After decades of famine, grinding poverty, colossal debts and enormous slum-growth, Africa is indisputably the worst casualty of economic globalization. As the region takes the further brunt of man-made climate change, the rich nations hold a moral responsibility to reorder economic priorities and coordinate a massive transfer of resources to the impoverished continent.
One in three
Africans is chronically hungry, despite $3 billion spent on food aid for
the continent annually and $33 billion in food imports, the director of
the food security at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) has warned. By the UN News Centre.
Since colonial times, commercial and political interests have profited from the DRC’s mineral resources with devastating consequences for its people and environment. Is the government's new ‘deal of the century’ with China a continuation of the same pattern? By Khadija Sharife.
Blaming
underdevelopment in Africa on climate, geology and natural resources ignores
the structural causes of inequality in the global economic system. Development
technocrats should address poverty as a problem of power, not a problem of
nature, says Jason Hickel.
For centuries, richer countries have imported resources from Africa to support expansive economic growth and increasing levels of consumption. But the African continent, rather than Europe, will suffer the impacts of the resulting ‘ecological debt’, says Andrew Simms.
Although many analysts blamed rival politicians for instigating post-election violence in Kenya during 2008, the uprising had much deeper roots: an inequitable economic system, rising poverty and the exclusion of the urban poor in rapidly growing ‘megaslums’, says Rasna Warah.
The escalation of the United States African Command underlines
a troubling commitment to an approach based on the use of military force, one
entirely at the expense of promoting sustainable economic development and
democracy, argues Daniel Volman.
The 2005 peace agreement which brought an end to
the conflict between north and south Sudan was based on an agreement to
share oil revenues. But greater transparency is needed to ensure the accuracy of the oil production figures
that underpin the agreement, warns a report by Global
Witness.
