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Are foreign investors colonizing Africa [again]? | Al Jazeera
Yes, they are.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m11qtbsorp1qzprlbo1_500.png)
Report Finds Slow Response to East Africa Famine - AP via NYTimes.com
Not as bad as I predicted, I am glad to say. But the underlying cause of famine in East Africa and now West Africa is drought, and that is not going to change anytime soon. And the international community’s attention is elsewhere, on the Euro, and the price of oil.
AP via NYTimes.com
Thousands of people died needlessly and millions of dollars were wasted because the international community did not respond fast enough to early signs of famine in East Africa, aid agencies said Wednesday.
Most rich donor nations waited until the crisis was in full swing before donating much money, said a report by the aid groups Oxfam and Save the Children. A food shortage had been predicted as early as August 2010, but most donors did not respond until famine was declared in parts of Somalia last July.
The report also said aid agencies were too slow in intensifying their response.
The British government estimates that 50,000 to 100,000 people died from the famine, mostly Somalis.
Now, there are clear signs of an impending hunger crisis in West Africa, said Justin Forsyth, chief executive of Save the Children.
Other countries at risk are Niger, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Mali and Chad, said Alun McDonald, regional spokesman for Oxfam.
The world is unready for 100M climate refugees.
Some 15 million Africans abandon the countryside every year in pursuit of better lives in the city. Climate change and further desertification will only exacerbate the trend. How will these ballooning urban populations survive? OnEarth articles editor Jocelyn C. Zuckerman and photographer Antonio Bolfo traveled to Kenya and Ghana, where they found that the best strategy is sowing seeds right in the heart of cities, where the people live. See Bolfo’s photos and hear Zuckerman tell journalist Jaime Bedrin about their trip in this audio slideshow, then read “The Constant Gardeners“ in OnEarth’s Winter 2012 issue.
BBC News - Mosquitoes 'disappearing' in some parts of Africa
Matt McGrath via BBC
Malaria-carrying mosquitoes are disappearing in some parts of Africa, but scientists are unsure as to why.
[…]
One possibility for the reduction in numbers is climate change. Patterns of rainfall in these years were more chaotic in these regions of Tanzania and often fell outside the rainy season. The scientists say this may have disturbed the natural cycle of mosquito development.
Continue reading the main story“Start Quote
Professor Dan Meyrowitsch, University of CopenhagenIt is most likely we will have an epidemic of malaria ”
But the lead author of the study, Professor Dan Meyrowitsch from the University of Copenhagen, says that he is not convinced that it is just the changing climate.
“It could be partly due to this chaotic rainfall, but personally I don’t think it can explain such a dramatic decline in mosquitoes, to the extent we can say that the malaria mosquitoes are almost eradicated in these communities.
“What we should consider is that there may be a disease among the mosquitoes, a fungi or a virus, or they’re may have been some environmental changes in the communities that have resulted in a drop in the number of mosquitoes”
The research team also found anecdotal evidence that their discovery was not an isolated case.
No mention made if other insects or animals are falling in numbers, which might be support for ‘chaotic rainfall’.
Even though it would be benficial to have malaria-carrying mosquitoes dying off, its frightening that no one knows what is happening.
Nicolas Wade, Phonetic Clues Hint Language Is Africa-Born
A researcher analyzing the sounds in languages spoken around the world has detected an ancient signal that points to southern Africa as the place where modern human language originated.The finding fits well with the evidence from fossil skulls and DNA that modern humans originated in Africa. It also implies, though does not prove, that modern language originated only once, an issue of considerable controversy among linguists.
The detection of such an ancient signal in language is surprising. Because words change so rapidly, many linguists think that languages cannot be traced very far back in time. The oldest language tree so far reconstructed, that of the Indo-European family, which includes English, goes back 9,000 years at most.
Quentin D. Atkinson, a biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, has shattered this time barrier, if his claim is correct, by looking not at words but at phonemes — the consonants, vowels and tones that are the simplest elements of language. Dr. Atkinson, an expert at applying mathematical methods to linguistics, has found a simple but striking pattern in some 500 languages spoken throughout the world: A language area uses fewer phonemes the farther that early humans had to travel from Africa to reach it.
Some of the click-using languages of Africa have more than 100 phonemes, whereas Hawaiian, toward the far end of the human migration route out of Africa, has only 13. English has about 45 phonemes.
This pattern of decreasing diversity with distance, similar to the well-established decrease in genetic diversity with distance from Africa, implies that the origin of modern human language is in the region of southwestern Africa, Dr. Atkinson says in an article published on Thursday in the journal Science.
Language is at least 50,000 years old, the date that modern humans dispersed from Africa, and some experts say it is at least 100,000 years old. Dr. Atkinson, if his work is correct, is picking up a distant echo from this far back in time.
Global Land Grab Spreads
Large corporations and national governments are moving aggressively to take control of arable land, as worsening climate — particularly desertification — is placing a premium on land and food:
Neil MacFarquhar, African Farmers Losing Land to Investors
Across Africa and the developing world, a new global land rush is gobbling up large expanses of arable land. Despite their ageless traditions, stunned villagers are discovering that African governments typically own their land and have been leasing it, often at bargain prices, to private investors and foreign governments for decades to come.
Organizations like the United Nations and the World Bank say the practice, if done equitably, could help feed the growing global population by introducing large-scale commercial farming to places without it.
But others condemn the deals as neocolonial land grabs that destroy villages, uproot tens of thousands of farmers and create a volatile mass of landless poor. Making matters worse, they contend, much of the food is bound for wealthier nations.
“The food security of the country concerned must be first and foremost in everybody’s mind,” said Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general, now working on the issue of African agriculture. “Otherwise it is straightforward exploitation and it won’t work. We have seen a scramble for Africa before. I don’t think we want to see a second scramble of that kind.”
A World Bank study released in September tallied farmland deals covering at least 110 million acres — the size of California and West Virginia combined — announced during the first 11 months of 2009 alone. More than 70 percent of those deals were for land in Africa, with Sudan, Mozambique and Ethiopia among those nations transferring millions of acres to investors.
Before 2008, the global average for such deals was less than 10 million acres per year, the report said. But the food crisis that spring, which set off riots in at least a dozen countries, prompted the spree. The prospect of future scarcity attracted both wealthy governments lacking the arable land needed to feed their own people and hedge funds drawn to a dwindling commodity.
[…]
The breathtaking scope of some deals galvanizes opponents. In Madagascar, a deal that would have handed over almost half the country’s arable land to a South Korean conglomerate helped crystallize opposition to an already unpopular president and contributed to his overthrow in 2009.
People have been pushed off land in countries like Ethiopia, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia and Zambia.
Expect to see large numbers of dispossessed people arriving into the already overcrowded large cities of Africa, with no education or skills, a perfect breeding group for unrest and disease. The likelihood of famine and plague is shooting up, along with the price of food.
Are you aware of the SIZE of Africa? via strangemaps
But they left out Alaska
| Africa = most people don’t want to know anythingak47:
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