance on it and so on.

So, getting the critical minerals out is not only an objective to help the United States diversify the supply chain, but it also means that now higher-standard companies from around the world are coming back into the industry in Africa for the first time. So, for many years, the higher-value companies were leaving, and instead, the mining was being done by companies who perhaps have lower standards across — whether it’s labor, environment, transparency, corruption — and now you’re starting to see higher-end companies with a better set of standards. KoBold is a good example of that. There are others now that are in final negotiations to come back into countries that they left only recently.

But once we wanted to work on the corridor, the President wanted to make sure we weren’t doing this on one issue alone of critical minerals, but rather how do we use this to raise GDP and support for countries along the corridor. What you’ll see is, beyond the investment that I just discussed, like Africell and the others, laying fiber-optic cable in Angola and along the rail to expand Internet connectivity, faster connectivity across a larger swath of land.

Countries that are land-locked, like Zambia and DRC, to a large degree, have a hard time raising their ability to feed themselves and to bring products to not only international markets, but even to their neighbors.

So, the rail suddenly opens up the ability to deliver commodities and food stuffs and equipment into — all the way to eastern Congo and Zambia. Both countries, Zambia and DRC, have fresh water, have arable land, and yet are importers of food.

What you’ll see in this facility that the President is going to go to, where the roundtable is going to be Carrinho, is the company that has built silos for storage so that you can get food crops into cold storage so they can last longer, which means that he is able to go to farmers across Angola and say, “Anything that you can farm, I will purchase,” and then be able to deliver. That has reduced the dependency of Angola already on certain products from a 100 percent dependency on imports to near zero and expanding.

So we’re working with — the U.S. government with Carrinho. How do you expand that into the broader region, into Zambia, into DRC, so that along the rail, now, if you’re in Zambia and you have the Zambezi River that has an enormous amount of fresh water, and yet they are importing food — if the agriculture there can be developed from small farms to large farms, and be able to sell into this corridor, we’re not only expanding it for critical minerals, but suddenly this corridor is now solving food security concerns across the corridor.

So this is the overview of why the President has gone not only all the way to Angola, but all the way to Lobito. And it’s a major investment for the U.S. The PGI initiative that we’ve talked to you about before is an initiative that is the leader in this.

Under this presidency, we’ve already spent, in this corridor alone, nearly $4 billion, but that’s just U.S. There’s a lot of other participants in this. The EU is coming in. The Italian government has provided, I think, $320 million of investment. The Africa Finance Corporation, as well as the Africa Development Bank, are all part of this and growing.

So, this is going to be a multibillion-dollar investment in lasting infrastructure that will not only not only build up these businesses, but bring about a change in attitude that the President mentioned in his public remarks today of increasing the transparency, increasing the standards of labor, increasing the environmental protection standards, all that have been — really, this continent has suffered enormously from investments that have not cared about any of those things and has taken the resources out and left behind no better economies, no advanced communities.

And so, the idea behind this corridor is that it will ensure that it doesn’t only come to take resources, but rather build up GDP, build up communities, build up towns, and increase the level of economic development for the towns and the communities around these businesses, as well as the country as a whole, while not adding crushing debt terms the way they have with other investors.

I will stop there.

MODERATOR: Great. With that, we’ll take a few questions, and we’re hoping to keep it focused on the visit tomorrow.

Q So, as far as just the rail project in particular, the big kind of new financial commitment is the AFC announcement, right?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: So, DFC, we haven’t formally announced it; we’ve talked about the (inaudible). But DFC, the Development Finance Corporation in the United States, has approved a $553 million package. And I won’t speak to what the AFC will announce tomorrow. That’s up to them.

Q Gotcha. And is that specifically for phase two?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: That’s for phase two.

So what we did was the United States came in with phase one at $553 million, and that was good enough for the two European companies that are building the rail and operating it, in addition to us helping them get secured usage commitments of the rail. That’s at phase one. Once the world saw that we were serious about this, it sort of paved the way for everyone to be like, “Oh, this thing is actually for real.” And then they came in and supported, specifically after the President made a big push at the G7 last year that unlocked a lot of financing from others.

Q Can I just look forward to AGOA? What is the future of this rail corridor and AGOA? I know that’s up to Congress. But do you see that some of these countries that are eligible for AGOA — Zambia, Congo, and Angola — could expand their AGOA exports? And do you have a roadmap for that?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: I think there’s no doubt that should Congress expand AGOA, that this would be a benefit. I think the point here is that it would support these countries’ ability to increase their exports, and will allow them to be not only connected to global markets for exports, but actually to other African markets. So, there is a critical need for Africa to be connected not only to the world and to itself. And so, the President spoke about it today. We talk a lot about it in aviation, where sometimes you have to fly very far away to go to your neighboring country, but having the critical infrastructure.

So, hopefully AGOA can strengthen it. But this is not reliant on AGOA. AGOA will just be a increase in support for it.

Q Right. But AGOA is, like, value-added products, and this rail line is going to bring in, like, raw materials. Is this is going to give an opportunity for these countries to export value-added products?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: So I disagree with the premise that it’s for raw products. There is — right now, only raw product is coming out. But I think what this rail does — an increased — in order to get to higher-value products, you need a few things. One of them is affordable and reliable and abundant energy. So, the build-out of the energy system allows you to then build the value added.

And I fully expect — we are already discussing with companies that are looking — I can’t announce it for them, but I would assume in the next weeks and months you’ll see some of the companies, the mining companies and other service companies, building out infrastructure to create value added. So instead of just the raw material, you’ll be ultimately exporting something. Now, I can’t tell you how far up the chain it will be refined, but I think there’s a lot of refinement to be done here in Africa.

Q And on just the fi- — so the investment from the DFC, it’s $553 million?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Yes.

Q That’s what’s coming tomorrow?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: That is part of the — when we talk about the over $3 billion of support in Angola, and then I think nearly or over $4 billion in total for the Lobito Corridor, the President is going to announce tomorrow an additional $600 million in financing for projects for the broader Lobito Corridor, and that takes you above the
number that we had talked about today.

Q Got it. So, additional $600 million is what (inaudible).

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Yeah. But that’s not
just for rail. That’s for the broader — and not just in Angola; that’s for the broader corridor.

Q So that’s separate from the 553 (inaudible).

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Correct.

Q Yeah, I just want to make sure that they’re separate.

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: The $553 million is for the rail itself, a phase one rail in Angola. And then there are all kinds of things that we’re doing to support the broader corridor. Some of that’s what I talked about — Africell, Sun Africa, the feasibility study that we have to do for the phase two. Phase two is essentially building the entire rail system inside Zambia, which we are pretty far along on the planning of that. We expect shovels on the ground by the end of 2025 or early 2026. And there’s a lot of work that goes into identifying routes. Do a brand-new greenfield rail.

So the part from Angola all the way to east Congo is already being used. And then phase two is much more expansive, more ambitious. I should say there’s a phase three, which is then connecting it onwards all the way to Tanzania. That’s why the vice president of Tanzania is going to be here.

Q Okay, got it. And then, just wanted to — can you just talk about what this financing looks like going forward, with President-elect Trump coming in? And the dollars that have already been allocated to the project, can you kind of detail how it’s being spent, how much has been spent already? Like, I don’t know if you can kind of break that down.

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: So, I think the most important way to tie the two ends of your question is to say that the money that I’m referring to, most of it has gone through the process already. It’s been approved. The ones that require congressional notification have already been congressionally notified. They have finished their notification periods. They have not had any holds. There is broad bipartisan support for these projects.

And, look, at the end of the day, if you want to talk about living in an era of global competition, specifically with China, this Lobito Corridor is the heart of that. You can’t stand up and say I want to compete with China — not adversary, but compete with China — and not support what’s happening here, which is why I have every confi- — which is why it’s had bipartisan support already across Congress, and why I have every expectation that when the new administration comes in, they will — I don’t know how many things they will continue around the world, but I believe they will continue this project because it is good for American national security, it’s good for American economic security, and it builds on what a Republican-controlled Congress during the Trump administration, which is to build that, that created the DFC for this kind of purpose.

And we’ve had Republican staff, Republican members of Congress, senators who’ve been to Angola, DRC recently. These are members who’ve never traveled to Angola before, but this is why they’re coming here. So, I think there is quite a bit of support for this.

Q Sorry, just a clarifying question. The $553 million, that’s for phase one, not two?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Correct.

Q How long will this take? You said that the Tanzania point — I mean, shovels in the ground for part of it, starting in 2025.

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Zambia. Zambia.

Q Right. And then, the Tanzania is like the long goal. And right now, there’s a portion that’s already being used to east Congo.

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Right. This is all going to be in pieces. So, nothing is going to — this is not a “we wait until a big reveal and something all works.”

So we had a test cargo a couple months ago that went from east DRC all the way to Lobito. It doesn’t mean the rail is fully operational yet, but we wanted to see how it works. So that’s how I can tell you how many hours it takes, because we had that test cargo. That will, probably in the next year or so, will be — the work inside Angola will be complete, next year-ish. Right around that time is when the shovel is going to go in the ground in Zambia. Again, the feasibility study is now done, and now we have to do all the other project preparation, which, again, is expensive and takes time.

There’s already pieces of rail that exist if you go further east. So now it’s about, Patrick, how do you make sure that all the rails connect to each other. So you don’t have to build the whole way to Tanzania; you just have to build the spurs that interlink the rail that already exists all the way to the port in Tanzania. So, that will give you that — what the President said in his comments at the Slavery Museum — of connecting for the very first time a truly transcontinental (inaudible).

