The Shell Nigeria Exploration and Production Company, SNEPCO, has been fined U.S.$5 billion over the massive oil spill that occurred at its Bonga oil field on December 20, 2011. This was disclosed by the director general, National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency, NOSDRA, Dr. Peter Idabor, when he appeared before the House of Representatives Committee on Environment.

The global battle for natural resources - from food and water to energy and precious metals – is only beginning, and will intensify to proportions that could mean enormous upheavals for every country, leading academics and business figures told a conference in Oxford. Sir David King, former chief scientific adviser to the UK government, who convened the two-day Resource 2012 conference, told the Guardian: 'We are nowhere near realising the full impact of this yet. We have seen the first indications – rising food prices, pressure on water supplies, a land grab by some countries for mining rights and fertile agricultural land, and rising prices for energy and for key resources [such as] metals. But we need to do far more to deal with these problems before they become even more acute, and we are not doing enough yet.'

In the context of the current rush for land in which the flows of land based wealth and power are being increasingly concentrated in the hands of dominant social classes and groups, an urgent debate on the future of farming is needed. Rather than accepting and seeking to regulate land grabs as if they were inevitable, this paper from the Transnational Institute proposes alternative investment opportunities which challenge the normative assumptions of the model of large-scale, industrial agriculture that these land appropriations promote.

The World Bank should ensure that the rights of indigenous peoples and the environment are rigorously protected before funding a power transmission line connecting Kenya to a controversial dam in Ethiopia, Human Rights Watch said in a letter to World Bank President Jim Yong Kim. The World Bank's board of directors was scheduled to meet on 12 July to consider the project. The World Bank project has the important goal of improving electrical service to people in Kenya, where more than 80 per cent of the population does not have access to electricity. However, the bank has been unwilling to apply the institution's social and environmental safeguard policies.

Copyright, and patents, were once about balance – balancing the public interest of encouraging creativity with the public interest of access to creative works and intellectual endeavours, states this article on copyright in the digital age. 'Copyright is not encouraging creativity or intellectual endeavour. By creating private property on goods that were paid for publicly (through paying the academics for their time), all copyright is doing here is creating artificial property rights, artificial restrictions on information.'

Survival International says it has received disturbing reports from members of several tribes in Ethiopia’s Lower Omo Valley, which describe how the government is destroying their crops to force them to move off their land into designated resettlement areas. Those most affected by the land grabs are Suri, Bodi and Mursi pastoralists, and the Kwegu hunter-gatherer people.

A new report provides details from the ground as the investor faces the Iowa Ethics Commission.

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On Wednesday 27 June 2012, at approximately 7am, one bulldozer arrived at Abonnema Wharf waterfront and, under the supervision of heavily armed security forces (members of the Joint Task Force (JTF), Operation Polo Shield), began to demolish buildings in the community around 11am. Later a second bulldozer arrived. No notice was given prior to the demolition, reports Amnesty International. The demolition was carried out despite a High Court order in November 2011 restraining the Rivers State government from demolishing the community.

Saudi Arabia has a major problem with water scarcity and only 1% of its land is suitable for agriculture. 'Saudi investors have reportedly planned or concluded investments covering 800,000 hectares of land in Africa (accounting for almost 70% of all large deals struck by Saudi firms globally),' says Standard Bank in a recent report.

While Botswana’s government has never officially admitted to forcibly relocating the G/wi and G//ana communities of the Basarwa indigenous group to make way for diamond-mining operations in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR), critics have long suspected this to be the main motivation for the removals. When it became known in late 2010 that Gem Diamonds would begin mining operations in the CKGR, suspicions seem to have been confirmed. Basarwa were granted the rights to occupy land within the CKGR, as a result of a court ruling in 2006, after years of attempted negotiations, struggle and litigation. There is concern over monitoring and ensuring that the needs of the communities in the CKGR are met, says this article from

The process of awarding oil exploration licences targeting Lake Malawi and other areas was so fraught with irregularities that the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) took preliminary steps to investigate senior government officials. In separate interviews, two former ministers of Natural Resources, Energy and the Environment – Goodall Gondwe and Grain Malunga – and other technical officials who spoke anonymously, provided evidence of irregular procedures that could have led to unqualified and/or not evaluated companies getting licences to explore oil in Malawi.

A large tract of near-pristine Afromontane forest has been found in Angola's Namba Mountains, tripling the amount of this habitat that was thought to survive in Angola. The site meets the criteria for a new Important Bird Area (IBA), holding one globally threatened species, and assemblages of restricted range and biome-restricted bird species. Afromontane forest is the most localised and threatened habitat type in Angola. By the early 1970s, only 200 hectares was estimated to remain, mainly at the Mount Moco IBA, and perhaps in the Namba Mountains, where most forest was thought to be degraded by logging.

This Fact Sheet highlights the involvement of the EU in the global land grab, both directly through the involvement of European capital and corporations in the acquisition of land and indirectly, through the suite of EU policies which are transforming land into a global commodity. It concludes with a number of concrete demands and proposals for the EU to end its collusion in the global land grab and align with international human rights law, especially the Right to Food.

A new report from Global Witness reveals that Zimbabwe's Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) appears to have received off budget financing from a Hong Kong-based businessman as the CIO and other security agencies continue to prepare to influence elections due to take place sometime in 2013, reports the latest issue of the AfricaFocus Bulletin, which contains a press release on the report from Global Witness, the Executive Summary of the report, and selected additional excerpts.

A United Nations agency seeking to safeguard the world's cultural and natural heritage has rejected its advisors' call to include Lake Turkana on a list of endangered sites. The decision is a blow to Kenyan activists who have been fighting construction of a dam planned for a river in Ethiopia that feeds Lake Turkana.

Ben Cousins, co-author of 'Land, Power & Custom: Controversies generated by South Africa’s Communal Land Rights Act' and Research Chair at the Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at UWC, recently talked with Talk Radio 702 about the difficulties surrounding land distribution. He stated that the fair distribution of land was an enormously complex issue, but that there was no need to change the Constitution in order to distribute land. You can listen to the podcast by clicking on the link provided.

The organisers of the campaign to name and shame the worst Olympic sponsor have announced preliminary voting results that show mining company Rio Tinto in the lead with BP in second place and Dow Chemical third. People have voted in the thousands on the Greenwash Gold website and final results will be announced and medals awarded just before the start of the games.

Months after the central government tried to quell land speculation in oil-rich Bunyoro by suspending the issue of new land titles, ‘Oil in Uganda’ visited Kasenyi, on the north eastern shores of Lake Albert, and unearthed a tale of double-dealing and thuggery seemingly abetted by district leaders and security officials.

A foreign mining company has polluted the environment so much that the local people have no access to safe and adequate water. And that is not the only mining company killing people in Ghana. The government looks on.