As swarms of locusts began devastating the crops and pasture lands of West Africa during this year's rainy season, the first teams to provide assistance on the ground did not come from the traditional donor countries of Europe and North America. Instead, trucks loaded with spraying equipment and pesticide rolled across the Sahara desert only a few weeks after the first swarms of locusts from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya to help the struggling locust control teams of their poorer southern neighbours.

Kenya's proposal to introduce a 20-year moratorium on the ivory trade has been rejected at a meeting in Bangkok. The idea did not get the votes needed for approval at the biennial summit of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites). The Thai gathering also turned down a request from Namibia for an annual export quota of two tonnes of ivory. But delegates did back a continent-wide plan by African nations to crack down on domestic, unregulated ivory markets. Countries with these home markets will now either strictly control their trade or prevent it completely.

A United Nations conference has given Swaziland the green light to export some of its white rhinos and bring in trophy hunters to shoot the animals. The motion was passed by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, which is meeting in Bangkok. It follows last week's lifting of a ban on hunting the rarer black rhino in Namibia and South Africa. Swaziland claims money raised from exports of live animals or trophy hunts will be used for rhino conservation.

A Save the Children vehicle was hit by an anti-tank landmine on Sunday 10 October in the Um Barro area of North Darfur, Sudan. Two members of staff travelling in the vehicle were killed, Rafe Bullick (British, Programme Manager, North Darfur) and Nourredine Issa Tayeb (Sudanese, Water Engineer). The team were carrying out programme work in this area which until three weeks ago had been virtually inaccessible to the outside world.

Nigerian authorities are committing serious acts of intimidation against senior leaders and activists of the Nigerian trade union movement, said the ICFTU today. In a spate of incidents which began to flourish in the days prior to the general strike called by the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) after talks with the government to reverse petrol price increases of 25% broke down, the Nigerian authorities subjected the trade union leader Adams Oshiomole to unlawful arrest and ill treatment.

Over 200 global coffee-industry experts started a three-day international conference on organic coffee production, saying it was the way to go in order to improve incomes of farmers who had been affected by a slump in international coffee prices. The conference's theme was 'Fair trade in quality coffee' and stressed the notion that the ultimate individuals to benefit from organic coffee production will be the smallholder farmer.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has led international efforts to fight locusts across Africa and the Middle East for over 50 years, acting as a link between donors and the affected countries. But this time around, as the insects demolish crops across a wide swathe of West Africa, there have been problems. Donors ranging from the United States to the European Union have privately criticised the FAO for doing too little too late to tackle the current crisis and have accused the organisation of not being properly geared up to deal with it.

The dispute over natural resources is at the heart of some of the most intractable conflicts in Africa today, from Sudan to Congo to Nigeria. Even amid international efforts to bring greater transparency to the continent's resource exploration, the recent strife here is a microcosm of widespread theft and mismanagement, which observers attribute to a combination of colonial-era intervention, corrupt governments, and cynical behavior by Western policymakers and multinationals.

Certain conservationists in Africa say they will oppose any move to revive commercial exploitation of elephants, at the 13th Convention on the Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) which opens in Bangkok, in the first week of October. As the Bangkok conference gets underway, South Africa and Botswana are also lobbying for permission to sell another batch of ivory.

Kenya is pushing for an international ban on trade in lion trophies and skins, arguing that the number of the animals has declined sharply over the years as a result of hunting, loss of habitat and lack of prey. Kenya will press world governments to give the African lion maximum protection under an international treaty governing trade in endangered or threatened plants and animals.

The United Nations is backing a new project along the Limpopo River in Southern Afirca which is aimed to improve the way land along the river is managed, boost the ability of governments, local authorities and communities to respond to extreme flooding events and establish early-warning systems.

Eritrea may hold a major piece of the puzzle to the solution to the environmental crisis's and food security problems the world is facing. On the southwestern coast of the Red Sea, it is the home of two cutting edge environmental developments based on the use of sea water to produce food, animal fodder and the ability to green the desert. Using sustainable aqua culture techniques along with the often despised mangrove tree, a company called Seawater Farms has developed the first commercial scale, self sufficient, non polluting production of food for humans and animals using sea water in Eritrea.

Workers at a white-owned farm in Namibia have decided to take over the property in three weeks' time to protest the government's failure to implement a decision to expropriate land owners, a union official said on September 24th. A Namibian newspaper separately said that the workers were also planning to seize several other farms from owners that they say are exploiting them.

More than half of Harare's three million residents are either chronically short of water or without any at all just days before the start of the hottest month of the year. President Robert Mugabe's administration is facing allegations of incompetence as dams feeding the city, although polluted by untreated sewage, are full. The Zimbabwean capital has also run out of foreign currency to buy chemicals to treat its water.