Q What’s the prediction for that, for it being (inaudible)?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: I don’t know. I think it’s hard for me to make that prediction. I think if all goes well, which construction projects sometimes do and sometimes don’t, I would say Zambia would then take probably two, three years to complete, and then — but some of the rest of the work could happen simultaneous, concurrently with the Zambia work. The Chinese are involved in a TAZARA section, which is they’re partnered with Zambia and Tanzania on part of that. And so that will connect into this. So we’ll have a lot of different pieces to this rail.

So my guess is, by the end of the decade, you can have a really fully functioning rail that goes coast to coast.

Q And do you hear frequently from these countries that you’ve been working with on the Lobito Corridor that they don’t have secure investments from their other investment partners? That’s been a big theme of what we’ve been hearing about. Without explicitly saying the names of the other partners, (inaudible) more reliable?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: I’m sorry, who are the other partners?

Q China and Russia. That the U.S. would be a more reliable investor. That’s what the U.S. is offering. Do you hear from these leaders that some of these other investments are falling short; that they need somebody to come in and be reliable?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: I think that the investment from the United States versus from others, it’s not about more or less, it’s about different. We hear a lot about others coming in with very large checks, build a lot of stuff, but that is with high interest rates on the debt, the terms are really difficult, and it doesn’t come with any of the commitments to their society.

And so, what you see happen — and again, the President mentioned in the speech today — 10 years, 5 years later, 10 years later, you go to a country, whether it’s here in Sub-Saharan Africa or in Southeast Asia or South Asia, or even Latin America — I mean, look what’s happened. The resource is gone, right? They’ve taken it out. But there’s — the debt in the early years is low interest rates, and then it expands with time. In some cases, it’s over 11 percent, which is crushing. And there’s no support for the local communities where these investments are.

Now, politicians today are wise enough to know that “my predecessor left me this debt and a community that is anti-investment,” because they’ve seen that their kids are working in these facilities, or they’re getting paid a dollar a day. They know their drinking water is worse because nobody is providing security into making sure that they’re not polluting all the waterways or moving rivers.

So what they’re looking for is a different kind of investment that guarantees the opposite of all those things. And what I hear from heads of state, you know, consistently, is, “I don’t want the other investments, but if I have to choose between a Chinese investment and no investment, I will choose a Chinese investment every day of the week, or the Russian.”

So if you give us a choice, we’ll be there. And what the President committed at the African Leaders Summit was to create a different offer, and that’s what he charged me with trying to implement, and that’s what he’s done. And that’s why President Lourenço said today in his opening comments to the President, “You lived up to your word. You gave us your word at the leaders conference, and you’ve actually lived up to it with what you’ve done.”

Q Can I follow up on something you just said, that the hope is that this will attract, like, higher-quality investments. But how — is there a mechanism in place to verify that the companies that will take part in this project, like actually have higher standards regarding, like, labor rights, environment, transparency, et cetera?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Yes, there is. I mean, the whole point of the U.S. participating in this is that part of the DFC or Ex-Im Bank or MCC or USAID, any of these organizations in the U.S. government, they vet the companies for that kind of action, and not just before they give the loan facilities or debt facilities, but rather during the project itself.

Second, with the fact that the U.S. government is saying we are effectively putting the American flag on these projects, we have a responsibility. And so, there’s a continued U.S. — you know, shining a light on these projects to make sure that it is done in the proper manner.

MODERATOR: We have time for just a couple more.

Q You know, I know this was supposed to come earlier, and the hurricane sort of derailed everything, but is there a fear that this is coming so late in the administration that even though this is, you know, good work that’s going to certainly have a lasting impact, that it’s going to be overshadowed by the President leaving office?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: I don’t think so at all. Look, the President was supposed to be here earlier, but I don’t think it makes any difference.

What’s being highlighted here, guys, is the — you know, we’re so used to the cynical of “government comes and we tout.” This is, like, literally, a transformative initiative for the United States that I think it’s not about whether the Trump administration is going to continue it, which I have very little doubt, but rather, I think this is the playbook for administrations to come.

There are a lot of things that we’ve done around the world. I mean, PEPFAR is, I think, George W. Bush, and we’re still talking about what a great initiative that was. Everybody thinks the DFC was a very good thing globally.

So, yes, from administration to administration, some things get carried on. So, I truly believe that this is something transformative.

But look at the politics of this. And I don’t want people to miss this: Nobody — when I came this morning to the palace, before the arrival ceremony, the ministers that I was talking to, the one thing that every single one of them separately said to me, “What we’ve been talking about is that no one in this country, at our age, would have believed that the United States would be here, the president of the United States would be here,” based on the relationship that we once had. We weren’t just on the other side of the Cold War. We were very much on the other side of the Cold War. During a civil war here then, we were sort of a player.

Q It was like a hot war with Cuba, a proxy war.

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Yes. This was basically a proxy hot war with the Soviet Union.

So to go from that — and, by the way, that — yes, we recognize, you know, reestablished relations in 1993. But when I came here, you know, and started talking to the Angolan government just three, four years ago, the relationship was not this. Today, this is one of our strongest relationships in all of Sub-Saharan Africa. It’s one of our best friends. President Lourenço has been one of our truest allies. That is unimaginable (inaudible). It didn’t happen because we decided to go the usual route of aid. It happened — or political promises. It happened because they could see that we were making promises and we were keeping them at every step of the way.

The fact that we made over $3 billion of investments here that are meaningful investments to people in this country is what drove it.

And so, the blueprint here is: If you get more — with aid, you get a certain amount; you’ve done the right thing. You should continue to do it. But the investment strategy that many presidents have talked about trying to — how do you go from aid to trade, we’ve heard that from many presidents. But the ability to actually do it is so different. And that’s why I don’t take the cynical view of, “Oh, it’s the end of the administration, didn’t have to come, it’s not going to matter.” On the contrary. The one thing that I hear from Republicans consistently since the election is, “Can you talk to us more about this? How do we continue this?” People asking for what kind of jobs they need to create for this and so on.

So it’s not just my hard-to-hide enthusiasm for this project, but it is that I truly believe that this is a blueprint for the future.

And, by the way, we’ve copied this in other parts of the world. When was the last time we took something we did in Africa and then copied it elsewhere? We created a corridor in the Philippines that is entirely — together with Japan — just with — you know, the Luzon Corridor — just based on this.

And I think if we had more time — I think we’re trying to do the same thing in East Africa, in Liberia and in Ghana, building out data centers. I mean, that’s the competition with China. It’s not getting China — by the way, it’s not about getting China out of Africa. On the contrary. I would love China to invest more. But hopefully, when countries say, “Wait a minute, I can go to the United States and there’ll be no child labor, they’ll get higher wages, more investment in my country, and I won’t have crushing debt,” and tell the Chinese, “If you want to compete, give me a better offer.”

And so China, then, is investing in Africa at higher standards. Great. We’re not going to close the infrastructure gap in Africa with the United States and the G7 alone. I can promise you that. So having China here would be great, but not the way they’ve been doing business (inaudible).

Q Just one quick one. Has there been any progress in finding a buyer for that Congolese mine that was being sold to a Chinese buyer?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Chemaf?

Q Yes.

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: So, one, they announced that — there was some announcement that it was sold, and then there was an announcement, “No, we didn’t sell it.” I think that the Congolese — you’d have to ask them, but they would like to make sure that their industry and their economy is diversified. They are having discussions with other companies. So it’s really not my place to speak for them.

MODERATOR: Thank you all. Thank you very much.

The post Background Press Gaggle by a Senior Administration Official on the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor appeared first on The White House.

Luanda, Angola

MODERATOR: Thank you all for joining for this gaggle. Everything will be attributed to a senior administration official, embargoed until 10:00 p.m. local time.

For your awareness, but not for your reporting, our SAO is [senior administration official]. [Senior administration official], we’ll turn it over to you for a few words at the top, after which we’ll take some questions.

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: All right, thank you.

So, as you know, the President is going to travel to Lobito, Angola, tomorrow. I’ll go through kind of a little bit of the schedule and then go into more of the details.

He’ll arrive in Lobito. He’ll be joined by — at the Port of Lobito and be joined by President Lourenço of Angola, as well as the presidents of Zambia and DRC, as well as the vice president of Tanzania.

They will tour the port. From there, they will travel by car to a grain facility — production facility of a company called Carrinho — I’ll explain a little bit later who they are and what they are — where he will tour the facility. It’s an agribusiness company. He’ll tour the facility by the founder and CEO, Nelson Carrinho.

He will then, at that facility, will also meet and get briefed by a number of other company leaders of companies that the United States has financed here in Angola and along the Lobito Corridor, such as Africell, who, if you’ve been traveling around Angola, you’ve seen a lot of their signs. They’re a mobile telecommunications company, a U.S. company that just a couple of — a few years ago, there was only a monopoly here of the state-owned company. They entered with U.S. financing support. Today, they have a significant market share already. They are also expanding beyond Rwanda to make sure that people in rural Angola can go from 2G to 3G. 2G is no data; 3G is with data.

And actually, we’re going to — we will be announcing shortly some financing for them — package financing for them to support their growth into both neighboring countries along the Lobito Corridor and to expanding to 5G here in Angola.

