ADDIS ABABA (VOA) — Ethiopia’s Prime Crime Minister Meles Zenawi says failures in the U.S. financial system are largely to blame for Africa’s economic crisis, and pointed to China as a possible key to recovery. Our correspondent in Addis Ababa has details of the Ethiopian leader’s keynote address to the annual African Economic Conference.
Speaking to an audience of academics and policymakers, Ethiopia Prime Minister the khat addicted dictator Meles Zenawi painted a gloomy picture of Africa’s economic outlook. He said the theme of the conference, fostering development in the current economic climate, may be impossible.
“The first question that comes to my mind is: Is it possible to foster development when we have a whole era of economic crisis ahead of us? I am going to suggest today that while it is probable that Africa will not be able to foster development in the current era, it is nevertheless possible to do so,” said Meles Zenawi.
Mr. Meles, a former Marxist rebel leader, launched a blistering attack on what he called “discredited neo-liberal economic policies” imposed on Africa from outside. He said unsustainable consumption by the United States when times were good had condemned Africa to a protracted period of low growth ahead.
“The United States has hitherto served as the consumer of last resort and helped to maintain the unsustainable division of labor and division of production and consumption,” he said. “It is no longer able to do it, and this is the main cause of the current crisis.”
Mr. Meles suggested Africa’s best hope might be a massive infusion of cash from China and other countries that have amassed surplus savings by producing goods for the consumers.
“It is possible to imagine that the Chinese will decided to redirect some of their surplus savings to infrastructural development in Africa,” said Meles Zenawi. “It is possible to do so because to some extent it is already happening. Such a shift would mean tens of billions of dollars per annum invested in African infrastructure, again opening the opportunity for the transformation of the overall economy. Indeed, it is not only possible but highly probable that the Chinese will take steps that would widen the window of opportunity for Africa.”
The Ethiopian prime minister, who will lead the African delegation to next month’s Copenhagen climate summit, expressed doubt the world is serious about tackling global warming. But he said a climate deal could be a boon to Africa, with its sources of renewable energy.
Some experts say Africa stands to receive as much as $100 billion a year from rich countries to offset the effects of climate change.
The three-day African Economic Conference is being held against a backdrop of low-growth forecasts for the near future. The 2009 growth estimate for sub-Saharan Africa is just 1.3 percent, with a prediction of an increase to four or five percent next year.
African Development Bank chief Donald Kaberuka, said prospects for recovery remain fragile. He said a full recovery would not occur until the continent returns to seven-percent growth, possibly within a few years.
MINNEAPOLIS (Star Tribune) — A 25-year-old Richfield, Minnesota, resident will spend at least 32 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to killing his sister and assaulting her infant.
Guuci Beyena Mekonnen, an Ethiopia native, entered his plea last week and was sentenced by Hennepin County Judge Tanya Bransford on Monday to a sentence determined by the plea deal.
If he had gone to trial and been convicted of first-degree murder, Mokonnen could have been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of release.
On May 2, Richfield police responded to a call about a woman lying in the parking lot at 734 E. 78th St. near the Buena Vista Apartments. The woman, who was on her back, had a slash across her throat and bled heavily. In her arms was an 8-month-old infant, the complaint against Mokonnen said.
While investigators were at the scene, police received a 911 call from the Mall of America transit stop from a man who said he had killed his sister. Police went there and arrested Guuci Mokonnen, according to the complaint.
Mokonnen told police he was angry at his sister for not allowing him to live with her. He said he was homeless and unemployed and had thought about killing her for three years. He said he took a knife from his brother’s apartment to kill her.
Mokonnen received 30 years for killing his sister and three years for threatening the baby. The sentences are to be served consecutively.
Since the release of the new book, “Amarigna & Tigrigna Qal Hieroglyphs for Beginners” (ancientgebts.org), Ethiopian and Eritrean adults have been familiarizing themselves with the controversial subject of the book. Now their children will have the opportunity to be exposed to it, too, in the classroom.
