Imagine a green wall - 15 kilometres wide, and up to 8,000 kilometres long. Imagine it just south of the Sahara, from Djibouti in the Horn of Africa in the east, all the way across the continent to Dakar, Senegal, in the west. The building of this pan-African Great Green African Wall (GGW) was just approved by an international summit taking place this week in the former German capital Bonn.

This International Land Coalition report analyses the illegal/irregular acquisition of land by Kenya’s elites to ascertain the types of land affected, the processes used to acquire land, and the profiles of the perpetrators, as well as to identify the victims and the impacts of land grabbing.

Based on comments from presenters and the audience the key priorities emerging from the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) public debate on rural transformation 'Back to the Plot!' held on 31 January 2011 included land reform; service delivery in rural areas; experimenting with alternative modes of agricultural production, such as smallholder producers and organics; enabling access to food value chains for more producers, especially small producers; addressing the rising cost of farm inputs, including new technologies, fertiliser and petrol; and addressing ecological matters. For more details about presentations at the event, please click on the link provided.

Witnesses say security forces fired on protesters for the second consecutive day in Ivory Coast’s biggest city, following a call for an 'Egypt-style' uprising to depose sitting president Laurent Gbagbo.
The witnesses say military police encircled a group of supporters of Alassane Ouattara in the Abobo district of Abidjan on Sunday afternoon, before opening fire. There were reports of several injured, though their numbers could not be independently verified.

Environmental activists are hopeful that negotiations at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to curb fisheries subsidies, especially those on fuel, can produce a deal that will help end overfishing. Agreement would not only help reverse the alarming depletion of global fish stocks and contribute to a broader trade deal in the WTO’s long-running Doha round, but would provide a template for tackling global problems such as climate change that have a trade dimension.

In a world plunged ever deeper into an uncivilised global capitalist condition, the World Social Forum is a crucial beacon of hope. But while news of Egypt and Tunisia’s revolutions electrified activists at this year’s gathering in Dakar, Vishwas Satgar asks whether progressive civil society is powerful enough to organise for a genuine climate change solution at COP17.

At the forefront of most people’s dreams when South Africa’s new ANC government came into power was the famous quote: ‘There shall be houses, security and comfort’. But it is now ‘years since we first voted and there is little change to show for that’, writes the Mandela Park Backyarders Movement.

Painting the country as both a contributor to and potential victim of global climate change, South Africa’s green paper ‘seems to fit within an all too predictable Pretoria formula’, writes Patrick Bond. It's up to civil society to demand genuine solutions.

These are strategic weaknesses that global anti-capitalist civil society has to confront as part of the build up to COP17 in South Africa, says this Red Pepper article. '...the build up to COP17 has to harness global public opinion around the alternatives represented by Bolivia and anti-capitalist civil society. The role of global pubic opinion, of over 6 billion humans on the planet, is crucial to democratise the climate change negotiations.'

Zahra Moloo

Zahra Moloo Rio+20 Earth Summit in 2012 and the development of ‘green capitalism’. Before the summit, Bolivia is to hold a gathering on climate change and mother earth’s rights, to mobilise progressive forces in the fight against climate change and green capitalism.

As South Africa prepares to host the United Nations climate change summit in Durban this year, Lake Chad is living proof of the continent's environment in crisis. It was almost double the area of Gauteng just four decades ago but has shrunk by 95%. It is now smaller than Johannesburg.

Land grabbing in Mozambique by transnational corporations, that hire rural workers who are not able to access lands to produce, is one of the issues that concern peasants of that country the most. Real World Radio interviewed Jose Mateus, leader of the National Farmers Union of Mozambique, member of La Via Campesina, who is participating in activities at the World Social Forum in Dakar, Senegal. Mateus regretted that many peasants of his country end up working for big agribusiness transnational corporations, because they don’t have the support of the State to access lands.

'NGOs don't mobilise people, desperation mobilises people,' said a Cambodian land activist as he related the experience of Boeung Kak villagers who were driven off their land by their own government to make way for corporate profiteering. Such stories were abundant from all corners of the world this week at the World Social Forum in Dakar, Senegal. The forum, which celebrated its 10th anniversary this year, attracted representatives from civil society organisations, social movements and unions from more than 123 countries. Present among them were land rights activists and small farmers, who came to relate and decry the unfettered grabbing of their land.

Local elected officials in southern and western Ethiopia are bitterly opposing the selling away of farm land by the Woyanne ruling junta to foreign investors, reports Ethiopian Review. Some of the local officials who take a stand are receiving threats and being summarily dismissed by Meles Zenawi’s puppets who are installed as regional administrators.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/516/sam_moyo_tmb.jpg [mp3]. Moyo talks about the successes and contradictions of Zimbabwe’s land redistribution strategy in the context of agrarian reform and the media’s tendency to misrepresent the issue, including continued accusations that only the elite have benefitted from the country's land redistribution programme. He says that in fact the degree of land distribution which took place benefitted a large number of people in Zimbabwe.

Algeria needs to invest up to 120 billion dollars in renewable energy between now and 2030 to meet the goals of a new energy policy adopted by the council of ministers on Friday (February 4th), experts said. The investment needs to come from both the public and private sector, in addition to contributions by foreign partners, energy consultant Khaled Boukhlifa explained at an El Moudjahid forum on Sunday (6 February).

The Nigerian Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, NEITI, has recommended a drastic restructuring of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, in order to ensure greater transparency and credibility of certain oil sector payments and receipts in the national oil and gas behemoth. NEITI's recommendation was made in its latest reconciliation report, which covered the period of 2006 to 2008 and published on the website of the extractive industries watch-dog.

Namibian President Hifikepunye Pohamba has publicly expressed frustration at the slow pace of the country's land redistribution programme, a process which he urged government to swiftly address. Pohamba told the country's first cabinet session in 2011 that the largely discredited willing buyer willing seller principle had been a failure and implored the Ministry of Lands and Resettlement to speedily finalise the Consolidated Draft Land Bill and the implementation of small scale farming projects.

The inland Niger delta of Mali is a unique wetland ecosystem that supports a million farmers, fishermen, and herders and a rich diversity of wildlife. But now, the country’s president and Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi have begun a major agricultural project that will divert much of the river’s water and threaten the delta’s future.