There, he’ll also be greeted by the CEO of Sun Africa, which is a company that has received financing from the Export-Import Bank of the United States. They are building something along approximately 700 megawatts of solar power, in addition to some storage and mini grids. This is the largest U.S. investment in solar power in Africa, here in Angola. It will mean that Angola will have not only a significant portion of its energy from clean sources, but also give the ability to export clean energy to its neighboring countries.

He’ll also be meeting with a leader from a company called KoBold — it’s with a K; K-O-B-O-L-D, as in David — which is a mining company in Zambia. Initially, it’s an American company backed by a number of U.S. well-known financial institutions, including Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Ventures. And they made a discovery, a copper discovery in Zambia. It was one of the largest copper discoveries. As you all know, copper is extremely important for both the chips development, as well as for electric vehicles and expanding the grid, which we will need because of the expansion of data centers.

He will also meet a leader from a company called Acrow Bridge. That’s A-C-R-O-W. They are based in Milton, Pennsylvania. They make pre-fabricated steel bridges, so it’s American steel, American jobs. It’s a unionized company. And they then deliver those bridges here in Angola. I believe the contract is for 186 steel bridges to be delivered here in Angola, and hopefully will expand their operations elsewhere. It’s a great story of creating jobs in America to deliver good commercial benefits here in Angola and in Africa writ large, again, receiving some commercial financing from U.S. government institutions.

After he visits with all these companies, he will then join a roundtable hosted by President Lourenço and President Biden, together with the presidents of Zambia, the DRC, and the vice president of Tanzania, and with, in addition, the CEO of the AFC, which is the Africa Finance Corporation, who is a partner in both leading the project, the Lobito Corridor project, a rail project, and is a — well, my understanding is will likely make a financial announcement — financial commitment announcement to the phase two of the project.

So why are we going to Lobito? Why is the President going to Lobito? So, the Lobito Corridor really is anchored in the Lobito port itself, which is the gateway in and out of Africa for the critical minerals industry and now for agriculture.

The premise behind the corridor is to be able to take American support and financial capabilities that are admittedly limited and to focus them more deeply in one area versus spreading that financial support and effort across many countries. So, instead of a little bit of human and financial resource across the whole continent, choosing corridors where we can have the largest impact.

The Lobito Corridor was the test case for this approach, not just for Africa but globally, and has been a very successful proof point in that theory.

The rail is a refurbishment of a rail that goes from the Lobito port all the way to the border of the Democratic Republic of Congo and nearby the border of Zambia, and extends all the way to eastern Congo. This means that a cargo of cobalt or copper that takes about 45 days to get from eastern Congo or Zambia to the market by going through Durban, South Africa — by truck, it takes about 45 days. This will take somewhere in the 40 to 50 hours to go the same distance. That is a remarkable not only cut in time, but cut in cost and the ability to get to market, which will then serve to cut the cost, eventually, of batteries and EVS or chips, et cetera.

So that is the first piece of what the Lobito Corridor does.

The reason the mining industry is so important in this is because by booking capacity in this rail, it makes it more financeable, more commercial. Nothing in what is happening in the Lobito Corridor is aid. It is all about making things commercial, financeable, and for-profit so that they’re actually sustainable for a long period of time and has the ability to have maintenance on it and so on.

So, getting the critical minerals out is not only an objective to help the United States diversify the supply chain, but it also means that now higher-standard companies from around the world are coming back into the industry in Africa for the first time. So, for many years, the higher-value companies were leaving, and instead, the mining was being done by companies who perhaps have lower standards across — whether it’s labor, environment, transparency, corruption — and now you’re starting to see higher-end companies with a better set of standards. KoBold is a good example of that. There are others now that are in final negotiations to come back into countries that they left only recently.

But once we wanted to work on the corridor, the President wanted to make sure we weren’t doing this on one issue alone of critical minerals, but rather how do we use this to raise GDP and support for countries along the corridor. What you’ll see is, beyond the investment that I just discussed, like Africell and the others, laying fiber-optic cable in Angola and along the rail to expand Internet connectivity, faster connectivity across a larger swath of land.

Countries that are land-locked, like Zambia and DRC, to a large degree, have a hard time raising their ability to feed themselves and to bring products to not only international markets, but even to their neighbors.

So, the rail suddenly opens up the ability to deliver commodities and food stuffs and equipment into — all the way to eastern Congo and Zambia. Both countries, Zambia and DRC, have fresh water, have arable land, and yet are importers of food.

What you’ll see in this facility that the President is going to go to, where the roundtable is going to be Carrinho, is the company that has built silos for storage so that you can get food crops into cold storage so they can last longer, which means that he is able to go to farmers across Angola and say, “Anything that you can farm, I will purchase,” and then be able to deliver. That has reduced the dependency of Angola already on certain products from a 100 percent dependency on imports to near zero and expanding.

So we’re working with — the U.S. government with Carrinho. How do you expand that into the broader region, into Zambia, into DRC, so that along the rail, now, if you’re in Zambia and you have the Zambezi River that has an enormous amount of fresh water, and yet they are importing food — if the agriculture there can be developed from small farms to large farms, and be able to sell into this corridor, we’re not only expanding it for critical minerals, but suddenly this corridor is now solving food security concerns across the corridor.

So this is the overview of why the President has gone not only all the way to Angola, but all the way to Lobito. And it’s a major investment for the U.S. The PGI initiative that we’ve talked to you about before is an initiative that is the leader in this.

Under this presidency, we’ve already spent, in this corridor alone, nearly $4 billion, but that’s just U.S. There’s a lot of other participants in this. The EU is coming in. The Italian government has provided, I think, $320 million of investment. The Africa Finance Corporation, as well as the Africa Development Bank, are all part of this and growing.

So, this is going to be a multibillion-dollar investment in lasting infrastructure that will not only not only build up these businesses, but bring about a change in attitude that the President mentioned in his public remarks today of increasing the transparency, increasing the standards of labor, increasing the environmental protection standards, all that have been — really, this continent has suffered enormously from investments that have not cared about any of those things and has taken the resources out and left behind no better economies, no advanced communities.

And so, the idea behind this corridor is that it will ensure that it doesn’t only come to take resources, but rather build up GDP, build up communities, build up towns, and increase the level of economic development for the towns and the communities around these businesses, as well as the country as a whole, while not adding crushing debt terms the way they have with other investors.

I will stop there.

MODERATOR: Great. With that, we’ll take a few questions, and we’re hoping to keep it focused on the visit tomorrow.

Q So, as far as just the rail project in particular, the big kind of new financial commitment is the AFC announcement, right?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: So, DFC, we haven’t formally announced it; we’ve talked about the (inaudible). But DFC, the Development Finance Corporation in the United States, has approved a $553 million package. And I won’t speak to what the AFC will announce tomorrow. That’s up to them.

Q Gotcha. And is that specifically for phase two?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: That’s for phase two.

So what we did was the United States came in with phase one at $553 million, and that was good enough for the two European companies that are building the rail and operating it, in addition to us helping them get secured usage commitments of the rail. That’s at phase one. Once the world saw that we were serious about this, it sort of paved the way for everyone to be like, “Oh, this thing is actually for real.” And then they came in and supported, specifically after the President made a big push at the G7 last year that unlocked a lot of financing from others.

Q Can I just look forward to AGOA? What is the future of this rail corridor and AGOA? I know that’s up to Congress. But do you see that some of these countries that are eligible for AGOA — Zambia, Congo, and Angola — could expand their AGOA exports? And do you have a roadmap for that?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: I think there’s no doubt that should Congress expand AGOA, that this would be a benefit. I think the point here is that it would support these countries’ ability to increase their exports, and will allow them to be not only connected to global markets for exports, but actually to other African markets. So, there is a critical need for Africa to be connected not only to the world and to itself. And so, the President spoke about it today. We talk a lot about it in aviation, where sometimes you have to fly very far away to go to your neighboring country, but having the critical infrastructure.

So, hopefully AGOA can strengthen it. But this is not reliant on AGOA. AGOA will just be a increase in support for it.

Q Right. But AGOA is, like, value-added products, and this rail line is going to bring in, like, raw materials. Is this is going to give an opportunity for these countries to export value-added products?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: So I disagree with the premise that it’s for raw products. There is — right now, only raw product is coming out. But I think what this rail does — an increased — in order to get to higher-value products, you need a few things. One of them is affordable and reliable and abundant energy. So, the build-out of the energy system allows you to then build the value added.

And I fully expect — we are already discussing with companies that are looking — I can’t announce it for them, but I would assume in the next weeks and months you’ll see some of the companies, the mining companies and other service companies, building out infrastructure to create value added. So instead of just the raw material, you’ll be ultimately exporting something. Now, I can’t tell you how far up the chain it will be refined, but I think there’s a lot of refinement to be done here in Africa.

Q And on just the fi- — so the investment from the DFC, it’s $553 million?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Yes.

Q That’s what’s coming tomorrow?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: That is part of the — when we talk about the over $3 billion of support in Angola, and then I think nearly or over $4 billion in total for the Lobito Corridor, the President is going to announce tomorrow an additional $600 million in financing for projects for the broader Lobito Corridor, and that takes you above the
number that we had talked about today.

Q Got it. So, additional $600 million is what (inaudible).

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Yeah. But that’s not
just for rail. That’s for the broader — and not just in Angola; that’s for the broader corridor.

Q So that’s separate from the 553 (inaudible).

