The Namibia Agricultural Union (NAU) has said that it accepts government expropriation of farms must take place, but that they remain confident that a consensus on land reform will be reached between the Government, themselves and the farmers. The comments follow notices delivered by the Government to 19 farm owners, advising them that their land had been identified for expropriation and that they should 'come and negotiate the sale'.

Scores of residents who were forcibly removed from their land in Pretoria's eastern suburbs and on the West Rand due to the now-repealed Group Areas Act have been compensated by the government. Residents of Eersterus/Riverside, now part of Newlands, and Munsieville and Madubulaville on the West Rand, will share an estimated R36,9-million which has been paid out by the department of land affairs.

A US Senate investigation into lax controls on money laundering at a Washington bank has revealed the misappropriation of at least US$35 million of oil revenues by President Teodoro Obiang Nguema of Equatorial Guinea and his family and other senior government officials since the country started exporting oil in the mid 1990s.

A U.N.-backed body barred the Republic of Congo from the legitimate world diamond trade this week, accusing it of blatantly sending millions of dollars in smuggled gems onto the global market. Suspending the west African country was "necessary to safeguard the credibility and integrity" of international efforts to block black-market conflict diamonds from the $60 billion annual diamond business, said the group.

Security forces and armed militiamen have clashed in Port Harcourt, in Nigeria's oil-rich Delta region. Residents say a number of people, including a woman bystander, died in the fighting, which took place in the city's Amadi-Ama district on Tuesday. Nigeria is Africa's biggest oil exporter, but the Niger Delta is one of the most underdeveloped regions of the country and is prone to violence.

Kenya is to receive a total of US $60.51 million in grants and loans from the African Development Fund (ADF) for projects aimed at strengthening rural health facilities and improving water-supply and sanitation infrastructure in Rift Valley Province. It is intended to ensure equitable provision of adequate quantity and quality of services to all the user groups at an affordable cost and sustainable basis in Nakuru and in urban, semi-urban and rural communities.

The lack of access to reliable and clean energy supplies is a major barrier to improving well-being around the globe - there are an estimated 1.6 billion people living in the rural areas of developing countries who lack access to electricity - but so is dependence on fossil fuels. Climate driven "natural" disasters also threaten far worse. Rather than just failing to improve the human condition, we could be about to witness the great reversal of human progress. This is according to the abstract of a recent publication by the New Economics Foundation.

The first desert locust swarms have left their breeding areas in North Africa and moved south to Mauritania, Senegal, and Mali, threatening the Sahel region with its worst plague in 15 years unless action is taken, the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) has warned. Mauritania has been spraying swarms of locusts with insecticide since June and a senior agriculture ministry official in neighbouring Senegal told IRIN that the first swarms had already landed in the north of the country.

Coal may seem like an unlikely weapon to stop the Sahara advancing, but the Niger government is marketing it as an alternative to firewood in order to save the country's forests and slow desertification. The government is halfway through a year-long campaign to make coal more popular, taking out adverts on television and radio and sending delegations from the Mines and Energy Ministry across the West African nation to talk to local leaders.

As people remake the world's landscapes, cutting forests, draining wetlands, building roads and dams, and pushing the margins of cities ever outward, infectious diseases are gaining new toeholds, cropping up in new places and new hosts, and posing an ever-increasing risk to human and animal health. "Evidence is mounting that deforestation and ecosystem changes have implications for the distribution of many other microorganisms, and the health of human, domestic animal and wildlife populations," according to a report compiled by the Working Group on Land Use Change and Disease Emergence, an international group of infectious disease and environmental health experts.

Poachers have burned one-third of Rwanda's largest national park, hampering efforts to protect wildlife from dangers posed by the country's fast growing rural population. Akagera is a haven for wildlife in overcrowded Rwanda, where more than 8 million people are squeezed into just 10,160 square miles and deforestation is already widespread. The sprawling park in the east of the country is home to elephants, giraffes, zebra, and various species of antelope and monkey.

Pesticide use in Africa has increased dramatically in recent years, despite the escalating costs and the fact that they are becoming less effective. This is creating a dependency on pesticides amongst farmers, threatening food safety, causing health risks, deepening the inequality between rich and poor farmers and creating environmental problems. Alternative methods of pest control are needed if these damaging social and environmental impacts are to be reduced.

This report forms the South African Country Study of a comparative regional study being undertaken by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) into ‘strengthening the role of agricultural workers unions in West and Southern Africa’. The focus is on the role of agricultural workers unions in land reform. The aim of the study is to understand the circumstances and organisation of South African farmworkers and unions, the legislative environment which influences or supports their actions, and their actual or potential participation in policy making and implementation, particularly in the unfolding of the country’s land reform programme.

The 'grace period' created by the 2002 cease-fire agreement in Angola, has been disappearing in recent months. Two different kinds of land conflicts have been increasing in recent years: occupation by powerful people of high quality land held by rural communities with good access to water; and evictions of the urban poor from the areas where they have settled in Luanda. Those in power, NGOs believe, seem to want to acquire assets urgently and to settle legal matters before the next elections. This is according to an article in the June edition of the Independent Land Newsletter.

The colonial histories of Southern African countries have influenced the land reform debate. But whether land is in the hands of a white minority or a black elite, redistribution in favour of the poor remains an emotive issue. Countries that were "settled" under colonialism - Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe - share a similar profile of racially skewed land distribution, dual tenure systems based on received law and customary law, and a dispossessed black rural population confined to degraded and overcrowded communal lands.

The San people, also known as bushmen, have challenged the government of Botswana over their expulsion from ancestral lands in what could be a landmark case for indigenous rights in Africa. The San accuse the government of illegally expelling them from ancestral land by cutting off water supplies and denying hunting permits. Their lawyers say that these measures are unconstitutional, and want water supplies to be restored to the reserve and hunting permits granted. The government's case is that the San left the reserve voluntarily to avail themselves of schools and clinics closer to towns and cities.

The African leaders should use this golden opportunity to blaze the trail by not just ratifying [The Protocol on the Rights of Women] but also ensuring the strict implementation of the charter in all member states. It is more than clear that women's rights should be at the centre of human's rights and human rights at the centre of sustainable development of any society. Africa, lead the way on this.

Sign the petition on the Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa at:

If land redistribution is defined as the transfer of commercial farmland from whites and foreigners to black Namibians, the available evidence suggests that present policies are leading to about 1% of commercial land being redistributed every year. At this rate it will take another 40 years before half of Namibia's commercial land lies in black hands.

The land rights movement among indigenous peoples is strengthened by a growing sense of awareness and power among widely scattered peoples. A few international conferences have provided a forum for sharing ideas and strategies. Full autonomy from national governance is a distant dream. But enhanced opportunities for self-determination, and a renewed commitment to their land-based legacy, seem within reach for most indigenous peoples. This is according to an article on the website of the Southern African Regional Poverty Network.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has announced that Zimbabwe faces a shortfall of 325,000 tons of cereal this year. Despite government predictions for a record 2.4 million tons harvest, the FAO believes the total will be less than half of that figure and predict that 30 to 40% of farmers may run out of food from their own production by the end of July.