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More than 700 delegates and 300 companies participated in the third edition of the American Chamber of Commerce summit in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, organizers said. U.S. government and private sector delegations met with counterparts from Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia and Kenya.

Kenya President William Ruto said Thursday that Kenya was open for business, highlighting a deal his government had struck with U.S. biotech company Moderna.

“It is with pleasure that I announced the finalized deal between Moderna and the government of Kenya to build a $500 million dollar MRNA vaccine facility in Nairobi,” he said.

The two-day AmCham business summit, which ended Thursday, gave business leaders a chance to exchange market intelligence and explore areas of opportunity, especially for commercial engagement, said Maxwell Okello, CEO of AmCham Kenya.

He noted that it followed the recent U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit hosted by the White House.

AmCham “does two things: … One: it’s a perfect demonstration of some of the commitments we had from the U.S. … Two: we are very keen in seeing how we can actually advance commercial engagement,” Okello said. “We thought this would be a good platform to create partnerships, bring local companies that could be counterparts to those American companies that are interested in coming into Kenya.”

Scott Eisner, president of the U.S. Chamber’s Africa Business Center, brought a group of over 30 executives. He told VOA they hoped to forge concrete private sector opportunities and joint ventures.

“We have plenty of tech companies with us, but we also have pharmaceuticals, medical devices, technology, satellite companies that are doing mapping of the world, infrastructure developers around Caterpillar, the GEs of the world,” he said. “So we really have arranged for a very strong delegation representing the complexities of the American business community.”

Nzonzi Katana is a process engineer for the Kenyan-based startup Semiconductor Technologies Limited, which had a booth at the exhibition hall. The company manufactures microprocessors, memory chips and sensors.

“We have been able to meet many representatives from many American companies,” Katana said. “I believe there’s one person who might be a potential supplier of our raw material.”

Effects of protests

Kenya is experiencing protests organized by opposition leader Raila Odinga over the high cost of living, and three people have died in clashes with police. How might this affect possible investors?

Whitney Baird, an official in the State Department’s Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs, said Washington keeps U.S. companies informed about each country’s political and security situation.

“The U.S. government produces publications every year like the investment climate statement, country commercial guide, so there is information available to any businesses about what we’ve observed over a year,” Baird said. She said Kenya has a strong democratic tradition, and “we were very pleased with the elections,” but she urged any incoming U.S. business to “engage with our commercial and economic sections at the embassy and get the most up to date information about opportunities and the ongoing situation.”

At the summit, seven African companies in the agriculture sector were awarded grants totaling $5.1 million by the U.S. Agency for International Development through its Prosper Africa and Feed the Future programs.
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Poland’s agriculture minister promised financial support from the government and the European Union and easier rules for constructing grain storage as he met Wednesday with farmers angered by falling grain prices.

Farmers in Poland blame the drop in prices on an inflow of huge amounts of Ukrainian grain that was supposed to go to Africa and the Middle East. Bulgarian farmers also staged a border protest Wednesday over the issue.

Poland and other countries in the region have offered to help transit Ukraine grain to third-country markets after Russia blocked traditional routes when it invaded Ukraine 13 months ago. The European Union, which borders Ukraine, has waived customs duties and import quotas to facilitate the transport — also through Romania and Bulgaria — to markets that had counted on the deliveries.

But farmers in transit countries say the promised out-channels are not working as planned. As a result, they argue, the grain stays, flooding their markets and bringing prices down — to their great loss — while fertilizer and energy costs are skyrocketing.

After a round of talks with farmer organizations, Poland’s Agriculture Minister Henryk Kowalczyk said they agreed on more than $277 million in compensation to farmers and traders who suffered financial losses and subsidies for companies transporting the grain to ports, to be shipped out of Poland.

The ministry also agreed to waive permission requirements for building small-sized grain storage facilities. But the farmers are expecting more talks and more support.

In Bulgaria, hundreds of farmers on Wednesday began a three-day blockade of the main checkpoints on the border with Romania to protest tariff-free imports of Ukrainian grain. They say about 40% of their crop from last year remains unsold amid huge supply, and there is no storage room just a few months ahead of the coming harvest.

They displayed banners reading: “Stop the genocide of agriculture” and “We want to be competitive farmers.”

