Not all gold glitters

There is no refuge from the blistering heat at this artisanal gold mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Any trees that might have provided shade have been consumed by the mine, which covers an area the size of five or six football fields. About a thousand people - men, women and some children - swarm across the open-cast mine near Iga-Barrière, about 25km east of Bunia, the administrative town of the Ituri Region. Local NGOs put the numbers of artisanal gold miners in Ituri between 130,000 and 150,000. Women, some with babies strapped to their backs, form human chains to pass plastic basins of mud from men excavating the shafts. They all work 13 hour days, six days a week. Some earn as little as US$0.21 a day.

It can take up to three weeks to dig, by hand, an 8m-deep shaft to where the gold-bearing sands lie at Iga-Barrière. Narrower shafts requiring less work carry greater risks.

A stake at the artisanal gold mine costs about $250, or five grams of gold, and is paid to the Société des Mines d'Or de Kilo Moto (SOKIMO), a public company. SOKIMO is a relic from Belgium, the former colonial power. Created in 1926, the company enjoyed boom years during the 1960s and 1970s, employing about 6,000 people and providing housing, clinics and schools for its employees. However, its nationalization in 1966 by then-Zaire's President Mobuto Sese-Seko, who used the company to support his lavish lifestyle, eventually took a toll. By the late 1980s, the company's only source of revenue was the taxing of artisanal and small-scale miners. Makuza Boniface, SOKIMO director at Iga-Barrière, told IRIN the company imposes a 30 percent tax on all gold produced at the site by the artisanal miners. Gold is being smuggled across the borders by gold dealers exploiting a tax loophole, Kitene said, to maximise profits.

Lobho Faustin, 30, cannot afford his own claim. He is part of a group of eight diggers, earning a wage to support his three children. "It's a job to live and survive on. How much money you make depends on how lucky you are. Sometimes I get $50 in a week and sometimes nothing. You can work for weeks and not get paid. I work for someone else. But it all depends. If we find gold then we get paid. There is nothing else to do," he said.

Artisanal miners face an array of occupational hazards, including: mercury inhalation while extracting gold from ore; tunnel and open-shaft mine collapses; women experiencing spontaneous abortions due to heavy labour; and the complete absence of water and sanitation facilities. "Health and safety is set down in the Mining Code, but most miners don't seem to care. It is very difficult to prosecute people as most are not educated and many were in militias during the war," Toto Bosingaka, the chief of the Service d'Assistance et d'Encadrement d'Artisanal (SAESSCAM), told IRIN.

As elsewhere in the eastern DRC, Ituri encountered a succession of international and local conflicts, and a variety of militias and foreign national armies imposed their own taxation system on the artisanal gold miners. Ndele Tanzi, coordinator for the Bunia-based NGO Honesty and Peace, told IRIN gold mining was a major threat to peace and stability. "The Ituri war was cast as an ethnic war, but if you look carefully it was about resources."
Although Ituri has returned to relative peace, gaining access to Iga-Barrière requires passing through numerous roadblocks staffed by security forces and government officials, who impose random "road taxes" on vehicles and pedestrians alike. The peace dividend has not provided any respite from a culture of backhander payments.

"While the exploitation of artisanal and small-scale miners continues, the identity of those responsible has now changed. They are no longer warlords and militia leaders but government administrators, members of the government's military and security organizations, and many regional traders," A November 2012 report, Conflict Gold to Criminal Gold, published by Southern Africa Resource Watch, said.

Louis Bedidj Fuarwingo, coordinator of the artisanal miner organization the Association Exploit dans Mineur Artisnal pur le pacification et reconstruction Ituri (AEMAPRI), told IRIN, "Sometimes authorities harass miners and make them pay for small things to let them work. They can make people very angry and demand as much as $750. "They ask for non-existent certificates, like 'scientific training' and 'expertise in mining'. They just create such lists to pick money from the miners. Police come to the mining camp and go to the mine boss and then all the miners have to contribute."

