A new report, published Monday, exposes the arguments for a new free trade agreement on foreign investment at the World Trade Organisation as groundless myths. The report, jointly produced by Friends of the Earth and the World Development Movement, shows that an investment agreement will primarily benefit large multinational companies, who will gain greater `rights to roam' in the global economy.

The world's leading pharmaceutical companies are set to unveil proposals to ease the supply of essential medicines to poor countries, in an attempt to break a World Trade Organisation deadlock that is jeopardising the Doha global trade round.

Apartheid, it seems, works. Nearly 10 years since racial segregation was abolished in South Africa, identity is still rooted in race. Or so it would appear from the case of Happy Sindane, the blond Ndebele-speaking boy who walked into a police station last month saying he had been abducted from his white family by their black cleaner at the age of six and brought up among blacks.

The annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission wound up last week with the 51 member organisation more deeply divided than ever.

Two new reports on genetically modified crops paint a convincing picture of their relevance to the needs of the developing world. But neither is likely, on its own, to convince the sceptics, says this editorial on the website SciDev.net.

A new international law covering the conditions under which genetically modified (GM) organisms can be traded between countries is to come into force later this year, after the Pacific island of Palau last week became the 50th state to ratify the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety. Palau's move triggered a 90-day countdown before the protocol – which will regulate the impact on the environment and human health from trade in GM organisms – comes into legal force on 11 September.

Why is the entire African continental economy no larger than Spain's, at $580 billion? Why is the combined GDP of the 40-plus countries that lie between South Africa and Egypt scarcely bigger than the annual turnover of ExxonMobil? There's a weary consensus that blames low prices for Africa's agricultural exports, corruption, cash-starved infrastructure and, increasingly, the devastating economic impact of AIDS. But less explored is the perverse logic of dividing Africa's small economic space into fifty sovereign entities. Regional economic integration is an absolute prerequisite for poverty reduction: expanding markets, attracting investment, and increasing savings. Unfortunately, there are powerful interests that stand in its way – mainly the politicians and bureaucrats who extract rent from their possession of sovereign privileges to tax and regulate.

Take Djibouti in northeast Africa. It has about half a million people and virtually no domestic economy. It depends wholly on three things: a port and railway link that serve the much larger economy of landlocked Ethiopia, a French military base (recently augmented by a U.S. command centre, used for keeping watch on Yemen and monitoring al Qa'ida's attempts to infiltrate the Horn of Africa), and lastly the fact that tiny Djibouti, by virtue of its sovereign independence, has a seat at the United Nations, the African Union and the Arab League, and therefore also has representation at the World Bank, United Nations specialised agencies and bilateral donors. A simple survey will show that across Africa, the smaller the country, the more aid it receives per capita. Partly this is simply because most nations have a desk officer in every large aid bureaucracy and thus a champion in the system. And partly it is because every now and then, the vote of that country may become important in some critical international forum. (The U.S. suddenly became much more conciliatory towards Angola last summer, coinciding with Angola taking one of Africa's seats on the U.N. Security Council.) Small countries are also more attractive as sites for military bases: their domestic problems are more manageable and their loyalty is more easily obtained than larger ones.

Five years ago, there was some discussion that Djibouti might merge with its neighbour Ethiopia. The rents that Djibouti's rulers can extract from the international system have put paid to that. On the other side of the continent, tiny Gambia broke up its sensible confederation with its sole and much larger neighbour, Senegal, because its leading officials were profiting too little from the arrangement.

The executives of international oil corporations, avowed globalisers in theory, are in practice the friends of regressive political economies. Oil companies prefer to negotiate deals with small countries rather than large ones: in a country with a million people, political stability can simply be bought, whereas there is a sad history of oil fuelling conflict in larger countries like Angola, Nigeria and Sudan. Oil wealth is a top-down resource: it's easy to distribute as largesse, and the smaller the constituency, the more effective it can be.

NGOs certainly have no intention to impede the continent's growth, but their operations may, at times, do exactly that. Aid agencies control substantial parts of the transport sector in Mozambique, but their contracts are not awarded through competitive bidding, but instead on opaque criteria developed by bureaucrats behind closed doors in Washington or Brussels. The domestic entrepreneurial class cannot compete.

Forty years ago, Africa's independence leaders came together to form the Organisation of African Unity - a minimum framework for organising the continent during the turmoils of the Cold War. Ordinary Africans longed for something more: true political unity. Last year in Durban, Africa's heads of state finally agreed to establish an African Union, a big step along this road. The new institution promises to build an ambitious array of institutions including a Pan African Parliament, but it is likely to be hampered by financial weakness and the vested interests of governing elites. Regional economic integration has historically been driven by a powerful manufacturing sector seeking to expand its markets. This is the case for Europe, the Far East and North America, and is manifestly the case for economic globalisation. By contrast, regional integration among non-industrialised countries has had more modest achievements – from the Mercusur economic cooperation pact in Latin America to the historic alliance of independent frontline African states against Apartheid South Africa.

As the least developed continent, Africa faces the greatest challenges to integration. With the exception of South Africa, it is largely dependent on agrarian produce, minerals and aid. The African Union's member states have long been used to seeing their continental organisation as a forum to defend their sovereign interests, and a bureaucracy in which to place 'their men'. The current and incoming chairs - South Africa and Mozambique -are both democracies, but there are fears as to the standing of the Union if a less respected country were to become its head.