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Correct.

Q Yeah, I just want to make sure that they’re separate.

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: The $553 million is for the rail itself, a phase one rail in Angola. And then there are all kinds of things that we’re doing to support the broader corridor. Some of that’s what I talked about — Africell, Sun Africa, the feasibility study that we have to do for the phase two. Phase two is essentially building the entire rail system inside Zambia, which we are pretty far along on the planning of that. We expect shovels on the ground by the end of 2025 or early 2026. And there’s a lot of work that goes into identifying routes. Do a brand-new greenfield rail.

So the part from Angola all the way to east Congo is already being used. And then phase two is much more expansive, more ambitious. I should say there’s a phase three, which is then connecting it onwards all the way to Tanzania. That’s why the vice president of Tanzania is going to be here.

Q Okay, got it. And then, just wanted to — can you just talk about what this financing looks like going forward, with President-elect Trump coming in? And the dollars that have already been allocated to the project, can you kind of detail how it’s being spent, how much has been spent already? Like, I don’t know if you can kind of break that down.

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: So, I think the most important way to tie the two ends of your question is to say that the money that I’m referring to, most of it has gone through the process already. It’s been approved. The ones that require congressional notification have already been congressionally notified. They have finished their notification periods. They have not had any holds. There is broad bipartisan support for these projects.

And, look, at the end of the day, if you want to talk about living in an era of global competition, specifically with China, this Lobito Corridor is the heart of that. You can’t stand up and say I want to compete with China — not adversary, but compete with China — and not support what’s happening here, which is why I have every confi- — which is why it’s had bipartisan support already across Congress, and why I have every expectation that when the new administration comes in, they will — I don’t know how many things they will continue around the world, but I believe they will continue this project because it is good for American national security, it’s good for American economic security, and it builds on what a Republican-controlled Congress during the Trump administration, which is to build that, that created the DFC for this kind of purpose.

And we’ve had Republican staff, Republican members of Congress, senators who’ve been to Angola, DRC recently. These are members who’ve never traveled to Angola before, but this is why they’re coming here. So, I think there is quite a bit of support for this.

Q Sorry, just a clarifying question. The $553 million, that’s for phase one, not two?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Correct.

Q How long will this take? You said that the Tanzania point — I mean, shovels in the ground for part of it, starting in 2025.

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Zambia. Zambia.

Q Right. And then, the Tanzania is like the long goal. And right now, there’s a portion that’s already being used to east Congo.

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Right. This is all going to be in pieces. So, nothing is going to — this is not a “we wait until a big reveal and something all works.”

So we had a test cargo a couple months ago that went from east DRC all the way to Lobito. It doesn’t mean the rail is fully operational yet, but we wanted to see how it works. So that’s how I can tell you how many hours it takes, because we had that test cargo. That will, probably in the next year or so, will be — the work inside Angola will be complete, next year-ish. Right around that time is when the shovel is going to go in the ground in Zambia. Again, the feasibility study is now done, and now we have to do all the other project preparation, which, again, is expensive and takes time.

There’s already pieces of rail that exist if you go further east. So now it’s about, Patrick, how do you make sure that all the rails connect to each other. So you don’t have to build the whole way to Tanzania; you just have to build the spurs that interlink the rail that already exists all the way to the port in Tanzania. So, that will give you that — what the President said in his comments at the Slavery Museum — of connecting for the very first time a truly transcontinental (inaudible).

Q What’s the prediction for that, for it being (inaudible)?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: I don’t know. I think it’s hard for me to make that prediction. I think if all goes well, which construction projects sometimes do and sometimes don’t, I would say Zambia would then take probably two, three years to complete, and then — but some of the rest of the work could happen simultaneous, concurrently with the Zambia work. The Chinese are involved in a TAZARA section, which is they’re partnered with Zambia and Tanzania on part of that. And so that will connect into this. So we’ll have a lot of different pieces to this rail.

So my guess is, by the end of the decade, you can have a really fully functioning rail that goes coast to coast.

Q And do you hear frequently from these countries that you’ve been working with on the Lobito Corridor that they don’t have secure investments from their other investment partners? That’s been a big theme of what we’ve been hearing about. Without explicitly saying the names of the other partners, (inaudible) more reliable?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: I’m sorry, who are the other partners?

Q China and Russia. That the U.S. would be a more reliable investor. That’s what the U.S. is offering. Do you hear from these leaders that some of these other investments are falling short; that they need somebody to come in and be reliable?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: I think that the investment from the United States versus from others, it’s not about more or less, it’s about different. We hear a lot about others coming in with very large checks, build a lot of stuff, but that is with high interest rates on the debt, the terms are really difficult, and it doesn’t come with any of the commitments to their society.

And so, what you see happen — and again, the President mentioned in the speech today — 10 years, 5 years later, 10 years later, you go to a country, whether it’s here in Sub-Saharan Africa or in Southeast Asia or South Asia, or even Latin America — I mean, look what’s happened. The resource is gone, right? They’ve taken it out. But there’s — the debt in the early years is low interest rates, and then it expands with time. In some cases, it’s over 11 percent, which is crushing. And there’s no support for the local communities where these investments are.

Now, politicians today are wise enough to know that “my predecessor left me this debt and a community that is anti-investment,” because they’ve seen that their kids are working in these facilities, or they’re getting paid a dollar a day. They know their drinking water is worse because nobody is providing security into making sure that they’re not polluting all the waterways or moving rivers.

So what they’re looking for is a different kind of investment that guarantees the opposite of all those things. And what I hear from heads of state, you know, consistently, is, “I don’t want the other investments, but if I have to choose between a Chinese investment and no investment, I will choose a Chinese investment every day of the week, or the Russian.”

So if you give us a choice, we’ll be there. And what the President committed at the African Leaders Summit was to create a different offer, and that’s what he charged me with trying to implement, and that’s what he’s done. And that’s why President Lourenço said today in his opening comments to the President, “You lived up to your word. You gave us your word at the leaders conference, and you’ve actually lived up to it with what you’ve done.”

Q Can I follow up on something you just said, that the hope is that this will attract, like, higher-quality investments. But how — is there a mechanism in place to verify that the companies that will take part in this project, like actually have higher standards regarding, like, labor rights, environment, transparency, et cetera?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Yes, there is. I mean, the whole point of the U.S. participating in this is that part of the DFC or Ex-Im Bank or MCC or USAID, any of these organizations in the U.S. government, they vet the companies for that kind of action, and not just before they give the loan facilities or debt facilities, but rather during the project itself.

Second, with the fact that the U.S. government is saying we are effectively putting the American flag on these projects, we have a responsibility. And so, there’s a continued U.S. — you know, shining a light on these projects to make sure that it is done in the proper manner.

MODERATOR: We have time for just a couple more.

Q You know, I know this was supposed to come earlier, and the hurricane sort of derailed everything, but is there a fear that this is coming so late in the administration that even though this is, you know, good work that’s going to certainly have a lasting impact, that it’s going to be overshadowed by the President leaving office?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: I don’t think so at all. Look, the President was supposed to be here earlier, but I don’t think it makes any difference.

What’s being highlighted here, guys, is the — you know, we’re so used to the cynical of “government comes and we tout.” This is, like, literally, a transformative initiative for the United States that I think it’s not about whether the Trump administration is going to continue it, which I have very little doubt, but rather, I think this is the playbook for administrations to come.

There are a lot of things that we’ve done around the world. I mean, PEPFAR is, I think, George W. Bush, and we’re still talking about what a great initiative that was. Everybody thinks the DFC was a very good thing globally.

So, yes, from administration to administration, some things get carried on. So, I truly believe that this is something transformative.

But look at the politics of this. And I don’t want people to miss this: Nobody — when I came this morning to the palace, before the arrival ceremony, the ministers that I was talking to, the one thing that every single one of them separately said to me, “What we’ve been talking about is that no one in this country, at our age, would have believed that the United States would be here, the president of the United States would be here,” based on the relationship that we once had. We weren’t just on the other side of the Cold War. We were very much on the other side of the Cold War. During a civil war here then, we were sort of a player.

Q It was like a hot war with Cuba, a proxy war.

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Yes. This was basically a proxy hot war with the Soviet Union.

So to go from that — and, by the way, that — yes, we recognize, you know, reestablished relations in 1993. But when I came here, you know, and started talking to the Angolan government just three, four years ago, the relationship was not this. Today, this is one of our strongest relationships in all of Sub-Saharan Africa. It’s one of our best friends. President Lourenço has been one of our truest allies. That is unimaginable (inaudible). It didn’t happen because we decided to go the usual route of aid. It happened — or political promises. It happened because they could see that we were making promises and we were keeping them at every step of the way.

The fact that we made over $3 billion of investments here that are meaningful investments to people in this country is what drove it.

And so, the blueprint here is: If you get more — with aid, you get a certain amount; you’ve done the right thing. You should continue to do it. But the investment strategy that many presidents have talked about trying to — how do you go from aid to trade, we’ve heard that from many presidents. But the ability to actually do it is so different. And that’s why I don’t take the cynical view of, “Oh, it’s the end of the administration, didn’t have to come, it’s not going to matter.” On the contrary. The one thing that I hear from Republicans consistently since the election is, “Can you talk to us more about this? How do we continue this?” People asking for what kind of jobs they need to create for this and so on.

So it’s not just my hard-to-hide enthusiasm for this project, but it is that I truly believe that this is a blueprint for the future.