From here

Why Mali

At issue in Western interventions in Africa's wars is the scramble for Africa's resources. They're vast. They're some of the world's largest and richest. They include oil, gas, gold, silver, diamonds, uranium, iron, copper, tin, lead, nickel, coal, cobalt, bauxite, wood, coltan, manganese, chromium, vanadium-bearing titanium, agricultural lands, and offshore fishing.  

Mali is strategically located. It's West Africa's largest country. It's more than double the size of France. It borders on seven nations. They include Algeria, Niger, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Guinea, and Cote D'Ivoire (Ivory Coast). Its northwestern area is largely arid desert or semi-desert. The Sahel runs through its central region. Rainfall and rivers make southwestern territory marginally more lush than the rest of the country.The Niger River is its most important geographic feature. It traverses the Sahel and southeastern region. It's a major transportation artery. 

 Mali's resources comprise of gold, diamonds, phosphates, bauxite, lignite, kaolin, salt, limestone, gypsum, granite, marble, diatomite, hydropower, iron ore, manganese, tin, lead, zinc, copper, oil, gas, and uranium. Mali is Africa's third largest gold producer after South Africa and Ghana. It's rich in uranium. It has an estimated 5,000 tons or more. It's neighbor Niger is the world's fourth largest producer. In 2007, Algeria's state oil company Sonatrach and Canada's Selier Energy signed oil and gas exploration deals. In mid-2012, drilling began.

Pretexts are easy to invent and the war on terror is just another piece of camoflage for  serving French, British and American business interests.

Congo and Cobalt

Many of the fastest-growing countries in the world are in Africa, the poorest continent on the planet. World Bank statistics indicate that the world's heaviest concentration of malnutrition remains in Africa, afflicting as many as 15 percent of all children under 5 in some countries in the southern and eastern regions. And in June, the U.N. Children's Fund reported that 1.5 million children were at imminent risk of starvation in the western half of the continent. Nevertheless, some African countries preparing to cash in on mineral wealth in East Africa include Tanzania, Uganda, Mozambique and Ethiopia, based on recent discoveries of oil and gas.

"I don't believe that African nations are even close to understanding the enormous wealth that is their natural resource endowment," David Doepel, chair of the Africa Research Group at Australia's Murdoch University.

In 2010, Guinea alone represented over eight percent of total world bauxite production, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo have a combined share of 6.7 percent of the total world copper production, and Ghana and Mali together account for 5.8 percent of the total world gold production, while Ethiopia also accounts for one-sixth of the world's tantalum production.

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) holds two major distinctions. First, it is the richest country in the world in terms of mineral wealth, at an estimated $24 trillion, and it is the country in which the highest number of people – estimates go as high as ten million -  have died due to war since World War II. The wars in that country have claimed nearly the same number of lives as having a 9/11 every single day for 360 days, the genocide that struck Rwanda in 1994, the ethnic cleansing that overwhelmed Bosnia in the mid-1990s, the genocide that took place in Darfur, the number of people killed in the great tsunami that struck Asia in 2004, and the number of people who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- all combined and then doubled. The Congo’s staggering economic potential. The DRC contains 5% of the world’s copper and 50% of its cobalt.

Cobalt holds a critical role in the future green energy economy for its use in solar panels and in the blades and magnets for wind turbines and for its use in the rechargeable batteries used in electric vehicles and consumer electronics. Cobalt is also used in the high-speed, high-strength wear-resistant alloys that are used in aerospace and military technologies. Cobalt also has many industrial uses such as a catalyst in desulfurizing crude oil and in hydrogen generation oxidation. It is used in natural gas-to-liquid technology, orthopedics and life sciences. Even though cobalt is one of the thirty most abundant elements in the earth's crust, it has an extremely low concentration, just 0.002 percent so it is rare to find it in economical standalone deposits. Identified world cobalt resources are about 15 million tons. The vast majority of these resources are in nickel-bearing laterite deposits, with most of the rest occurring in nickel-copper sulfide deposits hosted in mafic and ultramafic rocks in Australia, Canada, and Russia, and in the sedimentary copper deposits of Congo (Kinshasa) and Zambia. 48% of the world's 2007 mined cobalt was a byproduct of nickel mining from sulfide and laterite deposits. An additional 37% was produced as a byproduct of copper operations, mainly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Zambia. The copper deposits in the Katanga Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo are the world’s top producers of cobalt and the political situation in the Congo influences the price of cobalt significantly.

