Africa (general)

Welcome to this special edition of the WRM bulletin looking at Africa through the eyes of Africans. To many people in the world, Africa is an exotic continent filled with dances and songs of both people and birds. Africa is a big continent. Its land mass covers 31 million square kilometres and takes up 20% of the earth. It is the second largest continent in the world and has a population of some 900 million people, meaning that it is less populous than India and China.

“Mr. Chairman, Honourable Delegates;

Simple lessons are not necessarily easy to learn. For example: oil is a non-renewable and limited resource (1) Oil and conflicts appear to be twins in today’s world. When people think of oil, in general terms, what come to mind are ‘progress and development’. Thus, people speak of oiling the wheel of progress. Today, however, what we see and experience is that oil greases the wheels of conflict. And this is very much the case in the oil fields of Africa.

Ignorance is the night of the mind, but a night without moon or star. -Confucius Introduction

In the past For hundreds of years, it seems the African continent has been viewed as a kind of take-out convenience store by countries in the North – at first mainly for rare and exotic commodities like gemstones, precious metals, ivory, plants and slaves; and later for more basic items such as minerals, food, timber and oil. There is however a new rush to exploit Africa’s resources, this time aiming at the very basics – the fertile soil, relatively abundant water, and low-cost labour represented by poor people across the continent.

Introduction

Members of FoE Africa from Ghana, Togo, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Nigeria, Mauritius, Tunisia and Swaziland met for five days in Accra, Ghana reviewing issues that confront the African environment. A particular focus was placed on the current food crisis and agrofuels on the continent.

“Co-management: a situation in which two or more social actors negotiate, define and guarantee amongst themselves a fair sharing of the management functions, entitlements and responsibilities for a given territory, area or set of natural resources.” (Borrini-Feyerabend et al., 2000) [1] In the countries of Central Africa, numerous programmes have been undertaken since 1990 to demonstrate that protected areas can be more effectively managed through a participatory or “co-management” approach. There are three main reasons for the adoption of this approach:

It is difficult to analyse the question of indigenous rights in Africa without engaging with the question of statehood, and it is impossible to address the latter without considering its dubious origins. The colonial enterprise in Africa, marked by domination and annexation of territory, was masterminded by Leopold, the Belgian monarch, and Bismarck, the German chancellor. It reached its peak in the Berlin conference of 1884, which was convened ostensibly to regulate trading relations between European powers but ended by legislating for the partition of Africa.

An article in June’s WRM Bulletin highlighted Unilever’s role in the threat to Tanoe Swamps Forest, one of the last remaining forest blocks in Cote d’Ivoire.  Following international protests, Unilever now ‘promises’ an Environmental Impact Assessment but has given no guarantee that the forest will be protected.  Instead, they have publicised their long-standing plans to sell shares in PALM-CI, which holds the concession for Tanoe, although they will remain a major PALM-CI customer.  Behind the announcement, and possibly behind the plans to destroy Tanoe Forest, lie far-reaching changes in

The Gates and Rockefeller Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) initiative has landed on Africa announcing that it will help small-scale farmers go commercial. What does this mean? Behind the millionaire funding projects lies the promotion of biotechnology in agriculture. African agriculture will be more dependent on chemicals, monocultures of hybrid seeds, and genetically modified crops.

In November 2007, several representatives from World Rainforest Movement visited Komatiland Forests' operations at Brooklands in Mpumalanga province in South Africa.