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Africa News Briefs

November 30, 2011

South Africa, Host Of Climate Confab, Is Africa’S Worst Pollutor
 
Nov. 29 (GIN) – Delegates from around the world are streaming into Durban, South Africa, for the U.N.’s Conference on Climate Change. Ironically, this is also home of one of the worst polluters on the continent, the Eskom coal-powered national electric company.

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South Africa, Host Of Climate Confab, Is Africa’S Worst Pollutor

 
Nov. 29 (GIN) – Delegates from around the world are streaming into Durban, South Africa, for the U.N.’s Conference on Climate Change. Ironically, this is also home of one of the worst polluters on the continent, the Eskom coal-powered national electric company.
 State-owned Eskom's coal-fired power stations are responsible for 66 percent of the 6,000 tons of sulphur dioxide pollution spewed into the atmosphere daily.
 
Sulphur dioxide is dangerous to human health and to plants and corrodes buildings yet dirty and destructive coal plants are opening around the continent at a fast pace.
 
Prior to the opening of the Durban conference Tuesday, Tosi Mpanu-Mpanu, chair of the Africa Group of Negotiators for Climate Change, stated Africa’s concerns. “Africa wants an outcome based on science that is fair and honors the promises all countries have made in the U.N. Climate Convention and its Kyoto Protocol.
 
“African countries feel they have been “duped,” he stated at an earlier meeting, “because many of them have not seen the sustainable development benefits that were promised to them when they agreed to emission reducing projects under the Kyoto Protocol.  Three countries – Japan, Canada and Russia – have already expressed reluctance to honor their promises and the United States repudiated its commitments a number of years ago.
 
“But the world cannot be held hostage by a handful of countries. Africa will not serve as the burial ground of the only legally binding treaty requiring those most responsible for causing climate change to reduce their climate pollution.
 
“We expect the polluters, and not the poor in Africa, to pay. Durban must deliver an agreement on finance... If we depart from promises made as recently as 2007, how can we trust what comes next? Africa is more than willing to play ball, but only if the other side does not keep moving the goalposts.” w/pix of T. Mpanu-Mpanu.
 
Nigeria Joins Uganda To Pass Homophobic Legislation
 
Nov. 29 (GIN) – Joining a movement fueled by a segment of conservative American evangelicals, the Nigerian Senate approved this week a bill criminalizing gay marriage, gay support groups and same-sex public displays of affection.
 
It was the latest attack on a minority already facing discrimination in Africa’s most populous nation.
 
The Senate increased the penalty for gay marriage from five years' imprisonment proposed in a draft bill to 14 years. The bill must be passed by Nigeria’s House of Representatives and signed by President Goodluck Jonathan before becoming law.
 
“Such elements in society should be killed,” said Sen. Baba-Ahmed Yusuf Datti of the opposition party Congress for Progressive Change, drawing murmurs of support from the gallery.
 
Gay sex has been banned in Nigeria, a nation of more than 160 million people, since colonial rule by the British. In some areas of Nigeria’s north where Islamic Shariah law is enforced, gays face death by stoning.
 
The bill’s penalties were debated this week at the National Assembly before a television audience to the occasional sound of laughter, sources said.
 
One senator worried the bill would hinder the tradition of Nigeria’s Igbo ethnic group in the southeast to have infertile wives “marry” other women to carry their husbands’ children. Another said gays suffer from a “mental illness.”
 
The Coalition for the Defense of Sexual Rights in Nigeria, in an open letter to President Goodluck Johnson, urged him to guarantee the safety of all human rights defenders including gays.
 
“We could not help but notice from the outcome of the public hearing on the Same Gender marriage Bill, 2011 that committee members had already taken a position on the subject. That was evident from their deliberate name calling and profiling of the groups or individuals opposed to the Bill.
 
“The experience has been denigrating and humiliating and does not conform to democratic principles of freedom of speech, freedom of expression, prohibition of discrimination, and fair hearing,” the group wrote.
 
Meanwhile, in Uganda, a court this month sentenced the killer of noted gay activist David Kato to 30 years behind bars.  Kato's slaying came only months after his picture was published in an anti-gay newspaper next to the words "Hang Them."
 
Rights activists blame an increase in homophobia in Uganda on evangelical preachers. Val Kalende of Freedom and Roam Uganda, defending gay rights, said: “David’s death is a result of the hatred planted in Uganda by U.S Evangelicals in 2009. The Ugandan Government and the so-called U.S Evangelicals must take responsibility for David’s blood!” w/pix of anti-gay children's march
 
Farmers Prepare “Fight Back” To Foreign Land Grabbers
 
Nov. 29 (GIN) – An international farmers’ conference in the West African nation of Mali this month drew over 250 participants from thirty different countries to oppose the practice of “land grabbing” by foreign investors.
 
Ibrahima Coulibaly of the national organization of Malian farmers said in the opening speech: “The land belongs to local communities and it has been like that for generations. Now, governments are pushing farmers off their lands. This is not acceptable. It is a denial of historic rights, rights that exist since hundreds of years, while many states exist only since the 1960s.”
 
“Land grabbing is happening everywhere,” said Renee Vellve of GRAIN, a farmers' support group. “The rights of family farmers, pastoralists, artisanal fishers and indigenous communities, are violated constantly and their territories are being increasingly militarized."
 
More then 60 countries have been targeted by hundreds of private corporations and dozens of governments. This international “land rush” affects as least 30 million acres in Africa alone, according to GRAIN.
 
Currently in Mali, some 800,000 acres of land have been leased by foreign developers or are under negotiation for lease. One farmer from Kolongo, in the Ségou region, said: “We have been living in our villages for hundreds of years, yet nobody came and told us about these projects. Then one day, this machine came and started to dig. They gave us a paper which we could not read... The paper said that we had to leave our land and our farms...They dug up a cemetery, they robbed us of our harvest and ruined our land. We organised a forum in Kolongo one year ago and we are still struggling for our rights, but we are really suffering.”
 
So-called land grabbing has been reported from Ghana to Kenya and was the subject of a study by Maurice N. Amutabi of the Catholic University of Eastern Africa and discussed at an international conference on land policies in East Africa earlier this month. w/pix of I. Coulibaly
 
Nestle Company To Investigate Charges It Uses Child Labor
 
Nov. 29 (GIN) - Nestlé, the world's largest food company, has announced it will investigate charges of using child labor on the farms that supply it with the cocoa that ends up in millions of chocolate bars.
 
Beginning in January, the Fair Labor Association, hired by Nestle, will send a team of  assessors to Ivory Coast to map the cocoa supply chain. The group has conducted similar investigations in the textile, manufacturing and other industries around the world. But Nestlé is the first food company to open up its supply chain to FLA's scrutiny.
 
It's the first major move to combat child labor since the Swiss company and other major chocolate makers signed a U.S.-brokered agreement in September 2001.
 
The results will be made public in spring 2012.
 
Ivory Coast produces 35 percent of the world's cocoa. The nation's cocoa production hit a record 1.48 million tons last year despite a political crisis that almost brought civil war.
 
A report produced by Tulane University said last year that 1.8 million children aged 5 to 17 years work on cocoa farms in Ivory Coast and Ghana.
 
It said 40 percent of 820,000 children working in cocoa in Ivory Coast are not enrolled in school, and only about 5 percent of Ivorian children are paid for their work.