Life expectancy in the Democratic Republic of Congo is less than 48 years, one of five children will die before age five and almost 60% of the country’s 71 million people live on less than $1.25 per day. The DRC ranks as one of the least equitable countries in the 2011 Gender Inequality Index (GII), which shows rankings of gender equality based on a composite index of reproductive health, years of schooling, parliamentary representation, and participation in the labour market. Transparency International’s 2011 corruption perception index ranked the DRC 168th. The UN believes over 50% of the region’s 200 mines are controlled by armed forces which employ illegal taxation, extortion, forced labor, and violence to ensure the flow of mineral wealth. According to one CNN report eastern Congo’s armed groups generate some $180 million through the illicit trade of tin, coltan, tungsten, and gold which are easily traded across the porous eastern frontier and funneled into the international market.

Congo's pain

What is happening in eastern DR Congo is not a civil war, but continuation of a 16-year aggression by the country’s two neighbours. 

The African region which includes Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo has been in virtually a state of war since 1995; that is at war with each other. This has engaged the national armies, foreign armies, militias, ‘civil defence’ groups, looters, pillagers, child abductors and abusers, rapists, arsonists and murderers. One can add to this list of villains and plunderers the United Nations so-called Peacekeepers. 5 million Congolese have died. Many of these deaths were due to starvation or disease that resulted from the war, as well as from summary executions and capture by one or more of a group of irregular marauding bands. Millions more had become internally displaced or had sought asylum in neighbouring countries.These wars, centred mainly in eastern Congo (North and South Kivu and Maniema) have involved nine African nations and directly affected the lives of 50 million Congolese.

Initially these wars and the pillaging associated with them derived from the efforts to profit from the valuable mineral resources of the Eastern Congo, coltan and diamonds. Now the current targets of their looting – the oil and gas industries. In 2009 Heritage Oil discovered oil in Uganda. The oil and gas industries in East and Central Africa have been the world’s most important area of exploration in the last nine years. Africa is the main continent in the world with frequent and substantial new findings of oil and gas. A joint report by the African Development Bank, African Union and the African Development Fund observed that oil reserves in Africa grew by over 25 per cent, while gas has grown by over 100 per cent since the late 1980s. There have been major finds in Kenya and has become the latest African country to join the great African oil boom. In May 2012 Kenya announced its second profitable oil discovery in two months; and large oil deposit in the remote northern Turkana region.

Unfortunately the good fortune has only brought war and destruction in its wake. The Uganda finds in the Albert Graven were located in the seabed of Lake Albert. The border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (‘DRC’) runs down the middle of the lake. Uganda wants all the oil and has been funding the various insurgencies to control all the oil and gas of the lake. Perhaps the most contentious and conflicted result of the oil and gas finds in the region has been the Vanoil of Canada’s success in finding oil beneath Lake Kivu. Vanoil holds exclusive exploration rights to the 1,631 sq. km oil and gas concession in the north-western part of Rwanda better known as the East Kivu Graben. The Kivu Graben area is part of the great East African Rift System and is approximately 90 kilometres wide and 200 kilometres long. The Graben straddles both Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and is the Southern extension of the Albertine Graben in Uganda where major oil discoveries have been made by Tullow Oil and Heritage Oil.

