Africa

Currently Africa, and primarily the countries of Angola, Nigeria, and the Sudan, provides 25% of China’s petroleum imports.

As land is grabbed and earmarked in Africa for supposed development, there are nearly always implications for the water nearby, for local people's land and water rights and environmental sustainability.

The Bonadikombo water supply project exemplifies participatory planning in action. It shows how the various aspects of participation elaborated in participatory planning theory play out in practice by using elements of enlistment, cooperation and consultation.

Over the last ten years, a successful public-public partnership has taken shape between the water users associations in a rural region of Senegal, the French city of Cherbourg-Octeville as well as several other partners including civil society groups in Senegal and Europe.

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Praful Bidwai talks to DemocracyNow!'s Amy Goodman in Durban during the climate conference about the state of the climate negotiations.

Social movement representatives are in Rome this week for the final UN negotiations to adopt voluntary guidelines that would regulate the use and possession of land and other natural resources.

The so-called “global land grab” continues the historic process of land enclosures described by Sir Thomas More in Utopia as “sheep eating men,” when English peasants were evicted from the commons to make room for private estates.

Zimbabwe's political crisis staggers on, but the untold story is that the agricultural economy is recovering well. In-depth research in Masvingo province shows that despite abuses and corruption in land reform, there have also been successful results from land-redistribution.

There cannot be any clearer illustration of the impotence of Africa’s continental and regional institutions to find local solutions to the continent’s problems, than their numbing inaction in the face of the wave of popular rebellions against dictators in North Africa sweeping across the continent.

One of the main lessons of the global economic crisis that has cast its shadow since 2008 is that this is the time to be diversifying trade away from over-reliance on EU markets. It is clear to all observers that the economic chaos engulfing the EU in its euro-zone heartlands shows no end in sight and the prospect of long- term stagnation is becoming ever more real.