And, by the way, we’ve copied this in other parts of the world. When was the last time we took something we did in Africa and then copied it elsewhere? We created a corridor in the Philippines that is entirely — together with Japan — just with — you know, the Luzon Corridor — just based on this.

And I think if we had more time — I think we’re trying to do the same thing in East Africa, in Liberia and in Ghana, building out data centers. I mean, that’s the competition with China. It’s not getting China — by the way, it’s not about getting China out of Africa. On the contrary. I would love China to invest more. But hopefully, when countries say, “Wait a minute, I can go to the United States and there’ll be no child labor, they’ll get higher wages, more investment in my country, and I won’t have crushing debt,” and tell the Chinese, “If you want to compete, give me a better offer.”

And so China, then, is investing in Africa at higher standards. Great. We’re not going to close the infrastructure gap in Africa with the United States and the G7 alone. I can promise you that. So having China here would be great, but not the way they’ve been doing business (inaudible).

Q Just one quick one. Has there been any progress in finding a buyer for that Congolese mine that was being sold to a Chinese buyer?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Chemaf?

Q Yes.

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: So, one, they announced that — there was some announcement that it was sold, and then there was an announcement, “No, we didn’t sell it.” I think that the Congolese — you’d have to ask them, but they would like to make sure that their industry and their economy is diversified. They are having discussions with other companies. So it’s really not my place to speak for them.

MODERATOR: Thank you all. Thank you very much.

The post Background Press Gaggle by a Senior Administration Official on the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor appeared first on The White House.

Today, the United States and Angola are co-hosting a Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGI) Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor Summit, bringing together leaders from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Tanzania, and Zambia, as well as the Africa Finance Corporation (AFC).  The leaders will affirm their commitment to continue developing the Corridor and invest in infrastructure to connect the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.  They will further pledge to accelerate the next phase of the Corridor with the new Zambia-Lobito rail project.  The Summit will underscore the importance of enabling sustainable private sector investments that unlock inclusive economic growth and sustainable development for local and regional communities.
 
Through PGI—a bipartisan initiative in partnership with G7+, for strategic, values-driven, and high-standard infrastructure and investment in low- and middle-income countries—the United States and our partners aim to positively impact people’s lives, strengthen and diversify our supply chains, protect workers, and advance shared national security interests.  The flagship Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor, anchored in core rail investments, is a transformative economic corridor that connects the region and accelerates trade and the growth of key sectors supporting the economic diversification and development priorities of African leaders.  The United States is working with partners around the world to replicate the success of the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor and help bridge the global infrastructure gap.
 
In September 2024, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the completion of an initial feasibility study and launch of the environmental and social impact assessment for the Zambia-Lobito rail project, a greenfield 800-kilometer rail line being built from scratch linking Angola and Zambia for the first time.  Together, these studies ensure the project is economically and financially viable and will be delivered following international best practices on labor, community participation, and environmental protection.  AFC, Angola, and Zambia also celebrated the signing of the concession agreement, which allows the next phase of development to continue.  The target date to break ground is early 2026.
 
Today, President Biden is announcing $600 million in new funding for infrastructure projects along the Corridor, bringing the total for U.S. investments to more than $4 billion. With these announcements and together with G7 partners and regional development banks, international investment in the Lobito Corridor has exceeded $6 billion. These investments will be  mobilized towards new and continuing projects that support the economic potential and development impacts of the Corridor across multiple interconnected sectors, including transportation and logistics, agriculture, clean energy and associated supply chains, health, and digital access.
 
Transportation and Logistics
 
Rail and other transportation and logistics-related infrastructure forms the backbone of the Corridor and will enable expanded trade and business growth.  While these investments are traditionally public-sector investments, the United States through PGI is supporting commercially driven projects that lock-in efficiency and sustainable maintenance over the long-term.
 

• Following the due diligence announced by President Biden in May 2023, the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) is announcing the commitment of a $553 million direct loan to the Lobito Atlantic Railway to upgrade and operate a 1,300-kilometer rail line from the Lobito port to the Angolan town of Luau on the DRC border.  This investment supports the anchor rail investment of the first phase of the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor and is the backbone on which additional high-quality investments in agriculture, healthcare, energy, and financial services will be built.  The Lobito Atlantic Railway’s operational improvements have already scaled up the number of freight shipments from once per month to two times per week.

• The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Angolan Ministry of Transportation are signing a MOU to support new personnel and IT equipment, with the aim of helping the Ministry leverage private investment in Angola’s infrastructure and development.  This followed the approximately $1 million grant announced earlier in 2024 by the USAID to assist the Ministry.

• The anchor rail line of the second phase of the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor, the new Zambia-Lobito rail project, was launched in October 2023, with the AFC as the lead project developer.  Building on AFC’s initial $5 million for feasibility studies and project development, AFC is announcing its commitment to anchor and mobilize up to $500 million through various financial instruments to ensure the project reaches financial close, in line with its prior track record.  The announcement complements a technical assistance grant the U.S. Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) awarded to AFC in September 2024 for an environmental and social impact assessment to facilitate this effort and to move the project towards financial close.

• In October 2024, KoBold Metals, a U.S. company applying artificial intelligence to develop a critical minerals site in Zambia, signed Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with AFC committing to anchor the commercial viability of the Zambia-Lobito rail project with more than 300,000 tons of copper per year from its Mingoma mine.  AFC will collaborate with KoBold to support the Mingomba project, through a combination of project development funding, equity, or debt financing as required.

• AFC signed MOUs this month totaling an additional 170,000 tons of minimum freight commitments from Zambian mining projects including from Kobaloni Energy, which is planning to construct the first cobalt sulphate refinery on the African continent, and First Quantum Minerals, one of the world’s top ten copper producers.  These commitments will help the new Zambia-Lobito rail project raise capital at a lower cost.  The MOUs also represent start of creating a diversified supply chain route for the critical minerals that support the global energy transition.

• Since 1995, the United States has provided over $164 million for humanitarian demining in Angola.  This lifesaving assistance plays a critical role in bolstering human security, providing safe access to land for economic development, and facilitating environmental conservation in the Okavango River Basin. The U.S. Department of State announced a total of $9 million in de-mining assistance over the next two years that will facilitate rail construction along the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor, as well as other economic development goals across Angola, as part of a multi-year campaign for Angola to achieve mine-free status.  With a $10 million match from the Government of Angola, implementing partners will be able to clear the mines left from Angola’s decades-long civil war, enabling the land to be recultivated for farming and other uses.

• In December 2023, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) Board of Directors selected Tanzania to develop a threshold program.  MCC and the Government of Tanzania are now developing a trade and investment program to facilitate trade between Tanzania and its neighbors and address trade barriers.  The program is scheduled to launch in late 2025 and builds on MCC’s more than $700 million in prior investments in governance, transportation, energy, and water in Tanzania.

 
Agriculture

In support of U.S. efforts to accelerate agricultural-led economic growth in Angola and our partners across the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor, the United States is investing in value-added food processing and connecting farmers to global markets.  These investments also deliver on President Biden’s commitment under the U.S.-Africa Partnership to Promote Food Security and Resilient Food Systems, to step up our investments to build more resilient food systems in Africa and to unlock Africa’s enormous agriculture production potential.
 

• Today, President Biden will meet with businesses that are investing in the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor enabled by U.S. support.  He will visit the Lobito production facilities of the Carrinho Group, Angola’s largest food producer, which is rapidly expanding the network of family farmers from whom it sources raw produce for products sold across the country.  President Biden will celebrate the first shipment of Carrinho food products along the Lobito Atlantic Railway line to be sold in the DRC, supporting regional food security.  To enhance agriculture expansion, USAID has partnered with Carrinho through an existing $5.5 million program and public-private partnership focused on women’s empowerment, to facilitate the offtake of grain and crops grown by communities along the Corridor.  In November 2024, DFC signed a non-binding Letter of Interest to explore a loan that would support Carrinho to purchase and install grain storage equipment to reach more farmers along the rail Corridor and key hubs.  Complementing these investments is the previously announced Export-Import Bank of the United States (EXIM) financing to build 186 rural bridges.  This financing will further support thousands of smallholder farmers to participate in this sustainable agriculture value-chain as Carrinho grows its farmer network to two million farmers by 2030.

• The African Development Bank is announcing its intention to finance $370 million across three agriculture projects facilitating regional trade and food security and promoting sustainable commercial agriculture value chains.  These projects are expected to mobilize an additional $100 million in private sector capital and will enhance food security, promote the economic inclusion of local communities, including small- and medium-sized enterprises, and create jobs in agriculture and other sectors along the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor.  To accelerate implementation, the U.S. Department of the Treasury will make a $3 million commitment to the Bank to support project preparation and feasibility work.  This complements the Bank’s November 2023 $500 million commitment to invest in the Zambia-Lobito rail project, and adds to the $289 million agricultural value chain and transport infrastructure project in the DRC it financed in July 2024.  This brings the Bank’s total investment in the Corridor to more than $1 billion over the past 12 months.

• In October 2024, a U.S. consortium led by Amer-Con Corporation signed an MOU with ARCCLA, the Angolan public entity within the Ministry of Transportation responsible for the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor, to build and operate silo terminals and collection points on planned logistics platforms along the Corridor and nationwide.  The project will focus on staple crops such as corn, rice, soybean, and wheat.  This project will boost local production, enhance food security and stimulate economic growth as part of the National Network of Grain Silos strategy, which aims to achieve a 2.2-million-ton storage capacity and reduce post-harvest losses.