In March 2007, when the governments of the DRC and Rwanda met with the assembled lake experts and developers at Gisenyi on the northern shore of Lake Kivu, an initiative commenced to define the rules and regulations of safe and environmentally sound exploitation of Lake Kivu's gas reserves. Rwanda seeks to alter this by taking control of the other side of the lake. It has recently taken over Goma through its M23 surrogates and plans to exploit the oil reserves with Vanoil and to seek a competent gas partner for the buried methane. The M23 rebels have announced that they were going to take over the entire DRC. The root of much of the difficulties lies with the fact that the current DRC President, Joseph Kabila is weak, vacillating and bereft of the support of a united nation. That weakness has alienated many in the national army. The countries which supported the DRC in its last war against the Ugandan and Rwandan invaders may well intervene again. The citizens of the DRC have suffered grievously. Their future looks no better.

From here

Too Many Africans? No, Too Much Wealth

Africa is often said to be overpopulated. But it is quite easy to debunk this myth. The continent is a spacious and rich land-mass that can support its population well into the foreseeable future.

Africa’s population is currently 1 billion covering a vast landmass of 11,668,599 sq miles. Ethiopia’s landmass is 471,775 sq miles, five times the size of Britain’s 94,226 sq miles. Yet Britain’s population of 62 million is three-quarters that of Ethiopia’s at 83 million. As for Somalia, it is 2.6 times the size of Britain but has a population of only 9 million. Sudan and South Sudan provide an even more fascinating comparison. Whilst both countries are 10 times the size of Britain, they support a population of 45 million – about 70 per cent the size of Britain. In fact the Sudans have a landmass equal to that of India which is populated by 1.22 billion people i.e. more than the population of all of Africa! Britain is one-tenth the size of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) which has a landmass of 905,562 sq miles. In other words, the DRC is about ten times the size of Britain but with a population of 71 million, just nine million more than the population of the latter. Uganda’s landmass at 91,135 sq miles is comparable to Britain’s, yet with a population of only 33 million. Similarly, Ghana’s landmass of 92,099 sq miles makes it approximately equal to the size of Britain. Ghana is however populated by only 25 million people, far less than one-half Britain’s population. Angola and South Africa are about 4-5 times the size of Britain but with one-fifth and four-fifths respectively of the latter’s population.

On the question of resource, its availability or lack of it, and therefore its ability or inability to support the African population - another component of Africa’s ‘over-population’ fallacy -  well over 50 per cent of Uganda’s arable land, some of the richest in Africa, remains uncultivated. Were Uganda to expand its current food production significantly, not only would it be completely self-sufficient, but it would be able to feed all the countries contiguous to its territory without difficulty. Just about a quarter of the potential arable land of Africa is being cultivated presently. Even here, an increasingly high proportion of the cultivated area is assigned to so-called cash-crops (cocoa, coffee, tea, groundnut, sisal, cut flowers, etc.) for export. As for the remaining 75 per cent of Africa’s uncultivated land, this represents 66 per cent of the entire world’s potential. This vast acreage of rich farmlands with capacity to optimally support the food needs of generations of African peoples indefinitely. In addition, the famous fish industry in Senegal, Angola, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana for instance, Botswana’s rich cattle farms, West Africa’s yam and plantain belts extending from southern Cameroon to the Casamance province of Senegal, the continent’s rich rice production fields, etc. The current economic situation demonstrates that if the  acreage devoted to cultivation is expanded and expressly targeted to address Africa’s own internal consumption needs rather than land use directed to the calamitous waste of cash-crop production for export there need be no food shortages. It is an inexcusable tragedy that any African child, woman, or man could go without food in the light of the staggering endowment of resources in Africa. Africa constitutes a spacious, rich and arable landmass that can support its population, which is still one of the world’s least densely populated and distributed, into the indefinite future.

