China is not pushing to expand overseas farming and Chinese companies are less active in their investment abroad because of concerns of potential political risks, a senior Agriculture Ministry official said on Wednesday. To meet a perennial shortfall in soybean supply, China, the world's largest soy importer, will continue to import from major growing countries such as the United States, the largest exporter, rather than seeking to buy up farmland outside China, said Qian Keming, market economics director at the ministry.

International NGO Journal (INGOJ) publishes high-quality solicited and unsolicited articles, in English, in all areas of Non Governmental Organization (NGO) activities. INGOJ is founded to publish proposals, appraisals and reports of NGO projects. The aim is to have centralized information for NGO activities where stakeholders including beneficiaries of NGO services can find useful information about ongoing projects and where to obtain particular assistance. Also prospective donors will easily find information about different NGOs and decide which to fund on specific projects.

The pursuit of international justice for perpetrators of atrocity crimes necessarily has political implications – from shifting the balance of power within a country, to requiring other states to cooperate when doing so may adversely affect their own interests, to confronting both international and domestic actors with the undesirable task of weighing the benefits of peace against the costs of impunity.

cc The DRC’s desire to choose its own mining trading partners, whether Chinese investors or Western corporations, calls the bluff of global financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank, writes Antoine Roger Lokongo. Negotiations the country has conducted reveal how these institutions are putting pressure on the DRC government to ditch the Socomin deal with China – a Beijing-based, joint-venture between the DRC’s Gécamines and a group of Chinese state-owned enterprises – as a condition to get its debt forgiven. That is clearly blackmail, Lokongo maintains, and is inconsistent with the spirit of free trade and globalisation.

This paper makes the case that attending to fundamental issues such as social exclusion and gender inequity is crucial to the effort to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The challenge is to inspire the public and professionals alike to step up efforts - not by focusing solely on the goals themselves, but, rather, by broadening the perspective through linking the MDGs to leading global development debates.

The leading mobile telecommunications provider, Zain Tuesday announced plans to bring mobile banking to over 100 million people in Africa with the launch of its new service, Zap. Providing the most comprehensive and accessible package of mobile banking features currently available on the African continent, Zap will be initially available in Kenya and Tanzania prior to the launch in Uganda.

When United Villages took the web to rural India, its vision was to liberate the poor by giving them tools from the digital age. The communications group set up Internet terminals in remote villages and watched for a transformation. Almost three years later, technology is indeed enriching rural lives — but not quite how they expected. Rather than paying to send emails and surf the web villagers prefer to email their questions to someone who will do the surfing for them and return the answers in a pdf (portable document format) file.

Despite the global air cargo turmoil, carriers are confident that the westbound Asia-Africa trade will continue to offer good prospects. Correspondent Phil Hastings looks at the airlines focusing on the African continent. Chinese investment in African infrastructure has provided a significant boost to air cargo traffic between Asia and Africa over the past two or three years.

India and Mozambique on Thursday signed two agreements for promotion of trade and Investment and strengthening the cooperation in economic, cultural, scientific and technical areas. The agreements were signed by Union Minister of State for External Affairs Anand Sharma and Mozambique Foreign Minister Oldemiro Baloi at Hyderabad House.

China has extended a total of $100m (about sh197b) loans and grants to Uganda in the last five years. The Chinese government has provided Uganda interest free loans and grants to set up different projects in the country totalling $100m since November 2003 to date, the former industry state minister, Prof. Ephraim Kamuntu, said

Zambia expects foreign direct investment to reach $2.7 billion in 2009 despite the global economic downturn as investors rush to take up tax breaks, the government's trade minister said. Zambia has in the last five years liberalised its investment policies, awarding tax incentives to foreign companies in a bid to grow the economy and create wealth and employment.

Despite its failure to host the 2011 All-Africa Games, Zambia has been assured by the Chinese government that its 50 000-seater Ndola Stadium will still be constructed. Chinese President Hu Jintao last week said his country is committed to improving sports infrastructure in Africa and will soon commence construction of a modern stadium in Zambia.

Dubai-based Gulf Research Centre (GRC) has organised the first high-profile forum to discuss the increasing importance of Africa to the UAE and wider Gulf's future. The Gulf-Africa Strategy Forum 2009 takes place on February 24 and 25 in Cape Town, South Africa, and aims to cement the Gulf-Africa relationship by offering an in-depth assessment of the status of ties and a clear outlook to where the relationship could be heading.

Minister of Trade and Industry Rasheed Mohamed Rasheed started on Tuesday 24/02/2009 important talks in Beijing with senior Chinese officials on ways of deepening bilateral economic relations. The talks focused on promoting Egyptian exports to the Chinese market to correct the imbalance in trade that tilts in China's favor by billion.

Trade and cultural exchanges will benefit from direct flights between Beijing and Algeria which started earlier this week. The inaugural flight landed in Beijing Capital International Airport in the early morning of February 23 after flying 11 hours from Algeria's capital Algiers. Previously, it took travelers at least 16 hours to get the other city, as they had to transfer flights.

New Tactics are pleased to announce that our workbook, ‘New Tactics in Human Rights: A Resource for Practitioners’ is now available for download in Arabic. The New Tactics’ book is a collection of 100 innovative tactics being used by the international human rights community. This workbook is meant to illustrate the breadth of tactics and the power of tactical and strategic thinking. You can find many other translations of this book on the Workbook page!

