The UN refugee agency said Friday that the Kenyan government has agreed to allocate land to accommodate the increasing numbers of Somali refugees who are fleeing to north-eastern Kenya to escape the escalating conflict in their country. The commitment came during a three-day visit to Kenya by Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees Craig Johnstone, who arrived back in Geneva on Friday.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/418/53780_tmb.jpg]cc.In a poetic piece subtly traversing Nigerian post-colonial experiences, Chioma Oruh evokes a history of disunity, theft, rhetoric, marginalisation and the social toxicity of oil.

As many as 250 million people in Africa may not have enough water to meet their basic needs by 2020 because of climate change, a specialist in poverty, environment and climate change said on 27 January. "The day-to-day impacts of climate change, such as higher temperatures and erratic rainfall, are increasing many people's vulnerability to hazards," Charles Ehrhart, the poverty, environment and climate change network coordinator for CARE International, told policy-makers and representatives of pastoralists from the Horn, eastern and central Africa, at a consultative meeting on ways of mitigating the humanitarian effects of climate change on pastoral areas.

Okoroba community is one of the major oil bearing communities in Nembe Local Government Area of Bayelsa State. It hosts two oil multinationals: Shell Petroleum Development Company [SPDC] and Nigerian Agip Oil Company [N.A.O.C. The community has boundaries with Emaguo-Kugbo and Aggrisaba on its right and left respectively.

The Nigerian government has abruptly cancelled Korea's concession to explore oil fields off the shore of the African country, the Korea National Oil Corporation said Thursday. The contract for blocks OPL 321 and 323 was signed by former president Roh Moo-hyun and then Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo during Roh’s visit there in March 2006.

This publication from the Global Land Tool Network belongs to a series of research reports examining the changing landscape of land tenure security in developing countries. The intent is to provide up-to-date information to land professionals and policy makers working in the land sector and to raise awareness on what is being done at the country level.

The global oil crisis together with the need to look for cleaner sources of energy due to massive climate change impact has boosted the use and production of ‘biofuels’ as a viable alternative to fossil fuels. This has been translated in a huge demand for ‘biofuels’ from the rich world – especially the country members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), who account for 56% of the planet’s energy consumption – that is being produced in the South, especially Latin America and South Asia.

In what is being described by the United Nations as Liberia’s worst plague in 30 years, hordes of caterpillars are destroying crops and vegetation in northern areas of the country and posing a major threat to the already precarious food security situation in the country and the wider region. The situation in Liberia is a national emergency and is likely to escalate into a regional crisis involving neighbouring Guinea, Sierra Leone and Cote d’Ivoire, according to the Representative of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Liberia, Winfred Hammond.

Kenyan authorities have launched an investigation into the disappearance of $100m in oil imports as part of a corruption scandal that threatens to disrupt fuel supplies to east Africa. According to the Kenyan energy ministry, the oil was allegedly released – and sold – without the authorisation of the banks and trading houses that financed it.

Nigeria and Dubai have signed a preliminary agreement worth $16 billion to develop oil and gas infrastructure in Africa’s top crude producer, officials said. The deal will see Dubai World Corporation (DWC) wholly-owned by Dubai emirate, investing in projects in the restive Niger Delta, Africa’s oil and gas heartland, which accounts for nearly all of Nigeria’s around 2.0 million barrels of crude per day.

In its objections to proposed land and passport regulations at the latest East Africa Legislative Assembly session, Tanzania reveals a longstanding reluctance to fully commit to an accelerated regional integration in the East African Community (EAC). However, is this really about land? What are the options for Tanzania – in or out?

Poverty poses a major obstacle for farmers in Ethiopia to adapt to climate change, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said. "The poor do not have the necessary technology and resources, in terms of money and so on, to be able to change and adapt," Meles told a national climate change conference in Addis Ababa.

The policy debate about the merits and demerits of biofuels is growing and changing rapidly, with concerns being voiced over their effectiveness for mitigating climate change, role in recent food price hikes and social environmental impacts. This study contributes to these debates through examining the current and likely future impacts of the increasing spread of biofuels on access to land in producer countries, particularly for poorer rural people.

Governments around the world tend to force poor people off well located and therefore valuable urban land and into peripheral ghettoes. From New Orleans to Bombay and Johannesburg the story is the same. One motivation for this is to transfer valuable land from the poor to the rich to create a subsidy for elite development at the direct expense of the poor.

Lonrho, the pan-African conglomerate listed in London, has secured leasehold rights to 25,000 hectares of rice paddies in Angola and is negotiating two bigger land deals in Mali and Malawi, in another sign of investor appetite for African land. David Lenigas, Lonrho’s executive chairman, said the group has agreed to a 50-year lease of the rice fields in the Uige province of Angola, which were abandoned during the country’s long civil war that ended in 2002.

A rapid succession of oil strikes in western Uganda are increasing the likelihood that Tullow Oil and its joint-venture partner Heritage Oil are sitting on the largest new on-shore oil field in Africa. Heritage, which operates and half-owns two exploration blocks around Lake Albert in Uganda, built on previous discoveries on Tuesday when it announced its largest strike to date at the Giraffe well in Block 1.

The Rainforest Foundation UK demands the immediate release of the detained civil rights activists and journalists, arrested without charge by the Gabonese judicial police. On December 31, the Gabonese judicial police arrested the environmental and civil rights activist Marc Ona Essangui, president of Rainforest Foundation UK's partner organisation, Brainforest, and coordinator of the Publish What You Pay Coalition in Gabon.

cc. Highlighting the efforts of the Abahlali baseMjondolo social movement to draw attention to persistent governmental indifference towards the plight of Durban shack dwellers, Toussaint Losier sets the shack fires endured by locals within their broader political context. Directly equating the absence of adequate housing, water and electricity with the early 1990s informal negotiations between the ANC and corporate leaders, the author argues the shack dwellers’ marginalisation to be a direct consequence of South Africa’s post-apartheid neoliberal leanings and the unwillingness of the ANC to make good on its original aims of equitable social redistribution.

In response to Mphutlane wa Bofelo’s : It's a good point that the same ANC office bearers who have failed dismally in service delivery at local government level are likely to be back in their positions in COPE T-shirts - with similarly disastrous consequences. The same thing can be seen in the Western Cape. It IS an important point which gets buried beneath the argument that South Africa will no longer have a one party monopoly on power and that this will be good for democracy.

It may be, but how does it help if SA moves from one party power to two party power, both of whom can't deliver the goods? COPE by and large doesn't seem to be tapping into a new, inspirational leadership - instead its leadership face is made up of those who have held positions elsewhere previously. Nor is it offering inspirational policies.

In the darkness after pre-dawn prayer a village elder would squint at the sky overhead, tilting his head back until his cap fell off, looking for a cluster of bright stars that signalled the middle of the rainy season. Now many traditional methods are becoming increasingly unreliable predictors of the weather due to climate variability, and African farmers already facing fluctuations need scientific data to help them adapt, farmers and climate experts say.