One person was killed and six others were injured during a food riot inside a camp that houses Chadian refugees in the Sudanese region of Darfur, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reports. The agency said the incident occurred on Tuesday morning at the camp in Um Shalaya, about 70 kilometres southeast of El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur state.

The government of the Peoples’ Republic of China says it has resolved to build 100 primary schools across Africa, with Liberia considered as one of the favorites to benefit from the gesture. The special envoy on African Affairs at the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Mr. Liu Guijin, said in addition to the construction of these schools, his government has planned to build 13 hospitals across the continent to assist with the medical needs of the countries that would benefit.

This article from Future Medicine reports on research into the effectiveness of male circumcision (MC) as a means of preventing HIV in Africa. Findings show an average 65 percent reduction in HIV infection as a result of MC, rising to 76 per cent in South Africa where HIV prevalence was highest. MC has also been shown to eliminate or significantly reduce the risk of acquiring or spreading many sexually transmitted infections including syphilis as well as human papilloma virus.

The Program Officer of the Better Life Youth Organization, Jefferson J. A. Telar has called for the inclusion of sex education in the Ministry of Education curriculum. He said if sex education forms part of the curriculum, it would minimize the high level of teenage pregnancy in the country.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon has called on the Zimbabwean government to lift restrictions on aid deliveries, to stop "a catastrophic humanitarian crisis". He said curbs on aid agencies imposed in June meant that less than 20% of 1.5m people in need had received help.

Antiretroviral (ARV) drugs are free in Mozambique, and access to them is relatively easy, but for many HIV-positive Mozambicans the real challenge is a far more basic problem of finding enough food. ARVs are powerful drugs that need to be taken with nourishment. Regular and nutritious meals are also needed to help the body's own defences fight the opportunistic infections associated with AIDS.

Petrol tankers parked nose-to-tail line the five-kilometre stretch of road from the southern Nigerian town of Eleme to its refinery, waiting to fuel up and begin their long journey home. If the trip runs smoothly, a tanker leaving the big cities of the north at dawn should arrive at Eleme, in the troubled oil-rich delta region, by early evening.

The role of input subsidies in stimulating growth and addressing food security and poverty alleviation objectives has re-emerged as an important debate in agricultural policy. Sharp increases in world food and fertiliser prices in 2007 and 2008 have created a sense of urgency in meeting productivity and social welfare goals, and have put fertiliser subsidies high on the list of options for government and donor responses to the crisis.

Men are at much higher risk of becoming lost from HIV care programmes according to an analysis of clients attending USAID-AMPATH partnership’s HIV clinics in Western Kenya. This study, which also identified reasons why both men and women may be at risk of loss to follow-up (LTFU), was presented on Tuesday at the XVII International AIDS Conference in Mexico City.

The health department has withdrawn two widely-dispensed tuberculosis (TB) drug combination batches after preliminary investigations revealed the drugs became unstable under long-term storage, ultimately placing patients at risk of not receiving their optimal dosage.

I am wondering how much more evidence on the pre-structural adjustment era and on structural adjustment needs to be created before our friends from the NGO community stop telling this misconceived story-line that everything was just fine in African agriculture, until the bad World Bank and IMF pressured the poor African governments into dismantling their “elaborate system of public agencies that provided farmers with access to land, credit, insurance inputs and cooperative organization.” (quote from the article).

If these systems were working so well and reached the smallholders with all these services, then why didn’t Africa have a small-holder based Green Revolution prior to structural adjustment? Why did agriculture fail to even keep pace with population growth? There is ample evidence that many of these “elaborate systems” the article refers to mainly served elites who appropriated large rents rather than reaching smallholders. To name just one source, the book by Djurfeld et al. (2005) on “The African Food Crisis - Lessons from the Asian Green Revolution” provides ample evidence on the large-farmer bias and the rent-seeking by bureaucrats that characterized agricultural policies on the continent. Independent “cooperative organization” of farmers, for example, was destroyed by authoritarian governments long before structural adjustment (as in the case of coffee farmers in Ghana).

So yes, agricultural spending has been reduced under structural adjustment, but why is the author not asking in whose pockets most of that expenditure had ended up the first place? It is also important to consider what governments actually did--as compared what they were portraying to do--under structural adjustment. As Jayne et al. (2002:1967) show for Eastern and Southern Africa, “many of the most fundamental elements of the reform programs either remain unimplemented, were reversed within several years, or were implemented in such a way as to negate private sector investment incentives.”

Other authors (Cooksey, Pletcher) also provide evidence on the same point. And van de Walle shows that many African governments and elites were quite well able to protect their own interests under structural adjustment. I would be the last one to defend the Bank’s role under structural adjustment or thereafter, and I think it is very important that NGOs criticize the Bank and IFPRI for whatever goes wrong. For example, I think it took the Bank far too long to move away from the position that “all subsidies are bad” to considering “market-smart subsidies.” And one can certainly criticize IFPRI for starting to research this topic only now. However, I wonder when the NGO community will finally start to acknowledge that one can’t blame international organizations alone - African governments themselves—especially those who were not accountable to their own people--have played an important role in the destruction of African agriculture, as well.

