Search Results for: Ghana

BY ALISON MOODIE

SUB-SAHARAN Africa is still struggling to make its way in the global textile and clothing industry – but companies are convinced that without the USA’s African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) the outlook would be bleaker. One decade ago this May, this tariff preference programme was launched by the US: it gives qualifying African countries zero tariff exports for the huge US market – and statistics show that the sub-Saharan textile and clothing industry has benefited.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE MULTILATERAL Investment Guarantee Agency of the World Bank is considering guaranteeing US$260 million investment into a Ghana offshore oil and gas project. It would back Jubilee Ghana MV21 BV, a special-purpose Dutch company owning a floating production storage and offloading facility at the Jubilee Field, 60 kilometres offshore, operated by a subsidiary of Japan’s MODEC Inc.…

BY MARK ROWE

SEQUENCING the human genome has brought widespread interest and the potential for treatment of diseases, but confectionery industry researchers are increasingly applying this technique to key components in the food chain. One of the most high-profile sequencing programmes gathers pace this year, as Mars continues the sequencing of the cocoa genome, a project it is working on with the US department of agriculture’s subtropical horticultural research substation and IBM.…

BY EMMA JACKSON, KEITH NUTHALL, ALAN OSBORN, PAUL COCHRANE and BILL CORCORAN

WEST Africa is becoming a key region in the booming trade of illicit cigarettes, counterfeit copies of premium brands and smuggled properly branded and manufactured sticks. So much money is being made by criminals using this often-chaotic region as a hub to receive illicit sticks and then distribute them throughout Africa that this trade is becoming a matter of serious concern to the United Nations and even NATO.…

BY GEORGE STONE

GHANA, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are Africa’s latest upstream hotspots as major energy firms seek new provinces outside of regional heavyweight oil producers Nigeria and Angola. But jockeying for position has already led to friction between governments and the industry.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE INTERNATIONAL Finance Corporation (IFC) of the World Bank is lending US-based Kosmos Energy US$100 million to develop Ghana’s offshore Jubilee oil and gas field. The loan forms part of a US$750 million debt package the IFC helped raise – mainly from commercial banks.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

OIL tankers sailing past the often unstable shores of west Africa will be safer in future, following the commissioning of a fully-equipped regional Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre in Monrovia, Liberia, coordinated by the International Maritime Organisation. The centre will help ships in distress off the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

IT has long been outmoded and inaccurate to split the world into two camps: industrialised developed economies, and largely agricultural developing countries. The growth of the 1990s and the current decade means there is a wide range of social and economic sophistication and wealth amongst the poorer of these two old-fashioned categories.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Union’s (EU) rapid alert system for contaminated food and feed (RASFF) has warned nuts imported into the EU are still commonly contaminated with aflatoxins. It reported in August British customs seizures of groundnuts (and fine corn meal) from India, plus peanut butter from Ghana, containing the toxin.…

BY ALAN OSBORN

INCREASES in greenhouse gas pollution caused by deforestation, especially in developing countries, will be part of a revised Kyoto Protocol, covering the years beyond 2012. This was the agreement of a working group at a meeting last week (Aug 21-27) of the UN-sponsored global Climate Change Talks in Accra, Ghana.…