Zanzibar Chief Minister, Mr Shamsi Vuai Nahodha, has said that the 1964 declaration that Zanzibar land is government property has enabled the Isles to preserve land for future generations.He made the remark yesterday in the Zanzibar House of Representatives during questions and answer period, following an opinion from Mr Salim Abdallah Hamad, that it was wrong for the government to prevent Zanzibaris from owning land.

Ethiopia's plans to build Gibe 3 Dam now threaten the food security and local economies that support more than half a million people in southwest Ethiopia and along the shores of Lake Turkana. Construction began in 2006 with flagrant violations of Ethiopia’s own laws on environmental protection and procurement practices, and the national constitution.

A Libode community rejoiced when land, from a settlement claim worth R93 million, was handed over to it by South Africa's minister of Land Affairs. The claimant community is made up of five villages – Magcakini, Tyarha, Mamfengwini, Mdlankomo and Moyeni – which, when the claim was made, had a total of 907 households, the members of which are the direct descendants of the originally dispossessed individuals.

Imagine you live in a cramped shack too small for you and your family. You fear eviction by the authorities at any time. You face the threat of your home being demolished. This is a reality faced by hundreds of thousands of people in South Africa - every single day.

First there were "blood diamonds," the gems that fueled conflict and human rights abuses in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Then there was "conflict cocoa," the chocolate source that's harvested by children and funds civil war in Ivory Coast. Now concern is rising about the minerals that go into common consumer electronics. Could that be a BloodBerry or a Conflict Cell in your pocket?

Some of the 50 parliamentarians from across West Africa attending a conference on climate change, and food and water security held in Dakar on 25 and 26 March, looked uncomfortable when presented with a picture of a banana with a watermelon-coloured peel and an elephant with a cabbage head. “This is what you think genetically modified organisms (GMO) look like, right?” asked the plant breeding expert, Marcel Galiba. “I want you to reconsider,” he challenged the lawmakers.

Most people in Ethiopia's lower Omo River Valley continue to exist much as they have done for hundreds of years with virtually no concession to the 21st Century, with one disturbing exception: automatic weapons. Almost every male carries a Kalashnikov or an M-16 assault rifle, and what might in the past have been a fairly innocuous dispute over grazing or water-rights between different groups, now frequently escalates into bloody warfare.

Zimbabwe's Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai has said that anyone invading farms will be arrested - in an apparent challenge to Robert Mugabe. Mr Tsvangirai said the recent land invasions "are actually acts of theft". President Mugabe has said that the government would continue to seize white-owned farms as part of his land reform policy.

Copper stockpiling by a secretive Chinese state organisation has helped trigger an impressive rally of almost 35 per cent in the price of the metal this year. Copper’s fortunes are closely tied to the industrial cycle so the price jump, bigger than that of gold, has grabbed attention outside the commodities market, with some questioning whether it could signal a turning point for economic growth.

The Maasai of Kajiado, like many indigenous communities the world over, are continuously victims of historical and contemporary injustices arising from land and natural resources. This is occasioned by their unique and distinctively different livelihood system from the mainstream Kenyan society and their refusal to embrace the modern agricultural economic systems, despite much pressure to do so. Most recently, their lands in the Kajiado district are being threatened by the Nairobi Metropolitan Area Bill 2000 which will urbanise Kajiado as part of the Nairobi Metropolitan Area (NMA).

Buoyed by recent discoveries of commercial scale oil deposits in Uganda, east African policy makers, foreign oil explorers and their local partners trooped to a five-star hotel on the Kenyan coast this week to reflect on the progress and chart future strategies. Viewed as a frontier region for oil exploration, east Africa’s first major oil find was made by Tullow Oil and Heritage Oil companies in the Albertine Basin, which spans the border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (whose improving relations are making the exploitation of the reserves look more likely).

Mr President, two human rights defenders, Oscar Kamau King’ara and John Paul Oulu, were murdered in the streets of Nairobi, Kenya, two weeks ago. I was deeply saddened to learn of these murders and join the call of US Ambassador Michael E. Ranneberger for an immediate, comprehensive and transparent investigation of this crime. At the same time, we cannot view these murders simply in isolation; these murders are part of a continuing pattern of extrajudicial killings with impunity in Kenya. The slain activists were outspoken on the participation of Kenya’s police in such killings and the continuing problem of corruption throughout Kenya’s security sector. If these and other underlying rule-of-law problems are not addressed, there is a very real potential for political instability and armed conflict to return to Kenya.

The South African government took over a farm this week for the first time under a controversial new policy of taking back unproductive farms allocated to blacks as part of a land redistribution programme. Agriculture and Land Affairs Minister Lulu Xingwana announced the "use it or lose it" initiative last week for farms which the black beneficiaries have left idle.

The conviction of the Mai Mai commander Gédéon Kyungu Mutanga and 20 other Mai Mai combatants for crimes on major charges, including crimes against humanity, by a military court on March 5, 2009, was a crucial step toward creating accountability in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Human Rights Watch has said.

One thing that almost everyone across the political spectrum can agree on is that land reform in South Africa is in crisis. The pace of transfer is consistently slower than planned for, and much redistributed land is not being used productively. Government policies favour land redistribution, but land use models are not so clearly defined. In the absence of creative thinking about how land can be used, government has defaulted to a position that commercial agriculture is the only viable use for rural land.

Iran will supply four million metric tonnes of crude annually, as part of a range of deals signed last week, officials said on Tuesday. The agreed supply from Iran, the world’s fourth-largest oil exporter, is roughly equivalent to 80,000 barrels per day (bpd) by Reuters calculations. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited East Africa’s biggest economy last week, where he and his Kenyan counterpart, Mwai Kibaki, also signed a grant and loan agreement totalling 800 million shillings ($10 million), among others.

Prespone Matawira writes from Harare about an International Women’s Day spent queuing for water, in a city where communities are banding together to share access to a scarce commodity.

cc The Nigerian government's alleged approval for field testing of genetically modified cassava plants by a US-based plant science centre puts Nigeria in danger of trading away its food future to colonialists under the guise of agricultural biotechnology, Friends of the Earth Nigeria/Environmental Rights Action (FoEN) have warned. They and over 30 local civil society groups have called for an immediate end to the trials, to be conducted by the National Root Crops Research Institute with the reported approval of the National Biosafety Committee – a body that currently has no legal power to grant such an approval. In addition to its concerns about the effects on biodiversity and human health of GM crops, FoEN says that Nigerian food security lies in building the capacity of its farmers, not in GM foods.

Walumbe's* hand stalks our land AGAIN
Oh, each generation has to lose brilliant lives
So the rich can gorge themselves to death
while we die of hunger

Oh Walumbe's hand stalks this land AGAIN
Oi, oi, the young fall to death!

Lack of money and technical know-how makes it difficult for poor farmers to participate in the Kyoto Protocol’s carbon trading mechanism aimed at reversing global warming. Meanwhile, the global economic crisis may further undermine investment in carbon trade in African countries. The Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997, allows for carbon trade which involves industrialised countries lowering their greenhouse gas emissions by financing emission reduction projects in developing countries where investment is cheaper. This is called the clean development mechanism (CDM).