Demba Moussa Dembélé

Lila Chouli

In this week's edition of the Emerging Powers News Round-Up, read a comprehensive list of news stories and opinion pieces related to China, India and other emerging powers...

In the face of the Rockefeller and Gates foundations-funded AGRA (Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa) lobby ‘to extend outdated 20th century industrial agriculture’ to the continent, Carol Thompson and Andrew Mushita look at alternative African approaches for improving agriculture that focus instead on farmers' rights and build upon local knowledge.

Countries with high numbers of people living with HIV, especially where access to antiretroviral treatment is patchy, are sitting on a drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB) time bomb, which may have in some instances already exploded. South Africa and other high burden countries are diagnosing the tip of the DR-TB iceberg with the large majority of people who have DR-TB (multi-drug and extensively-drug resistant TB) dying because they are not diagnosed or receive the medication when it is too late.

A joint declaration by 85 member countries of the United Nations’ Human Rights Council, calling for an end to violence, criminal sanctions and human rights violations against people because of their sexual orientation or gender identity is a very significant step forward towards international consensus on LGBTI people’s rights, according to ILGA, the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association. ILGA considers the fact that the amount of countries willing to sign on to a declaration like this is approaching a majority of UN members, is a credit to the increased sensitivity of national governments, and the work of international, regional and local LGBTI human rights activists all over the world, particularly the international coalition of LGBTI organisations that worked together with national governments and provided the information they requested through the process of preparing the declaration.

The recorded number of people displaced within their country due to conflict or violence rose to 27.5 million in 2010, which is the highest in a decade, according to a report by the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC). The report was launched by the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Valerie Amos, the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict Radhika Coomaraswamy, and the Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) Elisabeth Rasmusson. 'Close to three million people in 20 countries across the world were newly displaced from conflict and violence during 2010, and large scale displacement continues,' Rasmusson said.

As the West intervenes in the Libyan crisis, the Afreeka in Unity group demands ‘the immediate end of the imperialist invasion in the African country of Libya’.

A three-day international seminar on the theme 'The Global Crisis and Africa: Commodity Dependence and Structural Transformation' took place in Accra, Ghana’s capital last week. Forty scholars from Africa and other parts of the world participated in the meeting. Setting out the context and key issues for the meeting, Tetteh Hormeku, head of programmes at TWN-Africa, said the influence and impacts of the crisis in Africa were shaped largely by the nature of the continent’s systemic integration into the global economy as primary commodity export dependent economies.

Responding to the work of scholars like William Carroll, Samir Amin considers the evolution and shape of globalised capitalism and the extent to which it might be termed ‘transnational’ or ‘collective imperialism’. He stresses: ‘Globalisation is an inappropriate term. Its popularity is commensurate with the violence of ideological aggression that has prohibited henceforth the utterance of “imperialism”.’

It's the deal of the century: £150 a week to lease more than 2,500 sq km (1,000 sq miles) of virgin, fertile land. Bangalore-based food company Karuturi Global says it had not even seen the land when it was offered by the Ethiopian government with tax breaks thrown in. Karuturi snapped it up, and next year the company, one of the world's top 25 agri-businesses, will export palm oil, sugar, rice and other foods from Gambella province – a remote region near the Sudan border – to world markets.

In this week's edition of the Emerging Powers News Round-Up, read a comprehensive list of news stories and opinion pieces related to China, India and other emerging powers...

In this week's edition of the Emerging Powers News Round-Up, read a comprehensive list of news stories and opinion pieces related to China, India and other emerging powers...

Under an overcast sky, nearly 200 members of the Djiboutian Army’s elite 1st Rapid Action Regiment honed their infantry skills, mentored by members of the US Army National Guard’s 2nd Combined Arms Battalion, 137th Infantry Regiment. The training included instruction on squad movements, convoy operations, contact drills, camp security and marksmanship.

Reporters Without Borders has carried out a new survey of online freedom of expression for World Day Against Cyber-Censorship, marked on 12 March. 'One in three of the world’s Internet users does not have access to an unrestricted Internet,' Reporters Without Borders secretary-general Jean-François Julliard said. 'Around 60 countries censor the Internet to varying degrees and harass netizens. At least 119 people are currently in prison just for using the Internet to express their views freely. These are disturbing figures.'

Despite regional initiatives that even include the eventual possibility of a 'Cape-to-Cairo' free trade area, protectionist impulses have caused non-tariff barriers to spring up across Southern Africa. Zambian trade consultant John Kasanga cites countless examples of non-tariff barriers across the region: 'Zambia protects its sugar industry from cheaper imports from Zimbabwe by demanding that all imported sugar be fortified with vitamin A. Zimbabwe, in turn, has blocked Zambian strawberries by stipulating that any shipment of this fragile fresh produce must be at least a massive one ton.'

In response to a pelting critique from academics, economists and grassroots organisers worldwide, the 2011 'State of the Microcredit Summit Campaign Report' plans to address the controversies surrounding a development scheme that many believe to have failed. A tempest of questions, censures and confusions has battered at the doors of Micro Finance Institutions (MFIs), whose small-scale loans many are calling 'micro band-aids' on the wound of inequality that the world is currently nursing.

In this episode of Palestine Studies TV, Dr. Leila Farsakh discussed the implications of the protest movements in the Arab world on Palestinian politics and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Dr. Farsakh is a professor of political science at the University of Massachussetts, Boston, and a member of the editorial committee of the Journal of Palestine Studies.

‘Putting Paul Collier, the former chief economist of the World Bank and one of the architects of this folly, in charge of explaining what went wrong with globalisation is akin to putting Attila the Hun in charge of the Ministry of Roman Reconstruction,’ writes Erik S. Reinert in this review of 'The Bottom Billion'.

If Libya goes the way of Western interests, it will be next stop Algeria, says Sukant Chandan.

This blog post points to the exciting potential created by volunteers from thousands of miles away using social networking platforms and free, open source software to create live crisis maps. '...thanks to today’s easy mapping platforms, volunteers can help respond to a crisis from thousands of miles away by collaborating online to create a live map that can be used to support humanitarian operations. They can use social networking platforms to connect, organize, recruit and train.'