A report released by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) for the Fourth Conference on the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) slated to take place in Istanbul, Turkey in early May expressed a strong critique of the snail's pace of development, but stopped just short of calling for radical new policies to be implemented. The report, entitled 'Growth, Employment and Decent Work in the Least Developed Countries', solidified widespread fears that the 'graduation' rate of LDCs was abysmally low, with only three countries out of 51 - the Maldives, Botswana and Cape Verde - moving out of the category since it was created by the United Nations in 1970.

French economist Esther Duflo thinks poverty can be alleviated or even eradicated with the right policies. All it takes is for politicians to 'translate research into action', implementing programmes that have been shown to work. But that is easier said than done. Duflo, who last year won American Economic Association's prestigious John Bates Clark Medal, acknowledges that it is sometimes frustrating to get policy makers to apply the results of research that could improve people's lives. Sometimes they do not know the evidence and so cannot take the right approach, she adds.

South Africa has angrily rejected attacks on President Jacob Zuma by Zimbabwean official media, which on Sunday labeled him duplicitous and questioned his suitability to mediate between Zimbabwe’s squabbling ruling parties. In the clearest sign yet of growing tensions between Pretoria and Harare, the Zimbabwean government mouthpiece Sunday Mail said Zuma was erratic and an undesirable facilitator in the talks between President Robert Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai.

In this week's edition of the Emerging Powers News Round-Up, read a comprehensive list of news stories and opinion pieces related to China, India and other emerging powers...

The edition focuses on activities of the 2011 World Social Forum held recently in Dakar. An article by Sanusha Naidu provides commentary on the event and discussions that took place during a panel organised by Fahamu’s Emerging Powers in Africa (EMPA) Initiative. The second article, by Hayley Herman, looks at the second African journalist study tour conducted by the EMPA Initiative, this time to India, in January 2011. It provides a summary of some of the key points discussed during the visit. A third article by Xiao Yuhua emphasises the need for greater civil society cooperation between China and Africa, and opportunities the FOCAC framework can provide in developing this cooperation. Finally, Johanna Jansson and Wenran Jiang provide their review of the recently released Global Witness report titled 'China and Congo: Friends in Need'. The March edition is available .

‘The UN must take its responsibility seriously. The world is waiting and watching to see what actions will be taken against other outlaws. Gaddafi is one among many,’ writes Wazir Mohamed.

Industrial tariffs and the services industry are proving a major headache for trade negotiators attempting to conclude the Doha round of trade talks. After a decade of negotiation, the talks are far from conclusion. Despite attempts by the WTO to breathe new life into the talks, agricultural subsidies, the liberalisation of the services industry, industrial tariffs and non-tariff barriers remain sticking points.

Fierce contestations over the African state has weakened rather than strengthened states on the continent when it comes to performing their functions, said Omano Edigheji from the Human Sciences Research Council in South Africa. He was speaking at an event held in Ghana to discuss the impact of the global financial crisis on Africa. The neoliberal agenda, he argued, had very little democracy. If anything, it was very supportive of autocracy. In effect, the dominant neoliberal regime supported authoritarianism. The African state has to be both developmental and democratic.

The African Development Bank (AfDB) has established a $57-million fund for renewable energy projects across the continent. The Denmark-backed Sustainable Energy Fund for Africa joins two other similar green energy funds in the region worth $6-billion being run by the AfDB and twelve non-African donor countries.

Demba Moussa Dembélé

Lila Chouli

In this week's edition of the Emerging Powers News Round-Up, read a comprehensive list of news stories and opinion pieces related to China, India and other emerging powers...

In the face of the Rockefeller and Gates foundations-funded AGRA (Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa) lobby ‘to extend outdated 20th century industrial agriculture’ to the continent, Carol Thompson and Andrew Mushita look at alternative African approaches for improving agriculture that focus instead on farmers' rights and build upon local knowledge.

Countries with high numbers of people living with HIV, especially where access to antiretroviral treatment is patchy, are sitting on a drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB) time bomb, which may have in some instances already exploded. South Africa and other high burden countries are diagnosing the tip of the DR-TB iceberg with the large majority of people who have DR-TB (multi-drug and extensively-drug resistant TB) dying because they are not diagnosed or receive the medication when it is too late.

A joint declaration by 85 member countries of the United Nations’ Human Rights Council, calling for an end to violence, criminal sanctions and human rights violations against people because of their sexual orientation or gender identity is a very significant step forward towards international consensus on LGBTI people’s rights, according to ILGA, the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association. ILGA considers the fact that the amount of countries willing to sign on to a declaration like this is approaching a majority of UN members, is a credit to the increased sensitivity of national governments, and the work of international, regional and local LGBTI human rights activists all over the world, particularly the international coalition of LGBTI organisations that worked together with national governments and provided the information they requested through the process of preparing the declaration.

The recorded number of people displaced within their country due to conflict or violence rose to 27.5 million in 2010, which is the highest in a decade, according to a report by the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC). The report was launched by the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Valerie Amos, the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict Radhika Coomaraswamy, and the Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) Elisabeth Rasmusson. 'Close to three million people in 20 countries across the world were newly displaced from conflict and violence during 2010, and large scale displacement continues,' Rasmusson said.

As the West intervenes in the Libyan crisis, the Afreeka in Unity group demands ‘the immediate end of the imperialist invasion in the African country of Libya’.

A three-day international seminar on the theme 'The Global Crisis and Africa: Commodity Dependence and Structural Transformation' took place in Accra, Ghana’s capital last week. Forty scholars from Africa and other parts of the world participated in the meeting. Setting out the context and key issues for the meeting, Tetteh Hormeku, head of programmes at TWN-Africa, said the influence and impacts of the crisis in Africa were shaped largely by the nature of the continent’s systemic integration into the global economy as primary commodity export dependent economies.

Responding to the work of scholars like William Carroll, Samir Amin considers the evolution and shape of globalised capitalism and the extent to which it might be termed ‘transnational’ or ‘collective imperialism’. He stresses: ‘Globalisation is an inappropriate term. Its popularity is commensurate with the violence of ideological aggression that has prohibited henceforth the utterance of “imperialism”.’

It's the deal of the century: £150 a week to lease more than 2,500 sq km (1,000 sq miles) of virgin, fertile land. Bangalore-based food company Karuturi Global says it had not even seen the land when it was offered by the Ethiopian government with tax breaks thrown in. Karuturi snapped it up, and next year the company, one of the world's top 25 agri-businesses, will export palm oil, sugar, rice and other foods from Gambella province – a remote region near the Sudan border – to world markets.

In this week's edition of the Emerging Powers News Round-Up, read a comprehensive list of news stories and opinion pieces related to China, India and other emerging powers...