A new book criticising government land reform threatens to strain relations between the government, farmers and agricultural unions, the Department of Agriculture and Land Affairs said last Thursday. "In fact if this book gets out into the general populace I can see racial outbreaks developing between blacks and whites," said chief land claims commissioner Tozi Gwanya. At the launch of the book, The Great South African Land Scandal, in Pretoria last Thursday, publisher Philip du Toit said he hoped it would "inform the broader public about the slow cancer infecting commercial agriculture in South Africa". The book claims that recent amendments to the 1994 Restitution of Land Rights Act paved the way for the land affairs minister to "expropriate land at will".

As governments turn to the private sector – rather than multi-lateral or bilateral development agencies for assistance – the victims of infrastructure projects are at risk. Without strong regulatory and monitoring capacity the needs and rights of the displaced will continue to be marginalised by private developers’ drive to meet construction deadlines and maximise profits. This is according to research from the University of Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre that compares approaches to resettlement and compensation taken by the World Bank and private companies.

Instead of a regular faucet that switches on and off, picture a large metal meter box with a slot for a plastic card and a water tap below. The device requires consumers to pay for water before consumption by purchasing a prepaid card. Consumers can then draw water from the meter by inserting the prepaid card into the meter and collecting the water in a portable container. As service is delivered, the balance is adjusted, and the remaining credit displayed. Service is automatically terminated if the payment balance is depleted until the consumer can pay again. The service is most prevalent in South African municipalities. Prepayment meters can also be found in Namibia, Swaziland,Tanzania, Brazil, Nigeria, Curacao and probably other countries, as well. The devices were previously used in the United Kingdom (U.K.) until they were declared illegal in 1998 for public health reasons. As water becomes an increasingly scarce resource, global corporations, many governments, and international financial institutions such as the World Bank, argue that water should be allocated through market mechanisms. But in many developing countries the lack of access to clean and affordable water contributes to the spread of water-borne diseases. More than 2 million people, mostly children, die each year from water borne diseases.

The Okavango Delta is a creature of extraordinary subtlety with roots deep in Africa. In summer, tropical storms rumble and flash across the high Bei Plateau from Huambo to Cuito Cuanavale. Water pours off steep slopes, gathering sand, leeching salts from the sodden Earth, and picking up speed as it gutters down long, straight valleys. As you read this, engineers, politicians, and ecologists are pondering a dam that could lead to the death of the Okavango Delta in Botswana, Southern Africa.

Some of the wildlife which had disappeared from Kenya's drylands are starting to return, thanks to the efforts of environmental agencies and the government. The area around Lake Baringo in the country's Rift Valley used to be a great source of biodiversity. But overgrazing in the past 50 years turned it into a barren wasteland - a disaster the area is only now starting to recover from.

Not long ago, the Internet's ability to provide instant, inexpensive and perfect copies of text, sound and images was heralded with the phrase ''information wants to be free.'' Yet the implications of this freedom have frightened some creators -- particularly those in the recording, publishing and movie industries -- who argue that the greater ease of copying and distribution increases the need for more stringent intellectual property laws. The movie and music industries have succeeded in lobbying lawmakers to allow them to tighten their grips on their creations by lengthening copyright terms. The law has also extended the scope of copyright protection, creating what critics have called a ''paracopyright,'' which prohibits not only duplicating protected material but in some cases even gaining access to it in the first place. In addition to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the most significant piece of new legislation is the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act, which added 20 years of protection to past and present copyrighted works and was upheld by the Supreme Court a year ago. In less than a decade, the much-ballyhooed liberating potential of the Internet seems to have given way to something of an intellectual land grab, presided over by legislators and lawyers for the media industries.

In response to these developments, a protest movement is forming, made up of lawyers, scholars and activists who fear that bolstering copyright protection in the name of foiling ''piracy'' will have disastrous consequences for society -- hindering the ability to experiment and create and eroding our democratic freedoms. This group of reformers, which Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School, calls the ''free culture movement,'' might also be thought of as the ''Copy Left'' (to borrow a term originally used by software programmers to signal that their product bore fewer than the usual amount of copyright restrictions). Lawyers and professors at the nation's top universities and law schools, the members of the Copy Left aren't wild-eyed radicals opposed to the use of copyright, though they do object fiercely to the way copyright has been distorted by recent legislation and manipulated by companies like Diebold. Nor do they share a coherent political ideology. What they do share is a fear that the United States is becoming less free and ultimately less creative. While the American copyright system was designed to encourage innovation, it is now, they contend, being used to squelch it. They see themselves as fighting for a traditional understanding of intellectual property in the face of a radical effort to turn copyright law into a tool for hoarding ideas. ''The notion that intellectual property rights should never expire, and works never enter the public domain -- this is the truly fanatical and unconstitutional position,'' says Jonathan Zittrain, a co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, the intellectual hub of the Copy Left.

Indigenous people from around the world demanded at a conference Wednesday that governments respect aboriginal land ownership and halt development and resettlement programs that can harm the environment. "We are linked to our land," said Sinafasi Makelo, a representative of Congo's Mbuti pygmies. "We must not be ordered to leave for money or material compensation. That is not what we're seeking." Makelo accused African authorities of expelling indigenous people to create national parks and forest reserves - then letting Western companies plunder the "protected" areas for profit.

