United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon warned on Wednesday that failure was not an option in addressing the global food price crisis, and said an extra -billion to -billion per year would be needed to help avoid disaster.
A 2,2m high tidal wave inundated parts of Jakarta overnight as the city government and citizens tried to hold the water back with emergency embankments, a government official said on Wednesday. The height of the water was far greater than earlier predictions.
Sunburned expedition leaders fresh from a journey down the Zambezi River to call attention to malaria said on Tuesday that countries must work together to eliminate the disease. The Roll Back Malaria expedition followed the river through six countries in Southern Africa, delivering insecticide-treated nets and medication.
The United Nations urged a summit on the global food crisis on Tuesday to help stop the spread of starvation threatening nearly one billion people by lowering trade barriers and removing export bans. ”Nothing is more degrading than hunger, especially when man-made,” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told world leaders.
It has been described as a global crisis pushing 100-million people into hunger, threatening to stoke social and political turmoil and set the fight against world poverty back by seven years. Now, the food price crisis will be tackled by world leaders, who meet in Rome next week to seek ways of reducing the suffering for the world’s poorest people.
President Thabo Mbeki called on G8 countries on Friday to follow through on promises of support for Africa’s socio-economic rescue plan Nepad. ”The other G8 members have got to respond in the manner that Japan has,” Mbeki said at the end of a three-day development conference in Yokohama, Japan.
African leaders and Japan pledged on Friday to get to work to ramp up food production, calling it ”critical” for the continent’s development amid a crisis over soaring prices. Japan also pledged to step up foreign aid and investment to Africa, at a three-day summit with 51 African nations in Yokohama, near Tokyo.
Africa is in need of a ”green revolution” to combat a growing food crisis on the continent, former United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan said in a speech in London on Wednesday. The Ghanaian diplomat also said that more needed to be done to deal with the impact climate change would have on food supplies in Africa.
Sitting under a pair of mango trees and sipping coconut water, Toolsy Poorun (87) says he thought he would live in Terre Rouge forever. But then Chinese investment came to this part of Mauritius. Poorun, who lives in the suburbs of the Indian Ocean island’s capital Port Louis, now finds himself caught up in China’s African push.
The prices of staple foods such as rice could stay high for the next three years, hindering the battle against poverty, a top World Bank official said on Tuesday. Food prices had risen at a ”startling” speed, giving governments and communities little time to respond, the bank’s managing director, Juan Jose Daboub, said.
A further -billion of debt relief for the world’s poorest countries is needed despite a decade of progress, the Jubilee Debt Campaign warns on Friday. The group’s latest report calls on the G8, World Bank and International Monetary Fund to cancel -billionn of debt, which it says is ”unpayable” and an obstacle to the battle against global poverty.
Malawi’s tobacco industry has been in turmoil after wildly fluctuating prices led protesting farmers to force the closure of the auction floors. This year’s tobacco sales started on a very high note with prices reaching the phenomenal price of $11 per kilogramme. The high prices did not last, however.
The most striking image of Spain’s drought, that has forced Barcelona to ship in water, has been that of the underwater church which emerged from a drying dam. For most of the past four decades, all that has been visible of the village of Sant Roma has been the belltower of its stone church, peeping above the water beside forested hills from a valley flooded in the 1960s to provide water for the Catalonia region.
Safety and Security Minister Charles Nqakula on Tuesday gave the assurance that all cases currently under investigation by the Directorate of Special Operations, or Scorpions, will be finalised. ”There is not a single case that was investigated by the Scorpions, which is under investigation now by the Scorpions, that will not be finalised.
The field is planted with shoulder-high rows of corn and is so close to Israel that the tall concrete boundary wall is well within sight, along with the Israeli military jeeps on their regular patrols into northern Gaza. For Abid Razzaq Ouda (40), who farms this land, this brings its own complications.
Zimbabwe has paid back 000 in arrears to the African Development Bank (ADB), despite vast economic problems at home, as part of efforts to meet commitments to donors, the bank said on Monday. ”Zimbabwe has in all paid 000 to the bank group despite numerous economic challenges,” the bank said.