Despite the ravages of history of foreign conquest and occupation and the virulence of locally-brewed tyranny of genocidal regimes and fellow-travellers, Africa remains one of the world’s most wealthy and potentially one of the world’s wealthiest continents. The world is only too aware of the array of strategic minerals such as cobalt, copper, diamonds, gold, industrial diamonds, iron ore, manganese, phosphates, titanium, uranium, and of course petroleum oil found in virtually all regions across the continent.

Africa must utilise its immense resources and must abandon the system of  nation-states. We require no reminders that the primary existence of these states is to destroy or disable as many enterprisingly resourceful and resource-based constituent peoples. The state is an instrument of capital interests is providing cheap and disposable labour, land, and legal privileges to land grabbers. It is abundantly clear that the factors which have contributed to determining the very poor quality of life of Africa’s population presently have to do with the non-use, partial use, or the gross misuse of the continent’s resources year in, year out has been thanks to those nation-states whose strategic resources are mostly used to support foreign capitalists and advance the interests of the groupings of  the local overseers - the national government and its capitalists - that exist solely to police the dire lot of the average African.



Adapted from here

POVERTY AMIDST PLENTY

Ghana, like many countries in Africa, has been endowed with everything which should make nations rich, yet poverty is our lot. Each time the world’s attention is drawn to disasters, it is hunger and disease in Africa, draught or wars.

Ghana has always survived on one crop, cocoa, ever since it found its way into this country. What has been done with this crop apart from exporting it in its raw form? Not much.

Oil palm was taken out of this country to Malaysia. While the Malaysians are making industrial use of oil palm, even in the automobile industry, Ghana's  excellence in the use of oil palm is soap making and margarine. All other aspects of oil palm are virtually thrown away. 

For almost 200 years, some towns in this country have produced one of the finest gold in the world, namely Obuasi and Tarkwa, to name just a few. Just go to these towns, there is nothing golden about these towns. Basic social amenities are denied them.  Everything about the gold-producing areas of this country is poverty. Today it has been proven that much of the land is rich in gold deposits, not just limited to a few towns and communities. Once again the stupidity of the leadership is not planning how to exploit this resource in a manner which will ensure that our generation benefits out of it without depriving the next generation the opportunity of also exploiting it or even benefiting from its exploitation today.The government have allowed everybody to scoop out the gold from the bowel of the earth anywhere, without any guidance and regulations. As for the Minerals Commission, their uselessness has been exposed by their corruption in the management of gold resources and their silence over the criminal exploitation of the resource. River bodies are filled with mercury, a harmful substance to the body, and nobody seems to care, knowing very well that to the majority of our people, rivers and streams are the primary sources of water. Recent medical reports indicate that many more people are suffering from kidney problems as a result of high concentration of mercury in their blood system. It is criminal for any nation to stand and stare while its innocent citizens are subjected to such deadly conditions by greedy individuals and groups of individuals. What is needed to be done is to determine which areas of the country the gold should be mined from, for say a period of 50 years. In this case, all other areas of gold would not be touched. This will make for a very efficient and sustainable exploitation of the resource. After the 50 years, when we are sure that the gold has been exhausted, we reclaim the area for another economic activity and move on to another area of gold concentration for mining. Sadly we are destroying everything in the way of gold just to satisfy the greed and affluence of the few in our society, without the slightest consideration for the unborn.

Some 40 years back, timber used to be one of the major exports of this country; today, local timber-based industries have collapsed and wood for domestic consumption has become a serious problem  for a hitherto timber exporting country. In its stead, we are importing everything furniture from China. Ghana did not plan the exploitation of our timber resources in a manner that would meet the needs of the generation then and the future generation. Ghana allowed all manner of people, particularly Syrians and Lebanese to exploit our timber resources from all corners of this country, with their local greedy collaborators. They did that with total disregard for the future. Stupid as the leaders were and perhaps still are, they established the Ghana Timber Marketing Company, without taking into account the fact that timber has to be produced before they are marketed. Ghana succeeded in marketing all the timber from all the corners of the country, but foolish enough not to establish a timber-producing company. 

