Patrick Smith wrote an insightful analysis for BBC News on the trend that keeps Africa in poverty — the continent’s illiberal and anti-democratic governments.
As Smith notes, at the beginning of 2005 British Prime Minister Tony Blair focused on debt relief as a means of lifting African nations out of poverty, but debt relief will do […]
Writing for TechCentralStation.Com, Pavel Kohout asks “where have all the children gone?” specifically in Europe where birth rates have fallen through the floor. Pavel ends up blaming everything from pay-as-you-go government-run retirement programs, heavy taxation that disproportionately effects younger people, and an increasingly secular culture. Oddly, what it all comes down to is this — […]
The European Union Commission demonstrated this month that developing nations hardly have a monopoly on official corruption that rises to the top of political systems.
At the November 19 meeting of the EU Commission President José Manuel Barroso shamefully threatened UK Independence Party’s Nigel Farage with “legal consequences” for daring to reveal the shady past of […]
Members of the United Nation’s Global Fund met this month and agreed to a new round of funding for projects to fight AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis in 2005.
The Global Fund was started in 2002 by the United Nations, but funding has been a major problem. Kofi Annan originally hoped that developed countries would contribute […]
The World Bank reports that East Asia is experiencing its fasted rate of economic growth since the 1997 financial crisis. The upshot is that the strong economic growth has lifted an estimated 40 million people out of poverty in China, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam.
In a press release, the World Bank’s Regional Vice President for East […]
Researchers at the University of California, Riverside, reported this month that they had developed a method to increase the resistance of grain crops to drought.
In research to be published in the December issue of The Plant Journal, the researchers describe how lowering the levels of an enzyme called ACC synthase in turn reduces production of […]
Earlier this month the United Nations released its Human Development Report 2004 which notes that the AIDS crisis has caused declines in life expectancy compared to 25 years ago.
In Rwanda, for example, the life expectancy in 1970-1975 was 44.6 years. In 2000-2005, however, it had declined to 39.3 years.
The African states of Tanzania, Cote […]
On January 25, 2004, the Protocol to the African Charter on Human Rights and Peoples’ Rights entered into force creating an African court to judge human rights violations on that continent.
Comoros paved the way for the Protocol to come into effect when it became the 15th African state to ratify the Protocol in December 2003. […]
The Food and Agricultural Organization released a report in November finding that the total number of people who are undernourished is now increasing by about 5 million a year. The number of people malnourished is now about 850 million according to the FAO report.
The number of undernourished people continues to decline in Latin America, the […]
Ronald Bailey reported for Reason magazine from the World Trade Organization meeting in Cancun, Mexico, including an excellent article on the idiocy of developed world farm subsidies and the surprising reaction to the subsidies from those who claim to represent the interests of the poor.
Bailey highlights the insidious inequity of farm subsidies in the United […]