Only a few days after Nigeria's military warned Mr. Asari's Niger Delta People's Volunteer Force that it would take off the "kid gloves" unless the militia stops threatening oil workers, an agreement has been made. Mr. Asari and five other colleagues met President Olusegun Obasanjo on Wednesday where both parties agreed to cease their attacks on each other.

On Friday, October 10 2003, before African head of states and foreign dignitaries in Kome, Chad, President Idriss Deby symbolically turned the tap that opened the flow of 225 000 barrels of oil. The $3.7 billion crown jewel project of the World Bank (WB) is the biggest foreign investment in sub-Sahara Africa. For the next 25 years, approximately 900 million barrels of oil will be pumped from 300 oil wells drilled in Doba, south of Chad, along a 1070km pipeline to Cameroon on the Atlantic coast.

WB financing, which totalled just 4 percent of the cost, was crucial to the project. The oil consortium comprising of Exxon, Petronas, and Chevron considered the participation of WB as a necessary political risk insurance, which enabled them to raise more money on international capital markets. Meanwhile, the WB embraced the project as an unparalleled opportunity for land-locked Chad to lift its 6.5 million population out of acute poverty, and for ocean-bordered Cameroon to generate much needed revenues.

Some months after Chad, the world's fifth poorest country, entered the pantheon of Africa's petro-states, it is worth taking stock of the overall project impacts now that the exploitation phase has started. Has the project broken free from the traditional gap between expectations and dismal realities of oil exploitation? Better still, has the oil been a Weapon of Mass Poverty (WMP) or a Weapon of Mass Development (WMD) to Chad and Cameroon?

The background to any petroleum project is key in determining the development outcomes. In fact, the underlying development problems associated with the extraction of black gold are not inherent in the resource itself. However, there is little disagreement on the ability of oil to ratchet up pre-existing conflict in a society; oil can become the very rationale for starting war. In this light, the socio-political environment in which WB approved the project was a potent recipe for poor development outcomes.

There is an endemic mix of corruption and civil strife in Chad and Cameroon. For instance, Chad, since independence, has been marred by a vicious cycle of conflicts and war. Besides the absence of basic ingredients for the growth of civil society, elections are shamelessly rigged, fraud is rife, and the regimes have shown a predilection to violently repress dissenting voices.

For example, villagers were coerced to give their accord to the project in consultations prior to its approval. Tales in Kome, where villagers were consulted in the presence of government forces and rebels, are all too glaring. The village chief was imprisoned for his unfavourable attitude, and the oil company representative arrived accompanied with military police. Given this background, most people were too intimidated to speak out against the project.

Given that Cameroon has consecutively crowned Transparency International's rating of the most corrupt countries in the world, it was no surprise that a bellicose climate of non- information disclosure concerning the project was the norm.

International civil society organisations in 1997 argued for the project's postponement to ensure the two countries upgrade their governance capacities. Contrarily, WB in June 2000 discounted this burgeoning corruption and civil strife in Cameroon and Chad respectively to approve the project. Shortly after, civil society partners were proved right when the Chadian government, on receiving $25 million from the project consortium as a signature bonus, admitted to have used the money in procuring arms to quell a rebel insurgence in the north of the country.

More recently, soon after the project's official inauguration last October, the government closed down the country's only independent radio station, FM Liberté, which had close ties to the country's human rights organisations. Then residents of the capital city, Ndjamena, witnessed the first public executions in more than a decade after court trails which human rights groups described as a mockery of justice. Hence, a warning signal to critical voices in the country to stay quiet.

It is worth noting that the WB's own Operations and Evaluation Department (OED) review commissioned in 2001 finds the Bank wanting on issues of governance. The review points out that while the WB is aware of the underlying causes for the underperformance of resource-rich countries, it has yet to formulate and implement viable approaches to address them. The recently released report of the WB sponsored Extractive Industry Review, primed the role of governance in shaping development outcomes of oil projects. Unequivocally, it recommended the WB to stop support for petroleum projects in areas of conflict or at high risk of conflict.

Broken livelihoods and promises

Approximately 880 km of the pipeline traverses Cameroon's fragile ecological zones. These include one of Africa's unique coastal rainforests, home to several indigenous peoples. Before the commencement of the construction phase, thousands of affected peoples living in villages and communities along the route of the pipeline were identified for eventual compensations. One hundred and fifty families were singled out for resettlement. Many village lands were expropriated, crops and plants destroyed and water sources polluted. The compensation plan, that included individual and communal compensations, was very limited in scope and inadequate to restore or improve on broken livelihoods.

Despite compensation being paid to replace agricultural land, most of the funds did not go into agricultural production or reinvestment to make provision for the future. The affected communities have been left alone with little or no skills to face the long-term impacts: funds had no impact in terms of generating new livelihoods for villagers; prices have increased due to shortage of labour and agricultural goods on the market; rural-urban exodus has increased and conflicts between locals and migrants attracted by the new found wealth have also increased.