• In fiscal year 2024, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) committed nearly $300 million that will use U.S. commodities to help strengthen food security across Africa.  These programs provide critical school meals and literacy programming and are facilitating agricultural economic development in nine African countries, including Angola, and Tanzania.  In Angola, USDA will work with World Vision through a $27.5 million McGovern-Dole agreement to provide school meals for more than 80,000 beneficiaries in three provinces.  The project will provide more than 5,000 metric tons in nutritious U.S. commodities and more than 4,000 metric tons of locally procured fruits and vegetables to support the school meals and literacy programming in eight municipalities across the Benguela, Cunene, and Huila provinces.  In Tanzania, USDA will work with Lutheran World Relief through a more than $35 million Food for Progress agreement to support food security for 30,000 beneficiaries through the implementation of climate smart agricultural practices in the poultry sector for smallholder farmers.

• In October 2024, the MCC signed a $458 million compact program with Zambia focused on catalyzing inclusive economic growth in the agriculture and agro-processing sectors.  The program, which includes an additional $33 million contribution from the Government of Zambia, aims to lower the cost of transporting farm products and processed goods to markets, increase the availability of equipment for small and medium farmers and processors, increase financing for infrastructure projects that support agriculture, and catalyze reforms in the agriculture sector to attract greater private investment.  The compact will build on MCC’s $378 million in prior investments in Zambia to remove barriers to trade and improve water infrastructure, distribution, and reforms.

• In September 2024, DFC committed a $5 million loan to Community Markets for Conservation Limited in Zambia to expand its food processing business to support the adoption of sustainable, conservation-based practices in rural Zambia.  This builds on DFC’s $10 million loan to Seba Foods Zambia Ltd., which was announced at the PGI Lusaka Investment Forum in February 2024.  DFC also reached a commitment on a $6 million USAID-sponsored loan portfolio guarantee for Angolan company Kixicrédito S.A. that will support lending to micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises targeting the agriculture sector, including firms along the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor.

 
Clean Energy 
 
Africa has approximately 39 percent of the world’s renewable energy potential.  The United States is committed to supporting the growing energy needs of people and businesses across the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor with renewable sources that power communities and industry.
 

• The United States supports Angola’s objective to generate 73 percent of its energy from clean sources by 2027 as well as current and anticipated energy needs across the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor as new companies and sectors develop.  Through PGI, the Department of State is providing technical assistance to strengthen the Angolan government’s capacity to meet national energy goals, reduce greenhouse gases, and expand access to electricity.

• In Angola, U.S. company Sun Africa, is part of a historic EXIM financing commitment of over $2.4 billion connecting a million Angolans to clean electricity.  This second phase of the project includes an additional 320 megawatts from distributed minigrid systems across four southern provinces alongside clean drinking water projects.  Sun Africa is receiving support from Power Africa, and has received support from a number of Power Africa interagency partners, including USAID, the Department of Commerce, the State Department, and EXIM.

• Through USAID’s Empower Southern Africa program under Power Africa, the United States plans to enter a formal partnership with the Angolan National Transmission Company to realize important cross-border and domestic transmission lines that will help integrate Angola into the Southern and Central Africa Power Pools and supply electricity to the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor. USAID is launching a new $1.5 million grant from the Power Africa Opportunity Fund to provide solar powered irrigation and refrigeration equipment to support farming communities along the Corridor.

• In September 2024, DFC committed a $40 million liquidity facility to Africa GreenCo, a company operating in Zambia that is expanding renewable energy access.  Africa GreenCo procures renewable electricity through power purchase agreements from independent power producers to sell on the Southern African Power Pool, to both public utilities and private sector buyers.  DFC’s support will help provide a credit enhancement to Africa GreenCo, enabling it to establish a track record as an energy aggregator and trader.

• To accelerate private investment in African infrastructure projects, and in the Lobito Corridor in particular, the U.S. Department of the Treasury will make a $4.2 million contribution to the Alliance for Green Infrastructure in Africa (AGIA) via the African Development Bank, one of the partners collaborating on the development of the Lobito Corridor.  AGIA aims to mobilize private capital at a rate of 20 times donor contributions, meaning that our contribution should catalyze approximately $100 million to build quality, sustainable infrastructure projects.

 
Critical Minerals Supply Chains 
 
Africa will play a central role in the global energy transition and the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor is rich in the critical minerals that will power the 21stcentury.  The United States is committed to ensuring reliable supply chains by supporting the development of this sector with environmentally respectful processing so more of the value is captured on the continent.
 

• Through the Kabanga Nickel project, LifeZone Metals Ltd., a company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, is investing in bringing critical mineral value addition to Tanzania.  Their support of the development of the Kahama special economic zone, which will include a first of its kind nickel processing facility in the region, can serve as a hub and training center for Tanzanians working across the clean the energy supply chain.  In August 2024, DFC signed a retainer letter with Kabanga Nickel Limited, a subsidiary of Lifezone Metals Ltd., to begin due diligence on political risk insurance to support the Kabanga Nickel underground nickel-copper-cobalt mine site and the Kahama Hydromet refinery site.  In September 2024, DFC also signed a non-binding letter of interest with Kabanga Nickel Limited expressing DFC’s interest in considering a potential direct loan to support the project.

• The United States and Angola are collaborating on principled investments to advance critical minerals projects along the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor through technical assistance to prepare new operations to secure future debt or equity financing.  During the June 2024 U.S.-Angola Energy Security Dialogue, the Department of State and Angola agreed to elevate our critical mineral partnership.  In September 2024, Pensana PLC received a $3.4 million grant from DFC to fund a feasibility study to double the capacity of its Longonio rare earths mine, design in-country refining capacity, and conduct test work on new ore bodies.  It also includes a $3.2 million DFC technical assistance grant to Chillerton to support the development of a green copper mining project in Zambia.

• USAID, the State Department, and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is announcing $2 million in technical assistance for responsible development and management of Angola’s mining sector.  In November 2023, USGS and the Angolan Geological Institute (IGEO) signed an MOU to enhance scientific collaboration.  This partnership will foster transparency and attract principled investment in Angola’s mineral sector through a three-year program to analyze and interpret newly acquired geoscience data to document Angola’s critical mineral potential while building capacity within the IGEO.

 
Health 
 
The United States is committed to expanding access to health care and strengthening health security, including through PGI investments in health-related infrastructure in the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor.
 

• The United States and Angola are working together to help accelerate development progress in Angola, including by mobilizing critical investments in Angola’s health infrastructure under PGI.  To support the Angolan government’s priorities in a fiscally responsible manner, DFC has committed to providing up to $150 million in political risk insurance for new water treatment plants to expand access to potable water to underserved communities in southern Angola.  This will further expand DFC’s portfolio of investments in Angola – more than $700 million in commitments – all of which have been committed during the Biden-Harris Administration.

 
Digital Access
 
Access to high-speed internet and associated digital resources helps fuel technological and economic innovation in Africa.  The United States is committed to connecting citizens and businesses across the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor with highly reliable and trusted vendor technology.
 

• In alignment with the Digital Transformation with Africa initiative, the United States is investing in Angola’s digital architecture, supporting reliable telecommunication networks—using trusted vendors—that will benefit the Angolan people and improve Angola’s digital connectivity to the global economy.  EXIM announced a non-binding, preliminary board commitment to provide $100 million financing for U.S.-owned telecommunications company Africell to expand its high quality, reliable, and affordable wireless cell service to all corners of Angola and upgrade equipment in the DRC with trusted vendor technology.  This builds on USAID’s 2023 launch of a nearly $5 million “Dinheiro Digital é Melhor” or “Mobile Money is Better” project with Africell to spur the development of a vibrant and secure mobile money and digital finance ecosystem in Angola.  USAID and partners are connecting approximately 12,000 new mobile phone users to the Afrimoney platform per month, with 240,000 new users joining in 2024.  In combination with financial literacy training and policy engagement with Angola’s government, USAID and partners are breaking down barriers and reaching those previously excluded from the formal financial system.

• To date, USTDA has provided $13.2 million in funding to prepare digital, transportation, and clean energy projects that will help develop the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor.  These activities are designed to help unlock several billion dollars in financing and deploy innovative U.S. technologies for the Trans-Africa Corridor’s implementation.

• In November 2024, USTDA awarded a feasibility study grant to Javilian Civils (Proprietary) Limited to support the deployment of terrestrial fiber and access infrastructure connecting inland locations in Central and Southern Africa with subsea cables along the Atlantic Coast.  The project will ultimately increase internet connectivity in Angola, the DRC, and Namibia.

• In April 2024, the U.S. Department of Commerce led a large whole-of-government delegation to the NewSpace Africa Conference held in Angola, representing a growing US interest in space-related cooperation and trade, and in engaging African nations in development of norms for satellite operations.  Part of the Commerce Department, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration offers a wide range of free, open source data, information, and tools that are available to help businesses, communities, and nations address climate adaptation and mitigation, sea-level rise, flooding, coral reef monitoring, and space weather, including a range of early-warning systems for weather, climate, and hydrological disasters.

 
Investment 
 
PGI leverages public funds to unlock private capital investment.  In the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor, the United States is supporting sustainable economic growth by helping secure investment for firms across many sectors and sizes.

