Fifty eggs suspected to be those of endangered parrots were intercepted at South Africa’s main airport in Johannesburg last Thursday – and some of them have now hatched. A 50-year-old Thai national was arrested for allegedly attempting to smuggle them in a “homemade incubator bag” carried as hand luggage, according to the Department of Forestry,…
Countries are spending too little to restore degraded land even as the economic cost of doing nothing climbs towards $1 trillion a year, UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed warned at a major UN land conference in Mongolia. Speaking at the high-level opening of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) meeting in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, Ms….
A family with four children abandoned its farm in Somalia after armed groups arrived and demanded payments for the right to continue cultivating the land. They walked roughly 100 kilometers to a displacement camp. One of the children died along the way. Carl Skau, the acting head of the World Food Program, met the family…
Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia — A major revival of degraded land across Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger was recognized today by the UN as one of three new World Restoration Flagships. Since 2018, the Sahel Integrated Resilience Initiative has strengthened food security and livelihoods for more than four million people by rehabilitating over 335,000 hectares…
Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia — The UN today awarded three new World Restoration Flagships in Brazil, the Sahel region, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The initiatives are strengthening landscape productivity by restoring degraded ecosystems in regions facing drought, desertification, and climate change. Jointly led by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization…
Africa must develop a new generation of purposeful leaders and stronger institutions if it is to break a cycle of governance failures that continues to undermine the continent’s development ambitions, speakers at the Africa Mindset Reset Forum have said. The issue took centre stage during a presidential panel on Tuesday, August 25, bringing together President…
Agriculture is the foundation for Africa’s economic takeoff, but without land tenure reform, its potential will remain untapped. Africa’s quality of governance has largely stagnated or declined over the past decade, as reflected in the World Bank’s Governance Effectiveness Index, Afrobarometer surveys across countries and the Ibrahim Index of African Governance. Africa’s youthful population is…
Somaliland has spent three decades asking the world to trust a specific story about itself: a peaceful, democratic state exercising real authority over the territory it claims, with institutions worthy of recognition. The 2023 war in Las Anod tested all four of those claims — peace, democratic legitimacy, authority over the territory, institutional credibility —…
Luanda — The Permanent Representatives Committee (PRC) of the African Union (AU) on Tuesday reviewed draft documents for the extraordinary sessions of the Executive Council and the Assembly of Heads of State and Government, scheduled to take place in Luanda on 29 and 30 August. The meeting, held by videoconference, was attended by Angola’s Permanent…
Eastern African countries are tapping the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ (FAO) Hand-in-Hand Initiative to unlock investment in agrifood systems, with a focus on turning the region’s agricultural potential into jobs, stronger food security and more resilient economies. The drive was highlighted in Kigali on Monday, August 24, during the opening of…
