"The production-sharing agreement with CNPC allows us, if we manage it well, to guarantee better returns for our country," he said in a statement on national television late on Monday.Hope it works out as planned.
Since the days of flag independence, the Niger’s Diori Hamani and his political party, the Parti Progressiste Nigérien (PPP), indirectly handpicked by France, ruled the country aided by various covert and overt interventions beginning in 1963. Thanks to a secretive defence agreement, French soldiers based in Niamey collaborated with Hamani to obliterate and exile the opposition, such as Union Nigerienne Democratique. Hamani ran unopposed in 1965 and 1970, but made the fatal error of requesting the removal of French troops in the early 1970s. France duly removed the troops. Not surprisingly, thereafter a military coup brought Colonel Seyni Kountche to power. In 1987 Kountche was killed and succeeded by Colonel Ali Saibou.At minimum that suggests that the nature of government in post-colonial Niger has been heavily influenced by an external power's interest in its resources. That in turn only reinforces my belief that the ultimate solutions lie in the realms of political economy.
Fast-forward to the Niger’s electoral authoritarianism under dictator Tandja Mamadou. Currently, the Niger’s 12,000 armed forces are guided by 15 French military advisors, with Nigerien personnel largely trained, armed and financed by France, protecting five critical defence zones – namely geostrategic routes and mines. The Niger’s two key mines are controlled by Areva, the world’s leading nuclear entity, controlled by the Elysée via the company’s majority shareholder, France’s state-owned CEA.
a fundamental transformation of consciousness, from the excessively individualistic and mechanistic approach to an ethical, ecological and democratic approach to life that honours the interdependence and unity of planetary life.And here is a Marxist who advocates another approach.
Research shows that for family planning to be voluntary, economic security of the population and women’s access to material resources, education and healthcare must be available.Those things too are badly needed in most of the places where fertility rates and population growth is highest. That family planning and efforts toward population control can go badly wrong is not a reason not to do any of it, it's a reason to make sure it's done right.
neo-Malthusians attribute major environmental problems – depletion of the ozone layer, greenhouse gases, acid rain, pollution, loss of biodiversity, deforestation, topsoil, desertification – to increased population pressure. They call for population stabilisation as the urgent solution.I have never heard of anyone who attributes even the one most widely-discussed problem among those, greenhouse gases, solely or even primarily to population growth. Anyone thinking of population control as the primary means to address global warming can only be thinking of reducing the world population by a factor of ten, as only some reduction of that order could possibly be effective. And yes, I know some people are thinking of exactly that, for other reasons, but they don't have a whole lot of currency.
Widening economic inequality, not overpopulation, is the critical issue. The 20 per cent of the world’s population living in the highest-income countries account for 86 per cent of total private consumption, whereas the poorest 20 per cent account for 1.3 per cent of the same. Clearly, the rich put more pressure on the environment than the poor.Population growth in the highest-income countries is of more direct concern to me personally than is whatever goes on elsewhere, since I happen to live in one of them. Despite the population here still growing naturally, plus immigration, the government still tries to encourage more people to contribute to the increase. It's madness, that. Then again it's also one of the lowest population density parts of the world, Canada. Yet it's pretty damn crowded with people in the more hospitable parts. All the good farm land is either being farmed or destroyed by suburban housing developments. Anyway, it's not just 'the South' that's growing, it's almost everywhere but Japan and parts of Europe. I think the average naive neo-Malthusian environmentalist would join us in agreeing that continued growth in America is on the whole doing more damage to the world than is all the population growth in Africa. That doesn't seem controversial.
...posted by Abiezer at 3:45 AM on August 11, 2010
The disorder of the world food crisis in 2008 did not become hazy, and this new peak comes to remind us that, in the Sahel, the crisis results from an endemic problem. This is a problem that, as the thrust of recurrent fever testifies, is more a question of structure than conjuncture, that these are the failings of agricultural policies that impose their own tough realities, and that the recommended solutions are not different from those pushed in the 1980s with the establishing of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) which sounded the death knell of Africa's agricultural policies.
The reduced investment imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank had then destroyed the base of an agriculture geared towards food sovereignty. Industrial cultures were promoted which washed the soil (leading to greater soil erosion, the use of pesticides and chemical fertiliser) and disrupted the balance of the systems of production behind subsistence and the generation of complementary revenues on the strength of access to local markets. From this point it was a question of food security, no matter where stocks came from. This was the period in which food aid poured in. Africa was to produce no longer, with African stomachs wagered on agricultural surpluses from Europe, the US and elsewhere. As a result, since 1980 sub-Saharan Africa has been the only region of the world where average per capita food production has continued to decline over the last 40 years...
African agriculture has suffered a series of difficulties which, over 30 years, have left it vulnerable to the smallest of changes on both the international market and climatically. Agricultural policies applied by states, under donors' pressure, have in effect turned their back on policies which, formerly, assured technical assistance to producers, backed up by a price-stabilisation mechanism and subsidies for commodities.
The fragility of this sector has been reinforced by an all-out liberalisation and the opening of markets to imported products, something which has practically strangled a scarcely competitive African agriculture. Today African markets are crumbling under the weight of Asian and European labels and so on, save in rare pockets of resistance and alternatives where the 'local consumer' is promoted. In this way, in a few decades, agricultural practices, in both urban and rural environments, have changed...
A year ago, Djibo Bagna - president of the Peasant Association of Niger, agro-breeder of his state and who became president of ROPPA (Réseau des organisations de producteurs et de paysans d'Afrique de l'Ouest) - outlined the terms of a crisis already known by the 'peasants' sense'. He said:
'Previously, we would work for three months and be able to eat throughout the year. A field of 100 hectares would produce 300 bundles of millet. Now, with the same area, it's hard to get 40 bundles, because the soil is worn away and the rain is less reliable. Two, three months after a harvest, the food is used up. People are forced to look into other ways of making a living. The problem is that today, such income is not enough as all the prices have gone up. Two years ago, a 100kg sack of maize would be around 10,000 CFA. Today, it costs around 22,000 CFA. It's unbearable!
'Our areas have come to resemble the food crises which followed the drought of the 1970s. And it hasn't stopped since. In 2005 and 2007, for example, millet completely dried up. Before, our governments supported agriculture: agronomists worked with farmers, livestock vaccination was free... But since structural adjustment, our governments have gone away from agriculture. Of course, when this sector involves 85 per cent of the population, this has consequences: lower production, a rural exodus, growing slums, with everything that that implies like poverty, idleness and delinquency...
'Today, in the smallest village, people eat bread, milk and coffee... This wasn't part of our customs; we used to eat maize-based dough, sorghum and millet. But when you can't live anymore from your field and you're reliant on others (neighbours, food aid), you eat what you're given...
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posted by three blind mice at 2:57 AM on August 2, 2010