• In September 2024, DFC committed a $13 million equity investment in the African Rivers Fund IV, which will support small and medium-sized businesses in frontier markets in Central and Southern Africa, including Angola, the DRC, and Zambia.

• To promote U.S. investment in Angola, the DRC, and Zambia, Prosper Africa is providing roughly $600,000 of transaction advisory services to firms along the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor.  These services aim to connect local firms, accelerate economic progress, and increase local and regional involvement in the growing economy around the Corridor.

• Through the United States’ Economic Resilience Initiative, USAID will help advance the economic opportunities presented by the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor for inclusive growth.  Working with Congress, $4.5 million will support workforce development that matches private sector needs and the industrialization of agricultural inputs and outputs for regional export markets along the Corridor.

 
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The post FACT SHEET: Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment in the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor appeared first on The White House.

Today, the United States and Angola are co-hosting a Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGI) Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor Summit, bringing together leaders from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Tanzania, and Zambia, as well as the Africa Finance Corporation (AFC).  The leaders will affirm their commitment to continue developing the Corridor and invest in infrastructure to connect the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.  They will further pledge to accelerate the next phase of the Corridor with the new Zambia-Lobito rail project.  The Summit will underscore the importance of enabling sustainable private sector investments that unlock inclusive economic growth and sustainable development for local and regional communities.
 
Through PGI—a bipartisan initiative in partnership with G7+, for strategic, values-driven, and high-standard infrastructure and investment in low- and middle-income countries—the United States and our partners aim to positively impact people’s lives, strengthen and diversify our supply chains, protect workers, and advance shared national security interests.  The flagship Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor, anchored in core rail investments, is a transformative economic corridor that connects the region and accelerates trade and the growth of key sectors supporting the economic diversification and development priorities of African leaders.  The United States is working with partners around the world to replicate the success of the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor and help bridge the global infrastructure gap.
 
In September 2024, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the completion of an initial feasibility study and launch of the environmental and social impact assessment for the Zambia-Lobito rail project, a greenfield 800-kilometer rail line being built from scratch linking Angola and Zambia for the first time.  Together, these studies ensure the project is economically and financially viable and will be delivered following international best practices on labor, community participation, and environmental protection.  AFC, Angola, and Zambia also celebrated the signing of the concession agreement, which allows the next phase of development to continue.  The target date to break ground is early 2026.
 
Today, President Biden is announcing $600 million in new funding for infrastructure projects along the Corridor, bringing the total for U.S. investments to more than $4 billion. With these announcements and together with G7 partners and regional development banks, international investment in the Lobito Corridor has exceeded $6 billion. These investments will be  mobilized towards new and continuing projects that support the economic potential and development impacts of the Corridor across multiple interconnected sectors, including transportation and logistics, agriculture, clean energy and associated supply chains, health, and digital access.
 
Transportation and Logistics
 
Rail and other transportation and logistics-related infrastructure forms the backbone of the Corridor and will enable expanded trade and business growth.  While these investments are traditionally public-sector investments, the United States through PGI is supporting commercially driven projects that lock-in efficiency and sustainable maintenance over the long-term.
 

• Following the due diligence announced by President Biden in May 2023, the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) is announcing the commitment of a $553 million direct loan to the Lobito Atlantic Railway to upgrade and operate a 1,300-kilometer rail line from the Lobito port to the Angolan town of Luau on the DRC border.  This investment supports the anchor rail investment of the first phase of the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor and is the backbone on which additional high-quality investments in agriculture, healthcare, energy, and financial services will be built.  The Lobito Atlantic Railway’s operational improvements have already scaled up the number of freight shipments from once per month to two times per week.

• The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Angolan Ministry of Transportation are signing a MOU to support new personnel and IT equipment, with the aim of helping the Ministry leverage private investment in Angola’s infrastructure and development.  This followed the approximately $1 million grant announced earlier in 2024 by the USAID to assist the Ministry.

• The anchor rail line of the second phase of the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor, the new Zambia-Lobito rail project, was launched in October 2023, with the AFC as the lead project developer.  Building on AFC’s initial $5 million for feasibility studies and project development, AFC is announcing its commitment to anchor and mobilize up to $500 million through various financial instruments to ensure the project reaches financial close, in line with its prior track record.  The announcement complements a technical assistance grant the U.S. Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) awarded to AFC in September 2024 for an environmental and social impact assessment to facilitate this effort and to move the project towards financial close.

• In October 2024, KoBold Metals, a U.S. company applying artificial intelligence to develop a critical minerals site in Zambia, signed Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with AFC committing to anchor the commercial viability of the Zambia-Lobito rail project with more than 300,000 tons of copper per year from its Mingoma mine.  AFC will collaborate with KoBold to support the Mingomba project, through a combination of project development funding, equity, or debt financing as required.

• AFC signed MOUs this month totaling an additional 170,000 tons of minimum freight commitments from Zambian mining projects including from Kobaloni Energy, which is planning to construct the first cobalt sulphate refinery on the African continent, and First Quantum Minerals, one of the world’s top ten copper producers.  These commitments will help the new Zambia-Lobito rail project raise capital at a lower cost.  The MOUs also represent start of creating a diversified supply chain route for the critical minerals that support the global energy transition.

• Since 1995, the United States has provided over $164 million for humanitarian demining in Angola.  This lifesaving assistance plays a critical role in bolstering human security, providing safe access to land for economic development, and facilitating environmental conservation in the Okavango River Basin. The U.S. Department of State announced a total of $9 million in de-mining assistance over the next two years that will facilitate rail construction along the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor, as well as other economic development goals across Angola, as part of a multi-year campaign for Angola to achieve mine-free status.  With a $10 million match from the Government of Angola, implementing partners will be able to clear the mines left from Angola’s decades-long civil war, enabling the land to be recultivated for farming and other uses.

• In December 2023, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) Board of Directors selected Tanzania to develop a threshold program.  MCC and the Government of Tanzania are now developing a trade and investment program to facilitate trade between Tanzania and its neighbors and address trade barriers.  The program is scheduled to launch in late 2025 and builds on MCC’s more than $700 million in prior investments in governance, transportation, energy, and water in Tanzania.

 
Agriculture

In support of U.S. efforts to accelerate agricultural-led economic growth in Angola and our partners across the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor, the United States is investing in value-added food processing and connecting farmers to global markets.  These investments also deliver on President Biden’s commitment under the U.S.-Africa Partnership to Promote Food Security and Resilient Food Systems, to step up our investments to build more resilient food systems in Africa and to unlock Africa’s enormous agriculture production potential.
 

• Today, President Biden will meet with businesses that are investing in the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor enabled by U.S. support.  He will visit the Lobito production facilities of the Carrinho Group, Angola’s largest food producer, which is rapidly expanding the network of family farmers from whom it sources raw produce for products sold across the country.  President Biden will celebrate the first shipment of Carrinho food products along the Lobito Atlantic Railway line to be sold in the DRC, supporting regional food security.  To enhance agriculture expansion, USAID has partnered with Carrinho through an existing $5.5 million program and public-private partnership focused on women’s empowerment, to facilitate the offtake of grain and crops grown by communities along the Corridor.  In November 2024, DFC signed a non-binding Letter of Interest to explore a loan that would support Carrinho to purchase and install grain storage equipment to reach more farmers along the rail Corridor and key hubs.  Complementing these investments is the previously announced Export-Import Bank of the United States (EXIM) financing to build 186 rural bridges.  This financing will further support thousands of smallholder farmers to participate in this sustainable agriculture value-chain as Carrinho grows its farmer network to two million farmers by 2030.

• The African Development Bank is announcing its intention to finance $370 million across three agriculture projects facilitating regional trade and food security and promoting sustainable commercial agriculture value chains.  These projects are expected to mobilize an additional $100 million in private sector capital and will enhance food security, promote the economic inclusion of local communities, including small- and medium-sized enterprises, and create jobs in agriculture and other sectors along the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor.  To accelerate implementation, the U.S. Department of the Treasury will make a $3 million commitment to the Bank to support project preparation and feasibility work.  This complements the Bank’s November 2023 $500 million commitment to invest in the Zambia-Lobito rail project, and adds to the $289 million agricultural value chain and transport infrastructure project in the DRC it financed in July 2024.  This brings the Bank’s total investment in the Corridor to more than $1 billion over the past 12 months.

• In October 2024, a U.S. consortium led by Amer-Con Corporation signed an MOU with ARCCLA, the Angolan public entity within the Ministry of Transportation responsible for the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor, to build and operate silo terminals and collection points on planned logistics platforms along the Corridor and nationwide.  The project will focus on staple crops such as corn, rice, soybean, and wheat.  This project will boost local production, enhance food security and stimulate economic growth as part of the National Network of Grain Silos strategy, which aims to achieve a 2.2-million-ton storage capacity and reduce post-harvest losses.

• In fiscal year 2024, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) committed nearly $300 million that will use U.S. commodities to help strengthen food security across Africa.  These programs provide critical school meals and literacy programming and are facilitating agricultural economic development in nine African countries, including Angola, and Tanzania.  In Angola, USDA will work with World Vision through a $27.5 million McGovern-Dole agreement to provide school meals for more than 80,000 beneficiaries in three provinces.  The project will provide more than 5,000 metric tons in nutritious U.S. commodities and more than 4,000 metric tons of locally procured fruits and vegetables to support the school meals and literacy programming in eight municipalities across the Benguela, Cunene, and Huila provinces.  In Tanzania, USDA will work with Lutheran World Relief through a more than $35 million Food for Progress agreement to support food security for 30,000 beneficiaries through the implementation of climate smart agricultural practices in the poultry sector for smallholder farmers.

