The Merowe Dam on the Nile in Northern Sudan is one of the largest and most destructive hydropower projects in Africa. Commissioned in 2009, the project affects up to 70,000 people, many of whom were displaced from the fertile Nile Valley to arid desert locations. Thousands of people were flushed out of their houses by raising waters before they were properly resettled.

Andrew Cranswick, the CEO of African Consolidated Resources (ACR), the company at the centre of a legal battle over the Chiadzwa diamonds claim, says one of their officials was abducted from the ACR offices in Harare on Thursday. He told SW Radio Africa that ACR Financial Officer Ian Harris was abducted at 4pm by members of Mines Minister Obert Mpofu's private police, the CID Mineral Squad. Cranswick said the police are refusing to tell lawyers where Harris has been taken.

The large-scale acquisition for industrial agriculture in African and other developing countries has been described as a global land grab, ‘threatening food, seed and land sovereignty of family farmers, social stability, environmental health and biodiversity around the world’, writes Joan Baxter. While it is understandable that investors deny that this kind of agricultural investment is a ‘land grab’, says Baxter, what is perplexing is that ‘the same kind of rhetoric is coming from some whose job it is to protect Africa’s farmers’ rights and their farmland from exploitative foreign takeover’.

Democracy Now! producer Sharif Abdel Kouddous spoke with Nnimmo Bassey outside the World Peoples’ Climate Conference gates in Tiquipaya, Bolivia.

Manuel Vicente, chair and director-general of Angolan state oil company Sonangol, had the distinction in 2008 of doing a business deal with himself in taking a percentage of Sonangol Holdings in his own name, writes Rafael Marques de Morais. This was an act in direct contravention of the country's 'Law on Public Probity', Marques de Morais stresses.

The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions says the controversial diamond mine in Chiadzwa, Manicaland Province, must be nationalised. ZCTU chairman Lovemore Matombo said no single individual or company should be allowed to exploit the diamonds now at the centre of a row between a British company which claims title and the state-owned Zimbabwe Mining Development Company (ZMDC).

Global Witness, a leading light in establishing the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS), a global system to prevent "blood diamonds" being sold into the market, is facing a "dilemma" now that the Zimbabwe High Court has allowed the sale of stones from the Marange diamond fields. There have been reports from Marange that "the military ... carried out widespread atrocities in the diamond fields, including murder, rape and forced labour", Global Witness said in a statement.

A landslide in western Kenya after relentless heavy rains has killed 10 people and more may be buried in the mud, the Kenya Red Cross (KRC) said on Friday. KRC said the latest deaths took the number of people killed by floods and landslides in Kenya so far this year to 100. El Nino weather patterns across east Africa are blamed for the wild storms that have hit east Africa's biggest economy. A massive landslide in neighbouring Uganda killed scores of people in a remote village in March.

South Africa's "willing-buyer willing-seller" land reform programme is not working and the government will introduce new ways to give more land to the black majority, President Jacob Zuma has said. After the end of apartheid in 1994, South Africa's government set a target of handing over 30 percent of commercial farmland to black people by 2014 as part of a plan to correct racial imbalances in land distribution caused by apartheid.

Morocco plans to lease 30,000 hectares (74,000 acres) of farmland per year to improve yields, satisfy growing national demand and boost export sales, its agriculture minister said on Thursday. But Aziz Akhennouch told Reuters the north African kingdom had no plans to join a continent-wide trend of selling farmland outright to foreign companies and governments that want to secure their future food supplies.

Rwanda has inaugurated its first-ever wind power station as part of efforts to exploit renewable energies. The wind station sits on the Mount Jali, from where it will feed a big FM transmitter of the Rwandan Office of Information (ORINFOR), also installed on the hill overlooking Rwanda's capital city of Kiga

In celebration of Earth Day's 40th anniversary, the Kingdom of Morocco announced an unprecedented National Charter for Environment and Sustainable Development, the first commitment of its kind in Africa and the first in the Arab World.

On April 21, Nnimmo Bassey of Nigeria's Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth International, spoke at the inauguration ceremony of the World People’s Climate Conference in Cochabamba, Bolivia. He was featured on Democracy Now discussing the Cochabamba-Copenhagen divide outside what he dubbed “The Most Important Event in the Struggle Against Climate Change."

African civil society has strongly criticised the World Bank’s new report on 'Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment that Respects Rights, Livelihood and Resources'. The World Bank’s report acknowledges and seeks to address the growing problem of 'land grabbing' by foreign investors in Africa. But civil society groups have condemned the report as an attempt to legitimise the land grabbing.

Thuli Brilliance Makama is not everyone's idea of an environmental hero. An attorney in Swaziland, Africa's last absolute monarchy, she has made her name not as a conservationist but by investigating the deaths of suspected poachers.

Domestic and international investors are taking over increasing amounts of arable land in Mali. In the Macina commune of south-central Mali, a giant irrigation canal is in the final stages of construction. Libya is in the process of developing 100,000 hectares of land it has leased adjacent to the Niger River.

On the International Day of Peasants' Struggle, April 17, FIAN International together with many other civil society actors calls for an immediate stop of land grabbing. A new report published today by FIAN International documents the findings of two research missions on land grabbing to Kenya and Mozambique, and concludes that land grabbing violates human rights.

The effects of climate change - such as drought, livestock deaths and resource conflict - may be all too apparent for the pastoralists of northern Kenya, but there is much to be done to explain the true causes. "We were warned about the current situation by our elders and spiritual leaders when I was very young. This was about 50 years ago when the Ngishili age groups were born,” Lemeteki Lerinagato, 70, told IRIN in the Samburu district.

Survival is appealing to sports giant Puma to disinvest from tourism company Wilderness Safaris over a lodge it has built on land belonging to the Bushmen of Botswana. Puma bought a 20% stake in the company via a private placement shortly before its listing on the Botswana and Johannesburg stock exchanges on 8th April.

Malawi and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has signed a formulation phase project document for managing climate change in the country to be implemented to a tune of $4.2 million