Sub-Saharan Africa is in the midst of an oil boom. The revenues available to reduce poverty in this context are huge, says a new report from Catholic Relief Services (CRS), who estimate that governments will receive over $200 billion in oil revenues over the next decade, enabling them to invest in health, education and other vital necessities. The dramatic development failures that have characterized most other oil-dependent countries around the world, though, warn that petrodollars have not helped developing countries to reduce poverty; in many cases, they have actually exacerbated it. Without improving their democratic institutions and administrative capacity, it is unlikely that Africa's oil exporters will be able to use petrodollars to fuel poverty reduction.

South African Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry Ronnie Kasrils recently launched an attack on “startling” claims that up to 10 million people in South Africa had suffered water disconnections after failing to pay their bills due to the government's cost-recovery approach to the sector. Click on the link below for the response by Municipal Services Project co-director David McDonald to the attack and the original article by Kasrils.

The South African government will play a critical role next week in ensuring the conservation of whales, dolphins and porpoises. Government representatives say they will support a controversial proposal at the highly charged yearly meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) to strengthen the group's conservation mandate. The IWC is the global forum that regulates whaling issues.

Sharp new questions over conflicts of interest have emerged about the controversial private company that secured a "government-to-government" deal to buy Nigerian crude oil. Two weeks ago the Mail & Guardian reported that "South African Oil Company" (SAOC), a private company registered in the offshore tax-haven Cayman Islands, was still benefiting from a Nigerian state oil contract allocated in 1999 to "the Republic of South Africa" - though neither oil nor income flowed to this country.

Wetlands are areas of marshes, swamps, peatlands or water-covered surfaces, whether stagnant or flowing, fresh or brackish waters; they include floodplains or adjacent coastal areas, as well as islands or seawaters within wetlands. This definition may not stress the importance that wetlands have for the environment, an importance which has also led them to be dubbed “the kidneys of the earth”, due to their role as natural filtering processes, replenishing groundwater and making it apt for human consumption.

The Government will soon take action against management of factories which pollute rivers and other water resources in the country, Environment Minister Dr Newton Kulundu said. Kulundu said the Government had put in place new laws to regulate factories from discharging pollutants into water resources.

Mozambican President Joaquim Chissano warned on Monday that, since the "Earth Summit" held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, there had been "a lack of political will to make available the resources necessary for the balanced and harmonious development of the planet". Speaking at the opening in Maputo of a Special Session of the Conference of African Environment Ministers, Chissano said that, despite all the commitment expressed verbally at Rio, "we are still witnessing a pattern of development that steps up the unsustainable use of natural resources".

The pipes are already laid in southern Chad, where they snake south underground through tropical forests from the oil fields of Doba to a marine terminal off the coast of neighboring Cameroon. At the port of Kribi, the 660-mile pipeline will empty up to 250,000 barrels a day of coveted crude into tankers waiting to transport the unctuous black gold to Western markets. The World Bank says this multi-billion dollar project will help to reduce poverty, but many critics find that assessment surprising, given that scholarly studies for more than a decade have consistently warned of what is known as the resource curse: that developing countries whose economies depend on exporting oil, gas or extracted minerals are likely to be poor, authoritarian, corrupt and rocked by civil war.

I want to take this opportunity to thank you for the article on "Ending the siege on Zimbabwean people is vital for African progress." I found the article to be a grounded approach to the Zimbabwean crisis.

Two European firms building the controversial Bujagali hydro-electric power plant in Uganda have stopped work on the project amid talk of financial difficulties for the main contractor, U.S. energy giant AES Corp, corruption probes and complaints from Uganda that the project is highly overvalued.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) resident representative, Daouda Toure, has asked the Government to double its current water and sanitation expenditure as a primary solution to the high infant mortality rates in the country.

The people of South Africa bear a double burden of environmental threats to their health, says Dr Anthony Mbewu, Executive Director for Research Development at the Medical Research Council. According to Dr Mbewu industry as well as under-development in informal and inner city settlements causes environmental pollution. He added that it is estimated that one-third of the burden of disease in the world is cause by environmental factors.

The Malawi Fisheries Department has embarked on a 10 year strategic plan to restore the chambo fishery in Malawi's waters. The strategy will strive to restore depleted fish stocks to maximum sustainable yields. The goal of this initiative is to meet the country's international obligations to restore the chambo fishery to its 1980 status by 2010, says the fisheries department.

Water privatisation is a monster that is hanging over the heads of many unsuspecting Kenyans, says this commentary in the East African. It is a buck-passing tactic that just won't solve the problem. South Africa recorded one of its worst cholera outbreaks soon after privatising its water supply systems. The government later admitted that the poor had little access to safe drinking water because of the prohibitive costs.

The charity ActionAid has urged Britain to join with other rich nations and save poor farmers from global patent rules that threaten to make the seeds they use more expensive. This plea came before a group of 34 African nations proposes a revision of rules which enable agribusiness giants to take out patents on seeds. The patents allow corporations to raise the price of seeds and reduce access to them for farmers and researchers.

The world's richest countries are failing to curb the pollution that's causing global climate change, says a report published by the United Nations. Emissions from countries such as the United States, Canada and Australia grew in the 1990s despite their promising, with other industrialised countries, to lead action to reduce the problem.

The world should impose environmental rules on the high seas and stop treating international waters as a "no man's land" if marine environments are to be saved, according to a report issued Tuesday by an international conference of ocean activists.

Leaders of the world's eight largest industrialized democracies wound up their annual three day meeting in Evian on the shore of Lake Geneva, with a joint statement that emphasizes environmental responsibility and sustainable development.

In a new grassroots movement to combat the corporatization of water, organisers gathered here in mid-May for their first annual water forum. Titled "Securing the Right to Water in Africa," the event brought together various groups in Africa who oppose growing efforts by multinational corporations and lending institutions to privatize water. The World Bank has set its sights on Ghana as a poster child for water privatisation in Africa. Under Bank loan requirements, monthly water rates have skyrocketed for the average Ghanaian. Now, the Bank is demanding the country privatise its system. A coalition of non-profit groups and grassroots protesters have delayed the plan for two years.

The Chad-Cameroon petroleum project was approved by the World Bank in June 2000 after more than three years of intense discussions between oil multinationals, the Bank, Bank member governments and NGOs from the South and the North. In response to the grievances received, the World Bank proposed a framework to impose social and environmental rules on the multinationals, and build the capacity of Cameroonian and Chadian governments to enable them to manage project-related opportunities and risks. The failure to respect promises in the construction phase is a cause for concern for the project's future. There are already talks of expanding the oil exploitation zone to the east of Chad, north of the Central African Republic and north of Cameroon. As the World Bank will have no means to exert pressure on the consortium it is hard to think that the operations will respect people and nature more than in the past three years. The major merit of the project is to have confirmed that under authoritarian regimes there is a fundamental incompatibility between poverty alleviation objectives and oil exploitation activities.