Gaza’s population has been reduced to a ”subhuman existence” where basic humanitarian needs are going unmet in the face of rapidly deteriorating conditions, according to a senior United Nations official. An Israeli economic blockade on the Gaza Strip has produced shortages of fuel and basic supplies and has closed most private businesses and pushed up poverty rates.
It is tempting to romanticise the lifestyle of nomads in Kenya’s north-east — a land peppered with vast termite mounds which burst from rust-coloured soil like fingers pointing to the cloudless sky. For centuries, Muslim pastoralist tribes have roamed the semi-arid wastelands, in perpetual pursuit of pasture and water.
Donor nations pledged a preliminary ,8-billion in assistance to Sudan on Wednesday, aiming to help bolster a 2005 north-south peace deal in the African country still torn by violence in its western Darfur region. Sudan had said it needed ,1-billion up to 2011, on top of -billion in humanitarian aid.
SABMiller announced on Wednesday that Transnet head Maria Ramos has joined their board as an independent non-executive director. "During her career, Ms Ramos has won a multitude of accolades, including being named as South Africa’s Businesswoman of the Year in 2001, and <i>Sunday Times</i> Business Leader of the Year 2005," said SABMiller.
Security forces on Monday killed at least five people in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, as they cracked down on riots sparked by rising food prices and record inflation, witnesses said. At least 20 000 people were out on the streets to demonstrate as anger grew at printers of fake money and unscrupulous traders.
The head of South Africa’s Scorpions crime-fighting unit, Leonard McCarthy, was appointed on Monday to head the World Bank’s anti-corruption unit. World Bank president Robert Zoellick, in a statement, said South African President Thabo Mbeki had agreed to release McCarthy from service to take up the position on June 30.
This week Switzerland will become ground zero for the future of health policy in Africa. The World Health Organisation’s intergovernmental working group is meeting in Geneva to discuss public health, medical innovation and intellectual property. Many participants are expected to express their support for efforts to undermine patent protections for drugs.
African Development Bank pledged -billion more for food aid on Friday as soaring commodity prices raise fears of famine, and it urged grain-exporting countries not to restrict shipments. The bank said that its agriculture portfolio will grow to ,8-billion, and it was restructuring a portion of that to free up -million to be used more quickly.
The United Nations’s new top adviser on food blamed two decades of wrong-headed policies by world powers for the food crisis sweeping the globe in a stinging interview published on his first day in office. Frenchman Olivier de Schutter told <i>Le Monde</i> newspaper the world needed to prepare for the end of "cheap food".
Israel will be urged on Friday to ease its blockade of the Gaza Strip to avert a humanitarian disaster as the Middle East ”quartet” meets to consider the state of the faltering peace process. Oxfam and five other United Kingdom aid agencies are calling for the quartet to end its ”complacency” by putting the ”highest diplomatic pressure” on Israel.
The ”DC Madam,” whose arrest for running a high-end prostitution ring sent sex-scandal tremors through the United States capital, hanged herself on Thursday in a shed at her mother’s house, police said. Deborah Jeane Palfrey was convicted last month on federal racketeering charges for running the prostitution ring for the rich, famous and powerful.
United Nations agencies and the World Bank pledged on Tuesday to set up a task force to tackle an unprecedented rise in global food prices that is threatening to spread social unrest. The international bodies called on countries not to restrict exports of food to secure supplies at home.
United Nations agencies and the World Bank pledged urgent action on Tuesday to tackle an unprecedented rise in global food prices that is hurting developing countries. The international bodies called on countries not to restrict exports of food to secure supplies at home, warning that could only make the problem worse.
Mozambique’s target of 8% economic growth this year is realistic despite floods and cyclones which hit the country this year, a World Bank official said. The World Bank’s Mozambique director Michael Baxter also said inflation, which stood at 8,4% in 2007, could be kept in single digits in 2008.
Official data tell us that class apartheid, born in April 1994 with features that include durable racism and patriarchy, is now a malevolent juvenile delinquent.As with racial apartheid two decades ago, the chains of class apartheid have growing cracks and, with enough pressure from below, can also be broken.
Seven African governments and the world’s largest banks and construction firms meet in London on Monday to plan the most powerful dam conceived to date — an -billion hydro power project on the Congo River which, its supporters say, could double the amount of electricity available on the continent.