The fourth largest river in Africa, the mighty Zambezi, is a lifeblood to 32 million people, from land-locked Zambia to Mozambique on the Indian Ocean. But its blessing is also its curse. Climate change is blamed for an increase in rainfall and flooding along the river's 2,574 kilometre course through Angola, Zambia, Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique.

The boom in the acquisition of arable land in Africa by foreign companies and governments has stirred an international debate between international institutions such as the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and non-governmental groups and independent experts. The debate centres on whether the transfer of land from local farmers to foreign investors represents a development opportunity for the continent.

A confidential memo by the head of a delegation of the Kimberley Process, which recently wrapped up an investigation into the reports of violence and killings in Marange, has detailed the ‘horrific violence’ used by the army against civilians there. The Kimberley Process, a scheme tasked with halting the trade in ‘blood diamonds, sent the delegation to investigate Zimbabwe’s ‘compliance’ with international diamond trade standards.

Zimbabwe has dismissed allegation of any fresh farm invasions, a preliminary report of the Joint Monitoring and Implementation Committee fact-finding mission said. The Minister of Industry and Commerce, Professor Welshman Ncube, said the committee was in its second week to determine if there are reports of farm invasions in the country but said present findings have revealed that there are only a “spate of land disputes” as opposed to intrusions.

An acute shortage of water resources has hit Kenya pushing the country into a crisis as water sources dry up in what experts say is a looming ecological disaster. The shortage has been complicated by drying up of water sources including rivers, lakes , dams ,wells and springs and worsened by a an ongoing 10 month drought.

The government of Equatorial Guinea has set new low standards of political and economic malfeasance in handling its billions of dollars in oil revenue instead of improving the lives of its citizens, Human Rights Watch has said in a report. The 107-page report, "Well Oiled: Oil and Human Rights in Equatorial Guinea," details how the dictatorship under President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo has used an oil boom to entrench and enrich itself further at the expense of the country's people.

In Kenyan history, the land issue has been an emotive issue. To address this problem, the government embarked on the formation of a national land Policy through a widely consultative process with the aim of producing a policy whose vision was to guide the country towards efficient, sustainable and equitable use of land for prosperity and posterity.

Concern is mounting in Kenya that the government has leased a big slice of agricultural land to the Qatari foreign investors to produce food for export. Land rights activists are questioning the rationale of such a move, claiming the land could be used for domestic food production. The activists say that they are privy to information that the government has leased 40,000 hectares of land to the Qatari administration for cultivation of fruits and vegetables for export.

The oil industry in the Niger Delta of Nigeria has brought impoverishment, conflict, human rights abuses and despair to the majority of the people in the oil-producing areas, according to a new Amnesty International report. Pollution and environmental damage caused by the oil industry have resulted in violations of the rights to health and a healthy environment, the right to an adequate standard of living (including the right to food and water) and the right to gain a living through work for hundreds of thousands of people.

Efforts to guard Uganda against looming food insecurity are held back by government’s failure to encourage and sensitize farmers on what specific fertilizer types to use in order to rejuvenate the increasingly less fruitful soils. Scientists warn that despite availability of some improved seed varieties, soils in the landlocked East African country can no longer produce food sustainably to feed a rapidly growing population.

Mali consumes 65 million tonnes of wood per year, which represents 90% of the country's energy consumption, according to the Malian government. Despite the adoption of a national programme for the increase in the use of butane gas and the Domestic Energy Strategy (SED), wood consumption remains high in the country.

It is no myth that repressive regimes are becoming increasingly more savvy in their ability to effectively employ sophisticated filtering, censoring, monitoring technologies (often courtesy of American companies like Cisco) to crack down on resistance movements. In other words, political activists need to realize that their regimes are becoming smarter and more effective, not dumber and hardly clueless.

cc With South Africa exploring the possibility of entering into a free trade agreement (FTA) with China, Ron Sandrey and Hannah Edinger consider the pros and cons. The authors also explore some of the non-tariff barriers impeding trade, and the substantial discrepancies between China's reported imports from South Africa and South Africa's reported imports to China.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) has launched a USD$ 8 million initiative to help build the disaster resilience of 600,000 people living along the Zambezi river in seven southern African countries. The Zambezi River Basin Initiative (ZRBI) is a response to "a dramatic increase in the numbers of floods along the river basin” according to Farid Abdulkadir, IFRC disaster management coordinator for the southern Africa region.

This film is about the eNkwalini community’s struggle for land rights. It highlights the attacks by the local neighbouring farmer who has been trying to evict them since 2005 when he started to demolish their houses. The film tells a story of a rural community that is waging a struggle against ferocious tides of oppression. It is a story about a territorial war between the poor rural community and rich land owner.

A Zimbabwean minister has denied any killings in the eastern Marange diamond fields, where rights groups have sounded the alarm over the forcible evictions of small-scale miners. Zimbabwe's deputy mining minister Murisi Zwizwai told a meeting of the Kimberley Process, the international scheme to curb the sale of "blood diamonds" , that the situation in Marange had been brought under control.

Banana peels, sugar cane and manioc are widely found in the trash piles that collect outside of homes in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. They're also the ingredients being used by environmental advocates to create a light, inexpensive cooking fuel that could ease deforestation in the region. Clement Kitambala, a Congolese advocate, and Ned Meerdink, an Advocacy Project (AP) Peace Fellow, came upon an idea online to make briquettes out of organic waste material. Mr Kitambala, who also produces the environmental newsletter Tunza Mazingira ("Conserve the Environment" in Swahili), secured $150 in funding from a United Nations fieldworker to construct a wood press for making the briquettes (shown below). He recently produced the first batch of about 500.

Following a toxic spill in the north of Tanzania's Mara region by the Canadian company Barrick Gold Corporation, of Norwegian Church Aid Tanzania [mp3] is interviewed by Zahra Moloo of Montreal's Amandla! radio about the situation on the ground, local mobilisation and the potential extent of environmental degration. Overflows of toxic sludge have been a regular fixture for residents in the area, with fields and livestock being exposed to contaminated water. Questions also remain over the relationship between the local community and the mining giant, with reports of shootings from security personnel, denial of the use of road infrastructure and land grabbing commonplace.

MPs in Uganda have demanded an explanation on the fluctuating rainfall pattern, which they said had become difficult for farmers to understand. Discussing the looming famine in many parts of the country, several MPs said farmers could not tell when to plant the crops due to the erratic rainfall patterns. Samuel Odonga Otto (FDC) said Pader district had experienced drought in the last two months which weather experts had said would be a rainy season.

With the snow-capped peak of Mount Kilimanjaro providing a backdrop under simmering tropical sunshine, a group of women in Mijongweni village break into song. The song, in Swahili, praises the benefits of protecting the environment and living in harmony with nature for the survival of generations; values vital to the survival of one of the rarest hardwood trees in the world, the African blackwood. Known to locals as mpingo, the African blackwood (dalbergia melanoxylon) is a tree that has been exploited to extinction in southern Ethiopia and Kenya and is currently only found in Tanzania and northern Mozambique. Tanzania boasts large tracts of natural forest and woodlands