* Regina Birner is Senior Research Fellow International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)
(for references, see below)

A comment on . Any attempt to cover a very complex subject in the space of a few pages must inevitably be somewhat superficial in its analysis. Walter Bello’s ‘The ‘destruction of African agriculture’ is a good attempt to do so but suffers from a number of analytical shortfalls. While the article starts with biofuel production it does not argue against the disastrous impact that biofuels has had on the global food crisis, and glosses over the fact that it is one of the major contributing factors at the present time. But I do not want to dwell on this and must myself be subject to the same criticism of trying to say too much in too little words.

The conflation in this article of structural adjustment, state failure and the more recent policies of global institutions in which privatisation has been mandatory for the developing world (together with the deforestation for, and use of, food crops for biofuel production) does little to clarify our current food crisis or the destruction of Africa’s agriculture. Furthermore the fact that African governments do little to promote agriculture either by investing a higher proportion of their national budget in this sector, or by enacting policies that link agricultural production to environmental and biodiversity conservation, raises some important issues of governance and accountability to their poorer citizens. But all this is old news. The point that we wish to emphasise is that the rather predictable outcome of a privatisation process should not detract from the fact that business as usual, the industrial model of agriculture, is no solution – to repeat the findings of the latest IAASTAD Report - to the current food crisis.

In this regard we want to refer to the Malawi success story promoted in the article, one that is dependent on continued donor support, affordability in the face of growing fertiliser prices, and state patronage. In attributing the success of the scheme to farming inputs, insufficient attention has been paid to the fact that rainfall in Malawi over the past two agricultural seasons has been optimal. We are delighted that Malawi farmers were able to grow more food and our wish is for this to continue. At risk of being harbingers of doom, it is clear that it cannot and will not continue – the sad fact is that Africa is susceptible to floods and droughts. The droughts will return, if not next year, then the year after, or the year after that. And at this point of time the crops will again fail. In any event donors will most probably have changed their priorities by then, but farmers’ reliance on an unsustainable model of agriculture will remain.

So what about sustainability? Part of the food crisis is the high costs of an agricultural model dependent on monocultures and fossil fuels at the expense of the environment. The threat of global warming tells us that we need to reduce risk and diversify agricultural production away from a reliance on single crops towards a diversified agriculture that is more in keeping with agricultural systems which have served Africa for millennia and more closely mimic the natural ecosystems. Hence the use of readily available local resources using farmers own skills and knowledge – in other words a range of technologies, practices and systems that require few external inputs. The article shows little concern for the environment, while even the Malawi Government is recognising the unsustainbility of highly subsidised input packages in the current economic crisis. It is for this reason that it has asked us, through the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, to launch a national composting programme, to reduce reliance on an intervention that it cannot afford and neither can the farmers which it is designed to benefit.

So the World Bank, with regard to subsidies in this case, is right, even if it is not for the correct reasons. And while we must recognise the mistakes of the rather short-sighted policies of the past – of which structural adjustment provides us with a devastating example – we should look forwards not backwards. The positive role that the state must play should be re-emphasised in a policy context which recognises farmers as custodians of the environment and plays an affirming role in setting the policies that empower them while making them responsible for conserving the agricultural and biological diversity on which posterity depends. This is real agency for farmers as citizens and one in which they will no longer be subject to the fads and fashions of donor policies or the edicts of global multilateral institutions.

I've read Walden Bello's article, with keen interest and, whilst I concur with the gist, I am compelled to point out some factual inaccuracies and oversights on Malawi.

1) The amount of deaths from starvation in 2001-02 is approximated at 42,000 people and not i,500 as stated.

2) The maize shortage was indeed exacerabted by maize exports (approx 65000 tonnes) to Kenya nad other countries, at the behest of the IFIs, but it was further exacerbated by unscrupulous and corrupt speculation by local traders posing as fronts fro political elites - this is now popularly known as the 'maize scam'.

3) Whilst we did, indeed, enjoy a bumper crop last year, the much heralded maize exports to Zimbabwe and Lesotho appear to have been conducted without proper consideration for maintaining an adequate buffer stock to satisfy local needs, which is why people are suffering at present, with long queues waiting interminably to buy maize at official (lower) prices at the Agricultural Development & Marketing Corporation (ADMARC) Depots - and, after leaving empty handed, are forced to buy from private traders at MK3,500 (US$24) for a 50kg bag.whilst Ministers insist that there 'plenty' of maize available.

4) The subsidised fertiliser scheme, whilst conceptually laudable, has also produced an extremely fertile ground for corruption at all levels due to a weak and opaque management framework which provide virtually no window for independent monitoring. These factors are undermine the incredible potential to wrest the people of Malawi from the perpetual despair of grinding poverty and hunger.