Any nation with people with right thinking caps would plan how its resources should be exploited for the overall benefit of all generations. The collective resources are expropriated without due regards for the next generation. We should protect certain parts of our natural resources, and even when it becomes very necessary for us to exploit any available resources, common sense should tell us that we cannot destroy everything nature has been kind enough to bestow on us. We owe nature that respect and appreciation for giving us so much for our survival. The earlier we sit down and properly plan our lives, the better it will be for us and the future.


http://www.dailyguideghana.com/?p=48606

No Money - No Food

 Just 15 per cent of its land is good enough to produce food or raise animals and now, for the third time in the past decade, drought has returned to Niger.

Aid agencies earlier this year revealed that tens of thousands of people died needlessly last year in the Horn of Africa because aid donors waited until people started dying to respond. Now agencies hoping to prevent a similar famine in the landlocked West African nation of Niger are having trouble getting aid donors to take notice. More than 5 million people in the Sahel region are facing famine and aid agencies want to move early before the dire situation becomes a crisis. Signs of the looming famine in the Sahel were first detected late last year - that is when aid organisations started issuing pleas for help.But selling the prevention message is never easy when there are not corpses to go with it.

 Denise Gibson, the World Food Program's country director in Niger, says the situation is urgent.
"What we've seen in over the past couple of months is a steady deterioration in the food security situation. The poorest people ... their situation is not getting any better, it's getting worse. People are still eating, they are eating wild leaves, they are eating wild berries, we don't want them to be eating that, but they are still eating," Ms Gibson said.

And when they run out of wild leaves and berries?

 Once again it is reported that there here is food in the markets in Niger, but people do not have the money to buy it.

In the predominantly rural economy, where 80 per cent of people rely on subsistence agriculture to survive, a succession of droughts has sapped the funds of most people. Oil has recently been discovered in the Niger and it is set to become the world's second-largest uranium exporter, but for the moment many of its people are struggling to survive.

mining the rich but not for the poor

John Paul Getty, once quipped that the meek may  inherit the earth but not the mining rights.

This years' list of the who's who of world mining, metal and minerals billionaires recently published by the popular mining web site miningnews.com tells a story. Not unsurprisingly, not one of  the mining super rich is an African. The richest of all the mining plutocrats is Eike Batista, son of the former CEO of Vale, Brazil's largest mining company. Young Eike is  now worth USD 33billion and is the richest man in Brazil and the 10th richest in the world. As ever, being born rich, really helps if your aim is to make the super-rich list.

It is estimated that the net worth of the 40 richest mining billionaires is in the vicinity of USD 300 billion in 2011, roughly equivalent to about of 40 percent of Sub-Saharan Africa's GD (excluding South Africa). The theory has been that the state gets the mineral wealth and then shares it among the citizenry. The reality is more dismal  In the countries dominated by mining they have the most unequal distribution of income in the world. The three most unequal countries in the world are Namibia, South Africa and Botswana. The increasingly divided world of a few very rich individuals dominating the mining and metal sector and the host countries calling for greater equity in the distribution of benefits, unable to lift their own citizens out of poverty, is set to continue

A new "resource nationalism", as it has come to be called, has been spawned by this relentless accumulation of wealth. These new nationalist mining policies include local ownership eg Zimbabwe.  Zambia is about to cut new deals with its copper mining companies. Additional profits taxes are proposed in South Africa. These new taxes which are supposed to capture high profits when prices rise are becoming de rigeur. Yet the experience from countries like Papua New Guinea which have long had these taxes is that mining companies and their accountants will find clever ways to avoid them. In addition, governments challenged when it comes to implementing inclusive policies that lift the bulk of the population out of poverty.

Environmental Racism ? Or Capitalism ?

