WASHINGTON – Caterpillar has evacuated a handful of employees from Liberia. Canadian Overseas Petroleum Ltd. has suspended a drilling project. British Airways has canceled flights to the region. ExxonMobil and Chevron are waiting to see whether health officials can contain the danger.
The Ebola outbreak, which has killed nearly 1,000 people, is disrupting business and inflicting economic damage in the three African countries at the center of the crisis: Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. So far, analysts say the crisis doesn’t threaten the broader African or global economies.
The World Health Organization on Friday declared the outbreak an international public health emergency. The WHO didn’t recommend any travel or trade bans. But it cautioned anyone who had had close contact with Ebola patients to avoid international travel and urged exit screenings at international airports and border crossings.
“When you have a widespread outbreak of Ebola, you can end up with a panic,” said John Campbell, senior fellow for Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. “People won’t go to work. Expatriates will leave. Economic activity will slow. Fields won’t get planted.”
So far, the economic damage has not affected West Africa’s biggest economy, Nigeria’s, though the disease has already spread to that country.
“It’s not stopped commerce; it’s not stopped buying,” said Danladi Verheijen, managing director of the investment firm Verod Capital. “The flights are still full going into Nigeria.”
Timi Austen-Peters, chairman of the Nigerian engineering and manufacturing firm Dorman Long, met in Washington on Friday with investors who were interested in Africa. Ebola, he says, didn’t come up in the discussion.
“We were having a good old-fashioned business meeting,” he says. “They were not in any way spooked.”