With the introduction of a companion teacher’s guide to the book, for primary and secondary education, now Eritrean, Ethiopian, and other school children in classrooms around the world will have the opportunity to learn about and examine Tigrigna and Amarigna as the founding languages of ancient Gebts. They will also for the first time be exposed to ancient Amara and Akele-Gezai, as not only the founders of ancient Gebts and writing, but also the providers of civilization to the world, which has long been attributed to ancient Gebts.
“With 30 million to 60 million Tigrigna and Amarigna speakers around the world, including those in Eritrea and Ethiopia,” says Legesse Allyn, author and publisher of the book and classroom teacher’s guide, “school-age children of Eritrean and Ethiopian parents will have a chance to see and experience their own languages in a new and exciting way – as the founding languages of ancient Gebts.”
Not only that, but for those school children who attend school outside of Eritrea and Ethiopia, especially in Western nations, their classmates will be introduced to their languages possibly for the first time in an official classroom setting. Together, Habesha and non-Habesha school children will learn about the languages of ancient Gebts as thriving, living languages as both the first written languages in the world and as the official founding languages of ancient Gebts 5100 years ago.”
The companion teacher’s guide includes a guide to synthesizing the content of “Amaringa & Tigrigna Qal Hieroglyphs for Beginners” with Bloom’s Taxonomy, which is essential for classroom learning. It also features a set of classroom exercises and the first available pronunciation guide matching the hieroglyphs to the pronunciation sounds of Tigrigna and Amarigna.
Not only that, but the pronunciation guide portion of the teacher’s guide utilizes fidel characters for the first time to teach hieroglyphic pronunciation, reading, and writing – fidel being a direct descendent of ancient Gebts hieroglyphs. The pronunciation guide is much different from what one might be accustomed to seeing in typical alphabet charts in schools and market places, where the complete alphabet is dispersed throughout a single chart.
Even if one does not agree with Legesse Allyn’s research, allowing school children to learn and benefit from current day research, in real time, that defines the origin of the very written words you are reading in this article, is invaluable to both the school children themselves and the broader global community. Never before has the fairly recent development of writing been so specifically explained as to why and how after an estimated 100,000 years modern human existence. If ancient Amara and Akele-Gezai had not developed writing for the administration of ancient Gebts, when might it have been invented?
BAKO, Ethiopia — For centuries, farmers like Berhanu Gudina have eked out a living in Ethiopia’s central lowlands, tending tiny plots of maize, wheat or barley amid the vastness of the lush green plains.
Now, they find themselves working cheek by jowl with high-tech commercial farms stretching over thousands of hectares tilled by state-of-the-art tractors — and owned and operated by foreigners.
With memories of Ethiopia’s devastating 1984 famine still fresh in the minds of its leaders, the government has been enticing well-heeled foreigners to invest in the nation’s underperforming agriculture sector. It is part of an economic development push they say will help the Horn of Africa nation ensure it has enough food for its 80 million people.
Many small Ethiopian farmers do not share their leaders’ enthusiasm for the policy, eying the outsiders with a suspicion that has crept across Africa as millions of hectares have been placed, with varying degrees of transparency, in foreign hands.
“Now we see Indians coming, Chinese coming. Before, we were just Ethiopian,” 54-year-old Gudina said in Bako, a small farming town 280 km (170 miles) west of Addis Ababa. “What do they want here? The same as the British in Kenya? To steal everything? Our government is selling our country to the Asians so they can make money for themselves.”
Xenophobia aside, a number of organizations — including the foundation started by Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates — argue that Africa should support its own farmers.
“Instead of African countries giving away their best lands, they should invest in their own farmers,” said Akin Adesina, vice president of the Nairobi-based Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). “What’s needed is a small-holder, farmer-based revolution. African land should not be up for garage sale.”
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Both sides of the debate agree on this much: a stark reality — underlined by last year’s food price crisis — looms large over Ethiopia and beyond. The world is in danger of running out of food.