We read that Shell's Opolo-Epie facility gives the lie to claims from oil multinationals and the Nigerian government that they are close to bringing an end to the destructive and wasteful practice of gas flaring.The Opolo-Epie plant is set to join at least 100 other flares burning across the swamps, creeks and forests of this oil-producing region, filling the atmosphere with toxins, seeding the clouds with acid rain and polluting the soil. The process of burning off unwanted "associated gas" brought up when oil is pumped out of the ground has been illegal in Nigeria since 1984. The government has set three separate deadlines for stopping the practice – the latest of which falls due at the end of this year – but still it continues. Medical studies have shown the gas burners contribute to an average life expectancy in the Delta region of 43 years. The area also has Nigeria's highest infant mortality rate – 12 per cent of newborns fail to see out their first year.
"This is environmental racism," said Alagoa Morris, an investigator with a local group, Environmental Rights Action. "What we are asking for is that oil companies should have to meet the same standards in Nigeria that they do operating in their own countries."

In a country where more than 60 per cent of the people have no reliable electricity supply the gas flares, some of which have been burning constantly since the 1960s ,is equivalent to more than one third of the natural gas produced in the UK's North Sea oil and gas fields and would meet the entire energy requirements of German industry.( Worldwide, the gas lost to flaring could meet one third of the EU's natural gas needs each year.) Making use of the gas being burned could produce 8,000 megawatts of power – three times Nigeria's current output. A single small- to medium-sized flare could power up to 5,000 homes, shops, schools and clinics as well as pumps and filters for drinking water.

The pollution generated from this flaring has been measured at up to 50 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, with unknown quantities of the far more damaging greenhouse gas: methane. According to Chris Cragg, an independent oil and gas expert. "It is one of the largest single pointless emissions of greenhouse gas on the planet, with obvious implications for climate change that will not only affect Nigeria, but also the rest of the world."

Un-natural resources

"Too often the political, ethnic or geographic aspects of war are considered to the exclusion of its economic drivers ... In countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, natural resources must be recognised not only as part of the problem but also as an essential part of the solution," said Mike Davis of Global Witness.

Socialist Banner have been on record that it is indeed economic causes that have been at the root of all conflicts .

The Global Wtness solution calls for UN peacekeepers to be mandated to deal with the economic dimensions of conflict. "The problem with natural resources is not so much the nature of resources themselves, their abundance or their scarcity, but how they are governed, who is able to access them and for what purposes"

Indeed , Socialist Banner agrees that the problem is fundamentally who controls natural resources - a capitalist class through their their respective nation-states , or the workers through a common-wealth of free associations .
Although there is criminal incompetence of Africa’s post-colonial black elites (the people who call themselves presidents, prime ministers, and in some instances kings and princes of the continent have waged war on their own people and plundered the continent’s wealth to ever bulging Bank account in Switzerland), the main problem of the continent is capitalism.

from theory to practice

As first previously reported on Socialist Banner here ,it now appears that capitalism will be exploiting Africa's geography .A sustainable energy initiative that will start with a huge solar project in the Sahara desert has been announced by a consortium of 12 European businesses.

The Desertec Industrial Initiative aims to supply Europe with 15% of its energy needs by 2050 and hopes hopes to start supplying Europe with electricity by 2015. Companies who signed up to the $400bn (£240bn) venture include Deutsche Bank, Siemens and the energy provider E.On. The initiative has gained the support of the German government of Angela Merkel, who has already expressed a desire to offset a dependence on Russian gas supplies.

Desertec Industrial Initiative aims to produce solar-generated electricity with a vast network of power plants and transmission grids across North Africa and the Middle East. The first stage will be to build massive solar energy fields across North Africa's Sahara desert, utilising concentrated solar power technology , which uses parabolic mirrors to focus the Sun's rays on containers of water. The super-heated water will power steam turbines to generate electricity 24 hours a day, 52 weeks of the year.The electricity will then be transported great distances to Europe, using hi-tech cables that suffer little conductive loss of power.