The decisions of the executive council and the assembly of heads of state and government from the recently concluded African Union summit in Egypt are now available for download.

The AU Commission chairman Jean Ping has welcomed the accord between Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and the Movement for Democratic Change leader Morgan Tsvangirai to begin negotiations on power sharing. While Ping called it ‘a significant step in the efforts aimed at overcoming the crisis facing Zimbabwe and promoting national reconciliation in the country’, the US insisted that the talks should lead to new elections. Meanwhile, African civil society organisations have welcomed attempts being made by Zimbabwean political parties to end the current crisis and have called on African leaders of all levels, the Southern African Development Community and the AU to demand an end to serious human rights violations in the country and publicly denounce the violence.

African trade ministers, meeting at an annual general meeting of the African trade insurance agency, agreed to remove barriers to regional trade and work towards improving regional transport and telecommunication infrastructure to bolster trade within Africa. The AU, regional economic communities, development partners and NEPAD’s comprehensive Africa agriculture development programme have ‘kick-started initiatives aimed at staving off the high food prices’. As the third Accra High Level conference (HLF-3) on aid effectiveness approaches, it is suggested that the scope of the application of the Paris Declaration principles should be broadened beyond Official Development Assistance and should govern all aid flows. HLF-3 is expected to focus on the building of more ‘effective and inclusive partnerships through constructive engagement of new and emerging donors, private foundations, global funds and civil society’.

As Africa celebrated pan-African women’s day on July 31, African Union chairman Jean Ping conveyed his special greetings and congratulations to all women of Africa recalling the history of ‘gender consciousness’ within the institution.

The ‘Making the eHealth connection: global partnerships, local solutions’. conference began in Italy this week. Meanwhile, Aids activists from francophone African countries warned that ‘the continual and growing outbreaks of violence against members of the gay community in Africa are jeopardising efforts undertaken to combat HIV both within that group and across the population as a whole’. Further, in order to achieve an Aids-free generation, African governments will need to change the political culture and, in particular, ‘African parliaments need to play a more assertive role in exercising oversight over how state funds are expended – and in ensuring HIV/Aids funding is put to its intended use’. In addition, Africans should partner with countries such as Cuba who have expertise in tackling the pandemic and have shown solidarity in with the continent in a myriad of ways.

Lastly, the AU commission is assessing the progress made in implementing the ‘plan of action on the family in Africa’, adopted by the assembly of the heads of state in 2004. Country responses to the evaluation will be submitted to the first AU conference of ministers in charge of social development to be held in October 2008.

Shutting down clinical trial centres in Africa in response to continued failure of HIV vaccine candidates would be a big mistake, researchers warned at the International AIDS Conference in Mexico City yesterday (5 August).

For the first time, the health of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people in Cameroon will be treated as priority in a newly established Health Care centre in Douala by Alternatives-Cameroun, a gay organisation in Cameron. Funded by a French group, Sidaction, and the American Foundation for AIDS Research, AMFAR, the centre has been named Access Centre.

Preaching abstinence to the young has not worked, nor has sex work been eradicated. Experts gathered in Mexico City for the 17th International AIDS Conference say it is time to put public policies under the microscope and see why they have failed.

Concern over the growing international trend towards the criminalisation of HIV transmission or exposure was documented in a Wednesday morning session at the XVII International AIDS Conference that highlighted “criminalisation creep” in Europe and Central Asia as well as the rapid spread of “highly inefficient laws” in West and Central Africa.

An expanded version of the Sudan Open Archive (SOA) is now online. The new version - SOA 2.0 - features an improved user interface and open access to a thousand books and documents on all aspects of Sudan. The Archive makes a wide range of material available - and searchable - in digital form for the first time. It also incorporates an internet guide with links to several hundred Sudan-related websites. SOA 2.0 includes dictionaries, material on human rights and environmental issues and a collection of reports on local peace meetings in north and south Sudan.

“The elevation of an agricultural people to the condition of countries at once agricultural, manufacturing and commercial, can only be accompanied under the law of free trade, when the various nations engaged at the time of manufacturing industry shall be in the same degree of progress and civilization; when they shall place no obstacle in the way of the economical development of each other, and not impede their respective progress by war or adverse commercial legislation.” - Friedrich List, in the National System of Political Economy

People often say when Africans argue for an integrated national African economy, they are self-indulgent entertaining nothing but a futile illusion. They claim that to argue that Africa must unite economically, ‘knowledge-ically’, politically, and ’society-ically’ is to day-dream and to give in to fantasy. They assert that Africa does not exist in anything, form or shape other than as a geographical accident.

Of course, they would hardly say this of the USA, for example, where 'the tribes of the whole world’, and people have united under one constitution and national flag, and right now seemingly poised to electing an African –American with a father from Kenya! To claim more than a geographical reality to Africa is often condemned and reproached. The pursuit of African integration is said to be a too pie in the sky dream, fantasy, utopian, unrealistic, which distracts from taking realistic incremental actions. Thus, going for unity on a big scale is pronounced dangerous!