By 2050, when its population is likely to be more than 9 billion, up from 6 billion now, the world’s food production needs to increase by 70 percent, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation.
In Africa, which for a variety of reasons was bypassed by the Green Revolution that transformed India and China in the 1960s and 1970s, the numbers are even more bleak. The continent’s population is set to double from 1 billion now.
In all, the FAO says, feeding those extra mouths is going to take $83 billion (50.2 billion pound) in investment every year for the next four decades, increasing both the amount of cultivated land and how much it produces. The estimated investment for Africa alone is $11 billion a year.
For deeply impoverished Ethiopia, sub-Saharan Africa’s second-most populous nation after Nigeria, even a fraction of those sums is unthinkable.
Yet with 111 million hectares — nearly twice the area of Texas — within its borders, the answer, in the government’s eyes, is simple: Lease ‘spare’ land to wealthy outsiders to get them to grow the food. One unfortunate consequence of that thinking is Gudina and his little plot of maize are painted as part of the problem, rather than a potential solution.
“The small-scale farmers are not producing the quality they should, because they don’t have the technology,” said Esayas Kebede, head of the Agricultural Investment Agency, a body founded only in February but already talking about offering foreign farmers 3 million hectares in the next two years.
“There are 12 million households in Ethiopia. We can’t afford to give new technology to all of them,” he said, sitting in an office adorned with maps showing possible sites for commercial farms.
Indian agro-conglomerate Karuturi Global, whose involvement in Ethiopia so far has been exporting cut-flowers to Europe, has taken the hint, branching out into food production with a sprawling maize farm in Bako. Unlike with similar land deals elsewhere in Africa, the company insists crops will be exported only after demand is met in Ethiopia — where 6.2 million people are said to be in need of emergency food aid because of poor seasonal rains.
“Our main aim is to feed the Ethiopian people,” Karuturi’s Ethiopia general manager, Hanumatha Rao, told Reuters, sitting under an awning at the Bako farm as hundreds of labourers harvested maize in the fields stretching up nearby hillsides. “Whatever we produce will go to the stomachs of the Ethiopian people before it goes to the international market.”
ANOTHER AFRICAN REVOLUTION
While many governments have been busy courting foreigners, in most cases from Asia or the Middle East, to increase Africa’s food output, small farmers like Gudina are not totally without friends.
An initiative backed by the Melinda and Bill Gates and Rockefeller foundations is aiming to kick-start an African Green Revolution, carefully avoiding the pitfalls that had engulfed previous such attempts.
In particular, Africa boasts a dazzling array of soil types, climates and crops that have defied the one-size-fits-all solution of better seed, fertilizer and irrigation that worked in Asia half a century ago.
Its perennial tendency to corruption and official incompetence has also played its part in keeping average grain yields on the continent at just 1.2 tons per hectare, compared with 3.5 tons in Europe and 5.5 tons in the United States.
AGRA’s Adesina says sub-Saharan governments are slowly realizing the importance of small farmers, who account for 70 percent of the region’s population and 60 percent of its agricultural output. But he urges governments to make good on a pledge six years ago to raise farm spending to 10 percent of their national budgets.
For its part, AGRA is pouring money into research institutes from Burkina Faso in the west to Tanzania in the east to breed higher yielding and more drought- and pest-resistant strains of everything from maize and cassava to sorghum and sweet potato.
“We’ve been studying African agriculture for several decades and the message we keep getting back from farmers is: ‘It’s the seeds, stupid,'” said Joseph DeVries, director of AGRA’s seed improvement division. “What you’re planting is what you’re harvesting.”
As yet, the work — carefully packaged as “Africans working for an African solution” — involves only conventional breeding techniques, such as cross-pollination and hybridization, as genetically modified seeds remain prohibitively expensive for farmers subsisting on one or two dollars a day.
However, AGRA does not rule out a future role for GM food crops, a stance that has stoked fears it will inadvertently pave the way for U.S. seed companies into the continent beyond South Africa, the only country that allows widespread commercial use. It also accepts a need for chemical soil additives — a source of concern to environmentalists — although it stresses the importance of “judicious and efficient use of fertilizer and more intensive use of organic matter.”