Socialist Banner notes that Desertec is keen to stress some of the power generated by the Sahara solar energy fields will also be used by domestic African consumers. However, with the little or no benefit going to local people from those countries gifted with oil resources , we cannot be blamed for an element of scepticism . We readSouth Sudan's semi-autonomous government has received nearly $7bn (£4.2bn) in oil revenue since it took over after a 2005 peace deal, but many question whether it is doing enough for its people.
"They say they are building new roads, but I think the ministers just pocket the money." says Akot, the driver .
"Misuse of public funds, favouritism in hiring and the existence of ghost names on government payrolls are examples of corruption that plague government offices," says the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs

There exists a viable alternative to capitalism as a world system of production for profit and uncontrolled and uncontrollable capital accumulation? It's where all the productive resources of the Earth have become the common heritage of the people of the world—"make the Earth a common treasury for all", as Gerrard Winstanley put it —so that they can be used, not to produce for sale on a market, not to make a profit, but purely and simply to satisfy human wants and needs in accordance with the principle of, to adapt a phrase, "from each region on the basis of its resources, to each region on the basis of its needs".

Poverty in the midst of Natural Wealth

Liberia - one of the largest rubber plantations in the world , the largest remaining portion of the once-great Upper Guinea Forest , virgin forest full of tropical hardwoods , gold and diamonds , a vast iron-ore mountain range in the north of the country that is currently being rehabilitated with a $1bn investment - resource-rich, dirt-poor Liberia .

Authors of the new report - called Land Grabbing and Land Reform argue that the raw materials sector has been organised almost exclusively to benefit a wealthy elite. Ordinary people saw the resources vanish - the trees being chopped down, for example - but did not see schools and hospitals coming back in return.

Liberia's modern-day economy was developed and exploited by expatriates and the small elite of "Americo-Liberian" freed slaves who colonised the country in the 19th Century and ended up dominating the indigenous Africans.
"The elites and the government structures they erected," the report says, "came to be seen as illegitimate, engendering first resentment, and in time hatred."

The war was not the cause of the poverty of Liberia but a consequence of it, and the reliance on the export of raw materials was a factor in creating that poverty.

On diamonds - the proceeds from which fuelled the wars in Liberia and neighbouring Sierra Leone - the report says there has been little effort by the government to make the gems benefit local communities or the artisanal miners themselves.
It says the ministry of lands, mines and energy "has resisted engaging with civil society".
On rubber, the report says the big plantations in Liberia have been extracting raw rubber for more than 70 years but have "so far not manufactured so much as a single rubber band in the country".

"The fighting... ceased only in 2003 with the departure of Charles Taylor and the arrival of UN forces," the report says, adding: "The peace however remains fragile, threatened... most importantly, by the unresolved issue of who will exploit and who will benefit from Liberia's natural resources." the report says, that many of the elite "see the return of peace as simply a chance to return to business as usual, an opportunity to recreate the Liberia they and their forebears knew, and exploited, for more than a century".

The report also describes what it calls the "resource curse" , which this blog earlier explained here in relation to the so-called oil bonanza in certain African countries . Endowment of natural resources in poor countries is one of the "traps" that prevents them from growing as rich as developed nations. The resource exports cause the country's currency to rise in value against other currencies. This makes the country's other export activities uncompetitive. Yet these other activities - manufacturing for export, for example - might have been the best vehicles for sustained economic growth. The volatility of prices of other raw material exports from poorer countries - especially but not exclusively in Africa - is also not conducive to long term investment and growth.

British economist Paul Collier argues that resource wealth can also be a curse because it induces autocracy by allowing elites to buy their way into power. Countries end up in a "resource trap" which does not generate the sustained income growth and security that can promote democratic accountability.

Once again Socialist Banner can only counsel for the working class to assume democratic control of raw materials and direct these resources for benefit of the working class as a whole and not in the interest of the small minority who presently own this natural wealth .