Search Results for: Kenya

BY STEVEN SWINDELLS, in Johannesburg

CENTRAL bankers, drug barons, warlords, corporate bosses and small town crooks in Africa are all washing their money despite attempts by governments and international law enforcement agencies to bring them to book. But financial crime has never been as lucrative as now on the world’s poorest continent.…

BY STEVEN SWINDELLS, in Johannesburg

AFRICA’S tobacco leaf producers are facing troubled times.

Instead of capitalising on crop and currency woes in rival Brazil, too many producers across the world’s poorest continent are battling drought and low selling prices.

Brazil’s problems should have opened a door of opportunity for leading African producers to claim back at least part of the world leaf market lost to south American and other producers when Zimbabwe’s crop collapsed amid the violent seizure of white-owned farm land.…

BY STEVEN SWINDELLS in Johannesburg

DROUGHT-HIT and AIDS-ravaged southern Africa is faced with a looming humanitarian crisis with almost 12 million people in need of food aid. But genetically modified (GM) crops remain off the menu for most African governments who remain reluctant to allow their farmers to do business with GM giants Monsanto and Syngenta.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE LATEST World Health Organisation (WHO) figures on HIV/AIDS indicate some heavily afflicted countries are seeing infection rates fall. Kenya and Zimbabwe are among those with declining infections: amongst all adults in Kenya, from 10% in the late 1990s to 7% in 2003; and among pregnant women in Zimbabwe falling, from 26% in 2003 to 21% in 2004.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
SATELLITE images of the shrinking Aral Sea in central Asia have long horrified environmentalists, but now similar creeping disasters are threatening the many fresh water and brackish lakes of Africa. These are illustrated by disturbing satellite images within an atlas produced by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
SATELLITE images of the shrinking Aral Sea in central Asia have long horrified environmentalists, but now similar creeping disasters are threatening the many fresh water and brackish lakes of Africa. These are illustrated by disturbing satellite images within an atlas produced by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
SUGAR exporting countries from the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group of countries have agreed at a meeting in Kenya to continue “a relentless fight” against planned European Union sugar reforms.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
GLOBAL tea production hit a new record high in 2004, growing 2% to reach an estimated 3.2 million tonnes, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation has reported. The expansion was mainly due to increases in Turkey, China, Kenya, Malawi, Sri Lanka and Indonesia, offsetting declines in other major producing countries, notably India and Bangladesh.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
TRADE and agriculture ministers meeting in Kenya to energise the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) Doha Development Round have made progress on moving towards a system where tariffs are always expressed as percentages of the price of products. This would simplify the existing set-up where some duties are fixed prices, or valued per measurement unit.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE UNITED Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) is sending legal and accounting specialists to Nigeria and Kenya, to help them trace and recover money stolen by previous corrupt governments. The agency will “conduct in-depth assessments of (their) institutional and legal frameworks”, making detailed proposals to “overcome obstacles to asset recovery”.…