By Paul Okunlola*
“The crisis of the 21st Century may not be triggered by ideology but by competition for natural resources, particularly in Africa.”
That was the stark message delivered by Dr. Cheikh Mbow, a bio-geography and remote sensing expert from the Universite Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, Senegal declared recently in Ougadougou, Burkina Faso.
Listing as tell-tale [...]

Continue reading...

By Marshall Bouton*
As the world still struggles to deal with the first truly global recession, little attention has been given to the growing number of hungry people and the possibility of mounting food crises in the years ahead.
According to the World Bank, over a billion people around the world are now chronically hungry.
Stagnant agricultural productivity, [...]

Continue reading...

By Maya Kaneko
Former UN chief Kofi Annan is seeking the support of Japan and other rice-producing countries to help double rice output in Africa by 2018, saying sustainable production of the grain would ease hunger and poverty in the continent.
Annan who is chairman of the board of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa [...]

Continue reading...

African nations will be hit hard by the global economic crisis during the course of 2009, the United Nations and the African Union (AU) say in a new report, which stresses the need to focus on agriculture, the mainstay of economies on the continent.
“Modernizing agriculture is crucial to development and industrialization in Africa, to food [...]

Continue reading...

By Loro Horta*
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is home to 22 percent of the world’s population, but has only 7 per cent of its total arable land.
Following the Chinese people’s recovery from the humanitarian disaster of the “Great Famine,” which according to one authoritative account contributed to the death of 36 million Chinese between [...]

Continue reading...