Developing countries are increasingly under pressure from international development institutions to privatise their water supplies. Yet privatisation has failed to produce its expected benefits. Research from the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) warns that privatisation is unlikely to contribute to achieving the Millennium Development Goal of halving the number of people without access to water and sanitation by 2015. Despite its prominence in current debates only around five per cent of the world’s population is served by the formal private sector.

Africa's urban poor, often struggling to eke out a living in unplanned and expanding shanty communities, are at the back of the queue for water and sewerage services from underfunded local authorities. But, as recent serious outbreaks of cholera in Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe have demonstrated, the lack of access to safe water and proper sanitation are critical public health issues.

Kenya's minister for land on Monday threatened to repossess tracts of idle land and redistribute it to thousands of landless people. Land ownership is an explosive topic in Kenya, with successive governments being blamed for failing to tackle the problem of inequitable land distribution.

In the first case heard since the Equality Court was set up last year, the owners of the club Sliver in Green Point acknowledged that racial discrimination lay behind the assault on a coloured man and his white partner after being refused entry to the gay club. After being refused an apology from the club or a change in its policy, the couple, from Bantry Bay, approached the South African Human Rights Commission last month and a complaint, one of the first, was lodged with the Equality Court.

A warming climate threatens tropical mountain forests that strip moisture from clouds and supply water to millions of people in Africa and Latin America, experts said in a U.N. report released on Monday. Cloud forests in equatorial and sub-equatorial regions of Latin America, Africa, and Asia account for just 2.5 percent, or 400,000 sq km (154,000 sq miles) of world tropical forest cover. But the benefits are felt way beyond their boundaries.

There exists a large opportunity for more constructive processes around conflict issues like illegal hunting, cattle grazing in protected areas, water management, and community development with regards communities adjacent to Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, according to a study by the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA). The study found that many people have a distrustful and difficult relationship with the park agency and the way the park and wildlife resources are being managed. Hunting was a prevalent and highly important activity for the communities and poaching is frequently counted as the most important conservation impact in Serengeti.

The collapse in commodity prices over the last few decades threatens farmer livelihoods and development prospects, according to a paper that studies the cases of cocoa and coffee to assess whether their systems of production and trade meet the needs and aspirations of poor rural populations in the developing world, and minimize environmental damage. The paper, from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, said the collapse in prices also had a significant impact on the environment. The biodiversity effects of changing prices were highly site-specific, but it was clear that the market was not delivering environmentally or socially sound outcomes.

After six years of growing Genetically Modified (GM) crops for animal and human consumption in South Africa without proper public knowledge and consent, the Department of Health (DOH) recently published its belated labelling regulations for GM foodstuffs. "These regulations do not require that GM foodstuff be labelled and effectively defeat the very purpose for labelling of any sort, namely to give the consumer the right to choose. They are totally unacceptable in that they don't require mandatory labelling of any of the major GM crops currently grown in South Africa. The Department of Health has cunningly provided industry with a way out of mandatory labelling by invoking the discredited and scientifically flawed concept of 'substantial equivalence'," said Andrew Taynton of the Safe Food Coalition.

The world's biggest agrochemical companies and the US government are rushing to introduce genetically modified (GM) crops into West Africa, starting with cotton. A new report from GRAIN shows that Monsanto, Syngenta and Dow AgroSciences, supported by USAID, are finalising plans with the Malian government to convert the West African country’s cotton crop to transgenic varieties over the next five years. Cotton is Mali’s number one export. Yet local farmers and the general public are in the dark about this.

Some rural communities whose traditional authorities are not recognised fear that the new Land Reform Act may give rise to disputes. The new Communal Land Reform Act requires that people with existing land in communal areas apply for their land to be registered to acquire a land registration certificate from the communal land boards within three years, or risk the land being allocated to others.

A Parliamentary committee has asked the government to revoke the Nile Treaty with Egypt. The committee on natural resources says the pre-independence treaties give Egypt monopoly over the Nile waters. It also wants Egypt to pay sh2b for damages by the rising lake levels as per a 1950 agreement. The agreement, signed by the British on behalf of Uganda, allows Egypt to pay for rising water levels caused by its heavy industrialisation along the river.

Malawi has launched a fishing project that will benefit more than 300,000 people who depend on fishing for their livelihood. The project, known as Lake Malawi Artisanal Fisheries Development Project, aims to improve household income in the lakeshore districts of Likoma, Nkhatabay, Nkhotakota, Salima and Mangochi. It was launched on January 24 and is expected to improve fish stocks as well as catches from Lake Malawi. The first component of the project will include construction of working tables, portable water, drying racks and fish storage facilities.

At least 10,000 Congolese, mostly illegal miners, have been expelled from Angola since December 2003 under inhumane conditions, a Congolese human rights organisation said on Thursday. "They were forced back by the military and hundreds of others have been arrested and detained in subhuman conditions," Dolly Ibefo, vice-president of the rights body, Voice of the Voiceless (Voix des Sans Voix), said.