• In October 2024, the MCC signed a $458 million compact program with Zambia focused on catalyzing inclusive economic growth in the agriculture and agro-processing sectors.  The program, which includes an additional $33 million contribution from the Government of Zambia, aims to lower the cost of transporting farm products and processed goods to markets, increase the availability of equipment for small and medium farmers and processors, increase financing for infrastructure projects that support agriculture, and catalyze reforms in the agriculture sector to attract greater private investment.  The compact will build on MCC’s $378 million in prior investments in Zambia to remove barriers to trade and improve water infrastructure, distribution, and reforms.

• In September 2024, DFC committed a $5 million loan to Community Markets for Conservation Limited in Zambia to expand its food processing business to support the adoption of sustainable, conservation-based practices in rural Zambia.  This builds on DFC’s $10 million loan to Seba Foods Zambia Ltd., which was announced at the PGI Lusaka Investment Forum in February 2024.  DFC also reached a commitment on a $6 million USAID-sponsored loan portfolio guarantee for Angolan company Kixicrédito S.A. that will support lending to micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises targeting the agriculture sector, including firms along the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor.

 
Clean Energy 
 
Africa has approximately 39 percent of the world’s renewable energy potential.  The United States is committed to supporting the growing energy needs of people and businesses across the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor with renewable sources that power communities and industry.
 

• The United States supports Angola’s objective to generate 73 percent of its energy from clean sources by 2027 as well as current and anticipated energy needs across the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor as new companies and sectors develop.  Through PGI, the Department of State is providing technical assistance to strengthen the Angolan government’s capacity to meet national energy goals, reduce greenhouse gases, and expand access to electricity.

• In Angola, U.S. company Sun Africa, is part of a historic EXIM financing commitment of over $2.4 billion connecting a million Angolans to clean electricity.  This second phase of the project includes an additional 320 megawatts from distributed minigrid systems across four southern provinces alongside clean drinking water projects.  Sun Africa is receiving support from Power Africa, and has received support from a number of Power Africa interagency partners, including USAID, the Department of Commerce, the State Department, and EXIM.

• Through USAID’s Empower Southern Africa program under Power Africa, the United States plans to enter a formal partnership with the Angolan National Transmission Company to realize important cross-border and domestic transmission lines that will help integrate Angola into the Southern and Central Africa Power Pools and supply electricity to the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor. USAID is launching a new $1.5 million grant from the Power Africa Opportunity Fund to provide solar powered irrigation and refrigeration equipment to support farming communities along the Corridor.

• In September 2024, DFC committed a $40 million liquidity facility to Africa GreenCo, a company operating in Zambia that is expanding renewable energy access.  Africa GreenCo procures renewable electricity through power purchase agreements from independent power producers to sell on the Southern African Power Pool, to both public utilities and private sector buyers.  DFC’s support will help provide a credit enhancement to Africa GreenCo, enabling it to establish a track record as an energy aggregator and trader.

• To accelerate private investment in African infrastructure projects, and in the Lobito Corridor in particular, the U.S. Department of the Treasury will make a $4.2 million contribution to the Alliance for Green Infrastructure in Africa (AGIA) via the African Development Bank, one of the partners collaborating on the development of the Lobito Corridor.  AGIA aims to mobilize private capital at a rate of 20 times donor contributions, meaning that our contribution should catalyze approximately $100 million to build quality, sustainable infrastructure projects.

 
Critical Minerals Supply Chains 
 
Africa will play a central role in the global energy transition and the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor is rich in the critical minerals that will power the 21stcentury.  The United States is committed to ensuring reliable supply chains by supporting the development of this sector with environmentally respectful processing so more of the value is captured on the continent.
 

• Through the Kabanga Nickel project, LifeZone Metals Ltd., a company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, is investing in bringing critical mineral value addition to Tanzania.  Their support of the development of the Kahama special economic zone, which will include a first of its kind nickel processing facility in the region, can serve as a hub and training center for Tanzanians working across the clean the energy supply chain.  In August 2024, DFC signed a retainer letter with Kabanga Nickel Limited, a subsidiary of Lifezone Metals Ltd., to begin due diligence on political risk insurance to support the Kabanga Nickel underground nickel-copper-cobalt mine site and the Kahama Hydromet refinery site.  In September 2024, DFC also signed a non-binding letter of interest with Kabanga Nickel Limited expressing DFC’s interest in considering a potential direct loan to support the project.

• The United States and Angola are collaborating on principled investments to advance critical minerals projects along the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor through technical assistance to prepare new operations to secure future debt or equity financing.  During the June 2024 U.S.-Angola Energy Security Dialogue, the Department of State and Angola agreed to elevate our critical mineral partnership.  In September 2024, Pensana PLC received a $3.4 million grant from DFC to fund a feasibility study to double the capacity of its Longonio rare earths mine, design in-country refining capacity, and conduct test work on new ore bodies.  It also includes a $3.2 million DFC technical assistance grant to Chillerton to support the development of a green copper mining project in Zambia.

• USAID, the State Department, and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is announcing $2 million in technical assistance for responsible development and management of Angola’s mining sector.  In November 2023, USGS and the Angolan Geological Institute (IGEO) signed an MOU to enhance scientific collaboration.  This partnership will foster transparency and attract principled investment in Angola’s mineral sector through a three-year program to analyze and interpret newly acquired geoscience data to document Angola’s critical mineral potential while building capacity within the IGEO.

 
Health 
 
The United States is committed to expanding access to health care and strengthening health security, including through PGI investments in health-related infrastructure in the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor.
 

• The United States and Angola are working together to help accelerate development progress in Angola, including by mobilizing critical investments in Angola’s health infrastructure under PGI.  To support the Angolan government’s priorities in a fiscally responsible manner, DFC has committed to providing up to $150 million in political risk insurance for new water treatment plants to expand access to potable water to underserved communities in southern Angola.  This will further expand DFC’s portfolio of investments in Angola – more than $700 million in commitments – all of which have been committed during the Biden-Harris Administration.

 
Digital Access
 
Access to high-speed internet and associated digital resources helps fuel technological and economic innovation in Africa.  The United States is committed to connecting citizens and businesses across the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor with highly reliable and trusted vendor technology.
 

• In alignment with the Digital Transformation with Africa initiative, the United States is investing in Angola’s digital architecture, supporting reliable telecommunication networks—using trusted vendors—that will benefit the Angolan people and improve Angola’s digital connectivity to the global economy.  EXIM announced a non-binding, preliminary board commitment to provide $100 million financing for U.S.-owned telecommunications company Africell to expand its high quality, reliable, and affordable wireless cell service to all corners of Angola and upgrade equipment in the DRC with trusted vendor technology.  This builds on USAID’s 2023 launch of a nearly $5 million “Dinheiro Digital é Melhor” or “Mobile Money is Better” project with Africell to spur the development of a vibrant and secure mobile money and digital finance ecosystem in Angola.  USAID and partners are connecting approximately 12,000 new mobile phone users to the Afrimoney platform per month, with 240,000 new users joining in 2024.  In combination with financial literacy training and policy engagement with Angola’s government, USAID and partners are breaking down barriers and reaching those previously excluded from the formal financial system.

• To date, USTDA has provided $13.2 million in funding to prepare digital, transportation, and clean energy projects that will help develop the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor.  These activities are designed to help unlock several billion dollars in financing and deploy innovative U.S. technologies for the Trans-Africa Corridor’s implementation.

• In November 2024, USTDA awarded a feasibility study grant to Javilian Civils (Proprietary) Limited to support the deployment of terrestrial fiber and access infrastructure connecting inland locations in Central and Southern Africa with subsea cables along the Atlantic Coast.  The project will ultimately increase internet connectivity in Angola, the DRC, and Namibia.

• In April 2024, the U.S. Department of Commerce led a large whole-of-government delegation to the NewSpace Africa Conference held in Angola, representing a growing US interest in space-related cooperation and trade, and in engaging African nations in development of norms for satellite operations.  Part of the Commerce Department, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration offers a wide range of free, open source data, information, and tools that are available to help businesses, communities, and nations address climate adaptation and mitigation, sea-level rise, flooding, coral reef monitoring, and space weather, including a range of early-warning systems for weather, climate, and hydrological disasters.

 
Investment 
 
PGI leverages public funds to unlock private capital investment.  In the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor, the United States is supporting sustainable economic growth by helping secure investment for firms across many sectors and sizes.

• In September 2024, DFC committed a $13 million equity investment in the African Rivers Fund IV, which will support small and medium-sized businesses in frontier markets in Central and Southern Africa, including Angola, the DRC, and Zambia.

• To promote U.S. investment in Angola, the DRC, and Zambia, Prosper Africa is providing roughly $600,000 of transaction advisory services to firms along the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor.  These services aim to connect local firms, accelerate economic progress, and increase local and regional involvement in the growing economy around the Corridor.

• Through the United States’ Economic Resilience Initiative, USAID will help advance the economic opportunities presented by the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor for inclusive growth.  Working with Congress, $4.5 million will support workforce development that matches private sector needs and the industrialization of agricultural inputs and outputs for regional export markets along the Corridor.

 
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