Diamonds have been at the centre of West Africa's nightmare for more than a decade. They helped to pay for former President Charles Taylor's 14-year rampage in Liberia and for his military adventures in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Côte d'Ivoire. They were the engine of the Revolutionary United Front's horrific decade-long war in Sierra Leone. In the 1950s, Liberia became a major conduit for illicit diamonds from almost everywhere in Africa, and by the mid 1990s it had become the country of provenance for billions - not millions - of dollars worth of stolen gems. This paper argues that while diamonds represent a very small part of Liberia's potential postwar economy, they loom large in the country's political schema, and they retain their enormous potential for national and regional destabilization.

Last month, the Angolan government did something startling: it announced that an oil deal signed with ChevronTexaco would bring the country $300 million. The disclosure of a single figure may not seem a triumph of transparency, but in the past Angola - like many other countries - treated its oil revenue as a state secret. Revealing its oil payments is the first of many anticorruption measures that Angola desperately needs.

Lazing submerged in the river, the hippopotamus may seem a docile creature, but to many rural communities in Burkina Faso it has become a menace - so much so that the government has made hippo hunting legal again. There were fewer than 100 hippos in Burkina Faso just two decades ago and the large pachyderm appeared to be on the verge of extinction in this landlocked and semi-arid West African nation. However, a recent government survey showed numbers have rebounded to around 1,400 following the imposition of a state hunting ban in 1991.

CIAT in Africa helps rural communities build sustainable livelihoods, through competitive agriculture, healthy agroecosystems, and rural innovation, working closely with national institutions, NGOs, and the private sector. The organisation has a new website on Africa.

It would cost governments billions less to protect the world's oceans than it does to fund subsidies for fishing fleets and will result in larger catches in the long run, according to a new study by WWF and the United Kingdom's Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, Reuters reports. The study was published in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and pushes for the creation of marine protected areas (MPAs).

The Mataffin Farm in Nelspruit, South Africa is testament to the country's thriving - and transforming - agricultural sector. Tidy rows of robust avocado trees splay across soft, rolling hills. Two schools and a spacious soccer pitch are enjoyed by the farm workers' children. Mataffin's white managers and its new black owners are working hand in hand to ensure that this coveted land continues to produce abundant harvests as it has for more than 100 years. The South African Land Claims Commissioner, Tozi Gwanya, holds Mataffin up as proof that land reform can be triumphant in the country.

The Global Environment Facility (GEF), through the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), has allocated 350 000 US dollars (N 2,2 million dollars) to strengthen national protected areas in Namibia.

The number of people living in the path of potentially devastating floods is set to double - from one to two billion - within two generations unless adequate preventative steps are taken, according to researchers at the United Nations University (UNU). The researchers blame climate change, deforestation, rising seas and population growth for the elevated risk of facing once-in-100-year flooding.

Agricultural experts are urging Malawian subsistence farmers to use organic compost - instead of manufactured fertilisers - to boost soil fertility and increase crop productivity. Accelerating soil degradation is increasingly being linked to declines in yields throughout the global south, but use of compost can help soils to retain both water and nutrients.

Only half of the health clinics in three Zimbabwean provinces have access to safe water and the majority of districts face shortages of essential drugs, according to an NGO monitoring group, the Food Security Network (FOSENET). Based on information drawn from 52 districts, FOSENET noted that clinics spread across central Zimbabwe - in Mashonaland West, the Midlands and Masvingo - had the poorest access to safe water out of the country's eight provinces.

Zimbabwe's controversial land reform programme took a significant turn this week when the government announced its intention to nationalise all productive farmland in the country. "In the end all land shall be state land and there will be no such thing called private land," the official Herald newspaper quoted Lands Minister, John Nkomo, as saying on Tuesday.

Cooperatives are playing a key role in helping impoverished Ethiopian farmers escape from the cycle of poverty, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) said on Wednesday. Ethiopia's cooperatives were vital in helping to promote rural economic development and getting farmers a fairer price for their crops, USAID said in a statement. "Cooperatives are an important means to bring smallholder farmers together to open new markets and receive higher prices for their produce," it said.

The tourists come to Zimbabwe's vast Hwange National Park, view its rich collection of big game from the safety of vehicles with armed guards, and then leave. But communities living on the fringes of the park are forced to share their land with the encroaching wildlife, a proximity that leads to inevitable conflict between humans and animals. The communities in this perennially dry region of northwestern Zimbabwe rely on the Gwayi river, as do thirsty animals who have broken out of the game park. Looking for water, they end up terrorising the villages on the edge of Hwange.

A 62 year old widow, Mrs Pat Campbell, was brutally beaten with sticks at her farm, Sutton Estate, in Banket recently, reports the website Sokwanele. Mrs Campbell's "crime" was being on the farm of which she is the lawful owner. In the attack an AK 47 assault rifle was pointed at Mrs Campbell and her son Doug, and they were threatened with instant death if they did not leave the farm at once. To emphasise the point the soldier whose rifle was aimed at their heads, cocked the weapon.

"In South Africa land is presently not only one of the most defining political and development issues, but also perhaps the most intractable. The continuing racial maldistribution of land will either be resolved through a fundamental restructuring of the government’s land reform programme, or it will be resolved by a fundamental restructuring of property relations by the people themselves. Which direction the country follows depends to a large degree on the urgent and immediate responsiveness of the government to the needs and demands of the country’s 19-million mostly poor, black and landless rural people." This is according to the introduction of a paper published on the website of the National Land Committee.

www.whoseland.com focuses on the unfolding story of land rights struggles. The site explores: land rights issues; relationships with other cultures; the future of indigenous minority cultures; and custody of the land for future generations.

Standing atop a sand dune, Klaas Matthuis can see more dunes almost surrounding Struizendam, his village in Botswana on the border with South Africa. They are bare of vegetation except the one he stands on, which has large clumps of grass, trees and shrubs. Mr. Matthuis, vice-chairperson of a new community resource management committee, is showing visitors from Kenya, Mali, and the University of Oslo in Norway the dune that has been stabilized by fencing out goats and cattle and planting various indigenous species.

The links between biodiversity and the path to achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have not been made explicit, even though biodiversity plays an important role in ensuring that the targets of the MDGs for sustainable development are successfully achieved. This report examines the role of biodiversity in achieving the targets of each of the MDGs (including poverty, gender and education, health, and environmental sustainability). The report also considers links between climate change, biodiversity and the MDGs.

The ‘Zimbabwe crisis’ has become the subject of intense debate both inside and outside Zimbabwe, and explanations for its origins, forms and outcomes have been many and varied. What is, however, disappointing is that despite their multiplicity, these explanations have done little to improve our understanding of the complexity of the problems confronting the country. The main problem being that many of these explanations have not only been parochial and partisan but also imagined; seeking to interpret the present problems out of history and context. Moving away from the tradition of narrow and partisan explanations which abound on the topic, this study, bringing together expertise from various scholars, policy analysts, development practitioners and activists who have all researched and written on Zimbabwe for years, analytically examines the crisis through its complexities and contradictions while also trying to suggest solutions to it.

Despite being vigorously promoted in the policy arena and having been implemented in several countries in the South in the 1990s, water and sanitation privatization has achieved neither the scale nor benefits anticipated, says a paper from the International Institute for Environment and Development, which is pessimistic about the role that privatization can play in achieving the Millennium Development Goals of halving the number of people without access to water and sanitation by 2015.