Some 3,000 African asylum-seekers have to leave Tel Aviv because of an August 2008 ruling by the Israeli Ministry of the Interior. The ruling permits asylum-seekers to reside and work only in towns and cities north of Hadera and south of Gedera, about an hour’s drive from Tel Aviv, where they now live. The ruling was initially imposed only on newcomers but in recent months asylum-seekers living in Israel for longer periods have experienced the same constraints on their work permits, forcing them to leave their homes.

Works can be nominated for prize consideration in the individual competition categories until March 6, 2009. Nominations are recommendations; thus, nominated projects are not automatically entered in the competition. The nominated artists will be contacted by the organizer before the jury convenes. Then, projects must be formally submitted by the artists themselves prior to the entry deadline and in accordance with all competition criteria in order to be entered in the competition.

As the dust settled on President Hu Jintao’s four nation African visit, a sense of relative normality returned to the Africa-China debate. A few residual commentaries and debates continue to make media headlines and blog sites around the interpretation of President Hu’s Africa visit and . But attention has now shifted to a more a significant diplomatic visit, namely Hilary Clinton’s first official engagement and visit to Asia as US Secretary of State.

As discussed in earlier editions of the China-Africa-Watch, Mrs Clinton’s visit to China has been characterized by all kinds of expectations, not least that the Obama administration would continue with its tough trade talk against China, in keeping with the new President’s election stance. Even Washington hawks and Clinton opponents expected her to stick to her guns in pushing China on its human rights record as she did during her election campaign.

But, it was Mrs Clinton who did a 360 degree turn and caught most off-guard with her comment that while Washington ‘would press China on long-standing US concerns over human rights such as its rule over Tibet…’.‘form a pragmatic partnership with Beijing on the financial crisis and climate change’.

By making her first diplomatic trip to Asia and China in particular, the new Secretary of State was sending a clear signal about her priorities. But where does Africa fit in all of this?

As the US and China begin to define their pragmatic but symbiotic relationship, how does President Hu’s talk of forging a new Africa-China consensus take into consideration this thawing of relations between Washington and Beijing? Perhaps, it is too early to draw conclusions, but for African scholars and commentators the issue is that any change to the engagement between Beijing and Washington does have important implications for how Africa engages with each of them.

This is especially relevant since the global financial crisis was the backdrop of President Hu’s African visit with the underlying message about strengthening partnership and cooperation during times of adversity.

Some might fear that America could be a rival to Africa for China’s attention and affection. But American-China relations are based on a real economic interrelationship whose health is also key to Africa’s hopes of mitigating the worst of the economic storms. In particular President Obama depends for his economic stimulus package on China’s willingness to continue to lend the USA money.

As the Financial Times reported on 22 February; ‘The level of Chinese demand for US Treasury paper could play a crucial role in determining the interest rates the US government has to pay for its rapidly growing debt pile.
‘In the past year, Chinese investors – mainly its central bank – have become the biggest foreign holders of US Treasuries, increasing their holdings 15 per cent last year to nearly $700bn (€545bn, £485bn).
‘Foreign investors now own about $3,000bn of US Treasuries, or more than half of the amount publicly available. Whether Chinese buying continues to increase this year at the same pace could be an important factor in the outlook for the Treasury market.

‘In turn, the level of demand from China depends on the health of the US economy. The fewer Chinese goods Americans buy, the fewer dollars China will have to invest in dollar-denominated assets’

So much as economic reality forced Hilary Clinton to moderate her election campaign line on China’s human rights issues, so China has little laternative but to continue to buy US Treasury bonds to enable Obama’s rescue package – although mounting opinion in China is asking if the money would notbe better spent at home.

This ambivalence was pungently expressed by Luo Ping, a senior Chinese banking official, at a recent conference; ‘“US Treasuries are the safe haven; it is the only option,” said Mr Luo. “Once you start issuing $1-$2 trillion ... we know the dollar is going to depreciate, so we hate you guys, but there is nothing much we can do.”

If this China-America marriage of convenience lasts long enough to pull the global economy out of recession, then Africa along with the rest of the world economy will feel the benefit of a shorter-lived downturn. But many expect that once the global economy recovers, China will be looking for alternatives to the dollar, and to reforms in the global financial architecture.
This could be to Africa’s benefit, if her leaders know or can be pushed and pressured into knowing, how to make the best of the opportunities.
But in forging a new consensus with Africa, China should also reflect on how Africa’s newest Diaspora in China is affected by the global financial meltdown.

As Chinese traders and merchant families have to find new ways of keeping the Chinese dream alive, similarly African traders in China are finding it harder to maintain their business activity, not least due to the increased pressures of ‘dared to think and act’. But African traders are also making the same trek to China with the same intentions and ambitions. Therefore, if the ‘financial crisis breeds new opportunities’ for China’s private firms and traders in increasing investment into Africa, then the traffic should certainly not be only one way. The official rhetoric of ‘win-win partnerships’, may sometimes appear to be contradicted by realities on the ground.

* Stephen Marks is research associate and Sanusha Naidu is research director of Fahamu’s China in Africa programme

* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.

Representatives from Africa and poorer Asian nations have been asked to attend the G20 financial crisis summit in London on April 2, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said on Friday. Brown has asked the New Partnership for Africa's Development, the Association of South East Asian Nations and the African Union Commission to send delegates to the summit.