However, there have been encouraging steps. In its last years the Organisation for African Unity refused to recognise the putschists in Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast, and insisting on only accepting rulers who come to power through constitutional means. But only when a Pan-African parliament is established that can set continental standards for democracy, mineral companies forced to become more transparent about payments to countries, and aid distributed in ways that promote economic integration, will Africa begin to escape its structural paralysis. That will require African leaders to sacrifice the spoils of sovereignty for the long-term promise of continental development.

* Alex de Waal is Programme Director for the Commission for HIV / AIDS and Governance in Africa, and a director of Justice Africa. This editorial is a shortened version of an essay from the book 'Unbinding Africa: Making globalisation work for good governance', edited by Phoebe Griffith. More information: id=15803

* Please send comments on this editorial to [email protected]

Promoting good governance is high on the list of priorities of Northern and African policymakers. But before we can build strong institutions, democracy and the rule of law we need to tackle the double bind facing Africans today. On the one hand, African states often do not have the capacity to institute much needed reforms. Yet the solution – giving Northern Governments, companies and NGOs overwhelming influence over how African countries are run – is only making their governments weaker over the long-term. Unbinding Africa explores how globalisation in its current form is affecting the continent.

Former President Daniel arap Moi has been asked by the anti-corruption police to record a statement over the Euro Bank scandal, it has been revealed. Investigators want to know if he ever ordered any of the former parastatal chiefs facing graft charges to pump millions of taxpayers' money into the bank before it collapsed.

This national symposium will look at the implications of important drivers of global change for national and regional sustainability of human and ecological systems in South Africa. It will build on the 1995 southern African IGBP meeting and the South African Country Study on Climate Change completed in 1999.

The Government's fight against HIV/Aids, tuberculosis and malaria has received a major shot in the arm with a Sh3.8 billion grant from the Global Aids Fund. However it has been cautioned that the money must be spent for the set purpose.

The Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa, Africa's major free trade bloc, plans to lobby the United States and pharmaceutical companies for the right to produce generic antiretroviral drugs, according to the group's secretary general, Reuters reports. COMESA Secretary-General Erastus Mwencha said that patent disputes in the World Trade Organisation are "robbing the region of a key weapon against AIDS," according to Reuters.

The losers in this world are those who are excluded from globalisation and Africa stands the risk of being left out, Norway's Minister of International Development, Hilde Frafjord Johnson warned Thursday. Addressing the plenary session of the World Economic Forum - Africa Economic Summit 2003 taking place in Durban, South Africa, Johnson said it was important not to overlook Africa, while the focus was on Iraq. The African Economic Summit, which kicked off Wednesday afternoon, is focussing on harnessing the power of partnership in developing Africa. It is being attended by African government officials, the business community, non-governmental organisations and civil society groups.

African commodities and raw materials are processed in wealthy nations and then resold by companies and corporations in those nations at prices many times greater than what is paid to the producers, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni said Tuesday night at a well-attended reception just hours after his meeting at the White House with President George W. Bush.

The open meeting of the Security Council on Resolution 1422 must carefully consider the need, merit and legality of a renewal of the resolution, said Parliamentarians for Global Action (PGA) this week. Resolution 1422, adopted last July, provides UN peacekeeping personnel from countries that have not ratified the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) with a 12-month suspension from investigation or prosecution for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity by the Court. It is due to expire on June 30, 2003. "As parliamentarians committed to the fight against impunity, we expect our governments to reaffirm their support for the ICC and take into account the compelling arguments against Resolution 1422 before the Security Council takes action on its renewal," said a press release.

A new global investment agreement proposed at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) carries huge risks for the world’s poorest people, says leading development agency ActionAid. In its new report, Unlimited Companies, the agency calls on the UK Government and the EU to drop their support for the agreement and stop putting the interests of big business before the needs of poor countries. The report comes at a crucial time in trade negotiations, as the Working Group on Trade and Investment meets in Geneva for the last time before the WTO Cancun Ministerial in September.

The May 2003 conference on “The Work of Karl Marx and Challenges of the 21st Century" was held under the auspices of Cuban trade unionists, philosophers and economists. More than 500 attended, and in addition to lengthy interventions by Fidel Castro, papers were presented by the likes of Samir Amin, Fred Bienefeld, Liudmila Boulavka, Simon Clarke, Francois Houtart, Diane Flaherty, Barbara Foley, Marta Harnecker, David Kotz, Michael Lebowitz and Istvan Meszaros. The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation (Johannesburg) has made available resources to discuss the conference and its implications for South and Southern African social change movements.

The emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from Europe, Japan, the United States and other industrialized countries could grow by 17 percent from 2000 to 2010, despite measures in place to curb them, according to a new United Nations report. Greenhouse gases blanket the Earth, trapping the Sun's heat close to the planet's surface.

Mozambique has established a "poverty observatory" to monitor its national plan to reduce one of the world's highest levels of deprivation. The observatory will collect and analyse data on poverty to track the plan's progress. The country's first report on progress towards the Millennium Development Goals, released last year, spells out the challenges: nearly 70 per cent of Mozambique's 17 million people live below the poverty line, subsisting on less than 40 US cents a day.

The United Nations Security Council must as a matter of priority address the issue of conflict diamonds in the DRC, says a new report from Partnership Africa Canada (PAC) on the diamonds trade. PAC recommended that the UN Security Council embargo all unofficial diamond exports from the DRC, and insist that the Kimberley Process develop a more rigorous approach to statistics and monitoring. PAC further recommended that civil society organisations take an active role in promoting a Publish What You Pay campaign. "The sooner there is consensus on basic corporate transparency in developing countries, the sooner corruption can be diminished." said the report.