Last week, Brussels offered a total of $61 million in compensation to affected farmers, of which Bulgaria would receive about $18 million and Poland about $32.5 million euros — amounts that protesters and some governments say are insufficient.

Daniela Dimitrova, regional leader of Bulgaria’s grain producers’ union, said Ukrainian imports make Bulgarian farmers noncompetitive.

“We stand in solidarity with Europe and its support for Ukraine, but the European Commission should look at each individual member state and make farmers competitive,” she said.

Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said grain from Ukraine was “destabilizing our market” and steps should be taken to urgently export it while reducing imports from Ukraine. He said the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, had regulations at its disposal to get the situation under control, as it was having negative effects also on other countries in the region.

“We do not agree for this grain to come to Poland’s and Romania’s markets in huge amounts and destabilize our markets,” Morawiecki told a news conference, while stressing that “transit is most welcome.”

At the start of the talks with farmers and grain exporters, Kowalczyk, the agriculture minister, blamed falling grain prices on a world-wide trend. He said that while more compensation funds could be expected from Brussels the main goal was to increase grain export and free space in silos ahead of this summer’s Polish harvest. He admitted that the original plan to transit grain through Poland did not go exactly as expected.
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The scope of blame for Silicon Valley Bank’s failure stretches across bank executives, Federal Reserve supervisors and other regulators, the banking system’s top cop on Wednesday told U.S. lawmakers demanding answers for the lender’s swift collapse. 

“I think that any time you have a bank failure like this, bank management clearly failed, supervisors failed and our regulatory system failed,” Michael Barr, Fed Vice Chair for Supervision, told Congress. “So we’re looking at all of that.” 

The failures of SVB, and days later, Signature Bank, set off a broader loss of investor confidence in the banking sector that pummeled stocks and stoked fears of a full-blown financial crisis.

Depositors tried to pull more than $42 billion in a single day at SVB in early March, surprising regulators and kicking off deposit flight across other regional banks. 

“That’s just an extraordinary scale and speed of a run that I had not ever seen,” Barr said. “I think all of us were caught incredibly off-guard by the massive bank run that occurred when it did.”  

Representatives from both political parties pressed Barr, Martin Gruenberg, head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, and Treasury undersecretary for domestic finance Nellie Liang on why regulators did not act more forcefully, given Fed supervisors had been raising issues with the bank for months.  

“There is still much we need to understand of what you knew when and how you responded,” said Republican Patrick McHenry, chair of the committee. “The bottom line for you as the panel, there’s bipartisan frustration with many of your answers. There’s a question of accountability and appearance of lack of accountability.”  

Barr on Tuesday criticized SVB for going months without a chief risk officer and for how it modeled interest rate risk, but lawmakers said the response wasn’t aggressive enough, with Democrat Juan Vargas saying, “it seems like they blew you guys off and you didn’t do anything.”  

Reports due May 1 

Both the Fed and FDIC are expected to produce reports on the failure of Silicon Valley Bank by May 1. The Fed’s report will concentrate on supervision and regulation while the FDIC report will center around deposit insurance.  

Several lawmakers asked Barr to make available the Fed’s confidential communications on supervision.  

Barr told the House Financial Services Committee that he first became aware of stress at Silicon Valley Bank on the afternoon of March 9, but that the bank reported to supervisors that morning that deposits were stable.  

Gruenberg of the FDIC told lawmakers he also became aware of SVB’s stress that Thursday evening.  

All three testifying said that regulators had sufficient tools to deal with the crisis once it happened, but Barr said the Fed could have done better on supervision. 

SVB and Signature became the second- and third-largest bank failures in U.S. history. Investors fled to safe havens like bonds while depositors moved funds to bigger institutions and money market funds. 

Markets have calmed since Swiss regulators engineered the sale of troubled Swiss giant Credit Suisse to rival UBS, and after SVB’s assets were sold to First Citizens BancShares FCNCA.O. However, investors remain wary of more troubles lurking in the financial system. 

Some Democrats have also argued a 2018 bank deregulation law is to blame. That law, mostly backed by Republicans but also some moderate Democrats, relaxed the strictest oversight for firms holding between $100 billion and $250 billion in assets, which included SVB and Signature. 

The White House is readying plans for legislation that would reinstate those regulations on midsize banks, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing two sources familiar with the matter.  
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