Dear Sisters and Brothers around the World: We call upon organizations and individuals around the world to express their international solidarity with the struggle of the Ghanaian people to stop the privatisation of their water services. World Bank policies require the Government of Ghana to privatise water in order to gain access to external assistance and soft loans. Five multinational corporations have bid for the urban water service in Accra, most of them with annual sales larger than the GDP of Ghana, and all of them with proven records of socially irresponsible practices. The National Forum on Water Privatisation took place in Accra, Ghana during May 16-19, 2001. At the end of four days of vigorous and exciting debate, the participants in the Forum founded the Ghana National Coalition Against the Privatisation of Water, called the "Ghana National CAP of Water" and drafted the Accra Declaration, attached below.

Scientists, governments and environmental groups from around the world are planning a cooperative assessment of all the planet's wildlife habitats and ecosystems. The United Nations Environment Programme unveiled the plans at World Environment Day 2001 celebrations in New York, Tokyo and Torino, Italy this week.

What are policy processes? Why do they matter? Why are environmental policies based upon highly questionable assumptions so persistent? How and why are particular types of knowledge established as policy? Can policy processes be opened up to more diverse forms of knowledge?

African journalists can enhance their understanding and reporting of environmental issues at this workshop offered by the Reuters Foundation.

Children displaced by years of drought are dying every day from malnutrition and disease in a situation that is likely to get worse unless urgent action is taken, a UNICEF press statement released on Tuesday in Addis Ababa said. "Mortality rates among IDP [internally displaced people] children in Ethiopia's Somali region are alarming. Several children are dying from malnutrition and related diseases every day, the statement quotes UNICEF nutritionist Yvonne Grellety as saying.

A Canadian mining company may lose its operating license to mine titanium if Kenyan members of parliament pass a motion seeking to establish whether it is operating according to international and local environmental standards. If passed, this would be yet another obstacle on the path of Tiomin Kenya Limited since it was awarded a license to mine titanium at the Kenyan Coast. Tiomin Kenya is a wholly owned local subsidiary of Canadian mining firm, Tiomin Resources Inc.

Operation Prevail, the code name for the South African government's financial restructuring plan for the country's national parks, has now moved to the Kruger National Park, the crown jewel in South Africa's park system. Under the plan to resolve the park system's tight financial situation, some 663 positions are being made "redundant," at Kruger, Park Director David Mabunda told employees May 18. This will result in a 26 percent reduction in the park's payroll.

Grahamstown, South Africa. African journalists can enhance their understanding and reporting of environmental issues at this workshop offered by the Reuters Foundation. Past environmental journalism workshops have included practical seminars, training and field trips designed to increase journalists' awareness of environmental issues, including genetic modification, global warming and sustainable development. The workshops are designed to improve journalists' techniques for writing effective, informative stories with impact.

The United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development scheduled to take place in Johannesburg, South Africa next September will cost more than 400 million rand, the equivalent of US$ 50 million, a joint meeting of Parliament's two environmental affairs committees heard on Tuesday.

A large-scale humanitarian disaster loomed as the lives of drought-affected populations of central, western and southern Sudan entered a more difficult phase, according to the latest summary report from UNOCHA, for the month of April. In addition to some 600,000 people being in dire need of food and supplies, infant mortality was increasing, malnutrition rates were rising - especially among children, and new segments of society were experiencing vulnerability, it said.

Royal Dutch/Shell Group, the second-largest publicly traded oil company, will team up with the World Bank to spread the benefits of its oil projects to Nigeria's people, in a bid to repair Shell's image in the country. Shell's plans to join with the lender in setting up a $30 million fund to finance oil service contractors is drawing fire from human rights and environmental groups, which say the bank is
encouraging what they call Shell's abuses in the oil-rich Niger Delta.

The Nairobi River, one of the most polluted rivers in Kenya, is the focus of an intense cleanup campaign by the United Nations Environment Programme which is headquartered in Kenya's capital city of Nairobi, through which the river runs.

Shell's deepwater subsidiary in the country, Shell Nigeria Exploration and Production Company Limited (SNEPCO), has announced the discovery of another substantial crude oil find in the company's oil block located in Nigeria's offshore deepwaters.

Bushmeat has become the most immediate threat to the future of wildlife populations in Africa, according to the Bushmeat Crisis Task Force. The task force, a consortium of conservation organizations and professionals, has just completed an international meeting to develop an action plan for countering this threat to wildlife.

At a conference in Stockholm to sign the international Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs), officials from 120 countries and a host of environmental and civil society groups have gathered to celebrate the adoption of a treaty that will restrict a group of chemicals the United Nations has labelled the most dangerous in the world. The convention will enter into force once ratified by 50 countries.

European companies with their sights set on potentially huge profits from Sudan's rich oilfields are turning a blind eye to massive human rights abuses, says a new report calling for cross-border controls on big business.

Food security prospects have improved in arable districts and western pastoral areas of Kenya following favourable short and long rains, but food insecurity persists in pastoral districts in the east, according to the latest country report from USAID's Famine Early Warning System (FEWS). Food production trends would be uncertain in these pastoral areas after critically needed rains were low and poorly distributed, it said.

The United Nations Security Council has announced the reopening of the Congo River to commercial traffic, a vital thoroughfare which has been blocked for two-and-a-half years as a result of the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Criticisms of the Bush administration's National Energy Policy unveiled Thursday are being expressed by a wide range of citizens groups and politicians from across the political spectrum and around the world. Objections to its reliance on fossil fuels and nuclear power rather than renewables and conservation dominate the comments.

A man whirls a whip around his head and brings it down hard on a Kenyan youth clad in a "Save our Forests" T-shirt. The whip cracks again and a mob starts hurling rocks at a busload of environmental activists from Kenya's Green Belt Movement, barring their way to a patch of threatened woodland. A rock shatters a window, blood oozes from a passenger's head and the bus roars away from the village, the visitors abandoning their plans to expose forest destruction.