In The News

Shell Workers Protest Planned Job Cuts

Mike Oduniyi August 28, 2003
Employees of Shell Petroleum's base in Nigeria are protesting the proposed centralization of the oil company's global operations. Under a new proposal called "Exploration and Production Globalization," Shell says it hopes to increase the efficiency of its operations. "The Group continues to explore best practices in its drive to evolve a more overall efficient...

New Activism by African Nations: Joining Forces to Solve Disputes

Marc Lacey August 12, 2003
Charles Taylor resigned the presidency of Liberia yesterday in front of leaders from Nigeria, South Africa, and Ghana. The president of Ghana announced the terms of Taylor's succession, while troops from Nigeria and South Africa stood guard in the city of Monrovia to ensure that the civil war had truly come to a close. Once, says this article in the New York Times, African nations would...

The Long Reach of King Cotton

August 5, 2003
Subsidies to American cotton growers are deflating prices on the global cotton market and causing great hardship for poor farmers in Africa, says this New York Times editorial. If the subsidies were removed, the paper argues, world prices would stabilize at levels that reflect real costs, African farmers would profit from their comparative advantage in cotton production, and the US would look...

For Zimbabwe’s White Farmers, Time to Move On

Rachel L. Swarns August 4, 2003
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, in an effort to erase the inequalities left by British colonialism, has demanded that white farmers stop working and leave their land. A tiny minority in Zimbabwe, the white farmers control a large percentage of the fertile land, inherited from the days of British rule. While the World Bank and United Nations do condone redistribution of land, half of...

Bush Tour: PR Exercise or Boon to Africa?

July 14, 2003
Was US President George W. Bush's trip to Africa primarily self-serving or truly centered on the continent's welfare? Throughout the five-day visit, critics asserted that the only interests the US President holds in Africa are American. Some observers believe that after finding itself short on friends in the UN Security Council prior to the Iraq War, the US is attempting to amass a...

Your Farm Subsidies Are Strangling Us

Amadou Toumani Toure July 11, 2003
African cotton is the best and cheapest in the world, maintain Presidents Amadou Toumani Toure of Mali and Blaise Compaore of Burkina Faso. Yet cotton farmers in their countries remain impoverished. In a jointly written opinion article for The New York Times, the Presidents of these two African nations solicit Western nations to cut the cotton farm subsidies that lead to overproduction, distort...

Critical of U.S. Policies, Africans Are Giving Bush Chilly Reception

Dana Milbank July 10, 2003
African commentators refuse to tip-toe around the tough topics. Though US President Bush and South African President Mbeki carefully avoided contentious issues at their meeting, newspapers refused to muffle criticism of America's foreign policies and continued to express doubt about the sincerity of the superpower's interest in Africa. In general, says this Washington Post article,...