The communal compensation plan, which had as its objective to compensate communities with social development projects, was very limited. Communities, who were supposed to identify projects themselves through consultations, were instead constrained to choose from a restrictive list of options proposed by the consortium.

The project thus raises a crucial issue: that of balancing profits with ecological and social principles in petroleum exploitation. Driven by the ethos of cost minimisation, the consortium was motivated to fast-track its operations, while time-intensive social and environmental components such as capacity building lag on. To what extent therefore can multinational corporations be constrained to synchronise the evolution of their exploitation operations with that of social and environmental safeguards?

Turning oil revenue into long-term benefits for the masses is the most contentious issue in resource-rich countries, particularly in Africa. Ultimately, this depends on the quality of public policy. The WB prides the revenue oversight mechanism in the Chad-Cameroon pipeline as an innovation to the extractive industry.

Under pressure from WB, the Chadian government decreed a petroleum management law in 1998. The law provides for the following division of the $2 billion royalties and dividends that would accrue from the project in the next 25 years: 10 percent set aside in a future generation-fund to prepare Chad for a post-oil future; the remaining 90 percent would pass through an offshore petroleum revenue account; 80 percent of which would go to five priority sectors (health, rural development, education, infrastructure, and environmental and water resources); 5 percent would go to the Doba oil producing region; and the remaining would be used by the Chadian government to tackle pressing operational needs.

To mainstream transparency, accountability, and participation, an oversight committee, comprising representatives from civil society, government, administration, and the judiciary was created to monitors the flows and approve spending from the offshore account.

Undoubtedly, this initiative is laudable. However, there are some flaws, which incapacitate it. For instance, three months after Chad started to taste the oil revenues, the committee lacked basic office facilities. In addition, the 5 percent allocated to the Doba region is inadequate. Worst of all, the allocations contained in the law can be changed by the government unilaterally after five years.

In addition, the law covers only direct revenues generated from royalties while indirect revenues such as taxes and customs duties are precluded. These could account for up to 45 percent of the total oil revenues expected over the lifetime of the project.

Conclusion

Several conclusions about petroleum development in Africa become apparent from the Chad-Cameroon pipeline project.

Firstly, oil corporations cannot be transformed into development agencies even with the best of intentions and monitoring mechanisms. Secondly, global wielders of development outcomes like the WB cannot exercise sufficient clout on the penchant for profits of oil multinationals. Thirdly, WB is incapable of respecting even its own weakening safeguard policies, which are premised on controlling damage rather than avoiding harm.

Fourthly, the embryonic neoliberal governance structures in Africa are incapable of constraining Foreign Direct Investments, which are principally attracted by ground mineral resources, to respect ecological and social principles. The flawed contention of the WB is "one cannot eat omelettes without breaking some eggs'' but the eggs are more often the poor who end up with no livelihood opportunity and become even poorer.

Finally, Public Private Partnerships (PPP), the buzz paradigm of sustainable development, are fundamentally incapable of readdressing the unequal power relations between fattening multinationals, weakening states and the World Bank.

As it turns sixty, it is time therefore to pressure the Bank to retire from financing development and environmental disasters like the pipeline. In sum, just like the Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, the Chad-Cameroon pipeline is an illusive Weapon of Mass Development. It is time to send some United Nations development experts to Chad and Cameroon to uncover Weapons of Mass Poverty.

* Akong Charles Ndika is an energy policy analyst with Global Village Cameroon

About 20,000 Ogiek live in the Mau Forest in Kenya's Rift Valley province, and also in Mount Elgon Forest in the western part of the country. Authorities sought to remove the Ogiek from their ancestral lands, on the grounds that the community was responsible for environmental degradation. Many viewed this as an attempt to provide land to members of the neighbouring Nandi community in a bid to gain support for government.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has updated their Guidelines for Drinking-water Quality (GDWQ) which will help pre-empt drinking water contamination. These guidelines will help regulators and water service providers the world over maintain and improve the quality of their drinking water, which could reduce the outbreak of water-borne diseases.

The overpopulation of elephants in parks throughout southern Africa has reached a crisis stage, most conservationists agree, and South Africa soon will consider whether to cull its herds. It would be the first culling on the continent in a decade. Proponents say it is necessary because the elephants are fast destroying valuable woodlands in many parks, including some 2,000-year-old thick-trunked baobabs.

In addition to DRC's shaky peace, her five World Heritage site national parks and their wildlife and unique ecosystems remain endangered. Although donors at a Unesco conference in Paris have just pledged $40m to protect DR Congo's natural heritage, conservationists on the ground have become victims of attacks by hundreds of roaming armed men who operate in the park's vast territory.