After 10 years of research, DeVries said, AGRA has developed, among other things, a cassava variety with double its previous yield and a hybrid sorghum strain that is producing 3 to 3.5 tons per hectare, compared with 1 ton before. It is also giving grants to rural shop-keepers to try to create seed distribution networks in countries that remain too small or inaccessible to attract interest from established commercial suppliers.
“There’s huge demand for these new varieties, but there’s just not nearly enough investment. It’s logistics, and it’s also capital,” DeVries said.
CASH FOR CROPS
As ever in Africa, money — or, rather, a lack of it — is a major problem. According to AGRA’s Adesina, only 1 percent of private capital on the continent is made available to farming, due to banks’ concerns about loan collateral and a reluctance to deal with farmers who in many cases are barely literate.
However, the Green Revolution push has begun to attract some serious financial players.
With AGRA providing $10 million in loan guarantees, South Africa’s Standard Bank, the continent’s biggest bank, has earmarked $100 million over three years for small farmers in Ghana, Mozambique, Tanzania and Uganda. The pilot scheme suggests the bank is buying an argument slowly gaining traction: That Africa, a continent more renowned for war, famine and disasters, could and should evolve into the breadbasket of the world.
With less than 25 percent of Africa’s potential arable land under cultivation, according to many estimates, and its current levels of yield at rock-bottom, it is a compelling, if distant, vision.
“The first step is improving the efficiency of small farmers in Africa,” said Jacques Taylor, head of Standard Bank’s agricultural banking arm in Johannesburg, seat of the gold on which most of South Africa’s wealth has so far been based. “Can we get them to increase their yields from just over 1 ton to 3 tons to 5 tons? That’s possible. It’s not a dream. It’s a reality.”
LAND-GRABS AND GM’S TROJAN HORSE?
Even though Standard Bank says it is keen to expand the funding, if all goes well, there is a very long way to go before such financing makes a dent in the $11 billion the FAO says has to be invested in Africa each year.
“Do we need more of this? For sure. $100 million is really a drop in the ocean when you look at the funding needs,” Taylor said. “But we’d like to think this is a step in the right direction.”
As such, it seems inevitable Africa will have to adopt a dual-track approach to its looming food crisis — rolling out the red carpet for more Karuturis, but also making life easier for Berhanu Gudina and his colleagues in central Ethiopia.
While it is hard to fault the thinking behind either strategy, critics of both abound.
Across the continent, foreign deals have been condemned as “land-grabs” negotiated between barely accountable administrations and outside companies or governments who care little about poverty or development.
In one notable case, in Madagascar, a little-reported million-hectare deal with South Korean conglomerate Daewoo contributed heavily to a successful popular uprising in March against President Marc Ravalomanana.
Elsewhere, from Sudan and its numerous Gulf farmer-investors, to Republic of Congo and a group of white South African commercial farmers, to Ethiopia and its Indians, land has become a hot political potato.
The prevailing view outside governments is that the little guys are being forced to make way for the mega-deal.
“It cannot just descend on them from the sky. It has to be done in consultation with the people who occupy the land,” Ethiopian opposition leader Bulcha Demeksa told Reuters. “But the government is not doing that. It is just going ahead and signing agreement after agreement with the foreigners.”
Similarly, AGRA’s detractors look to unintended consequences of India’s Green Revolution — particularly the environmental damage caused by widespread fertilizer use and drying up of water tables — to argue Africa should look before it leaps.
Furthermore, says Mariam Myatt of the Johannesburg-based African Centre for Biosafety, if India’s experience is anything to go by, a Green Revolution would leave Africa’s farmers as dependent on banks and seed and fertilizer companies as they are now on seasonal rains.
“The Green Revolution, under the guise of solving hunger in Africa, is nothing more than a push for a parasitic corporate-controlled chemical system of agriculture,” she said.
With Bill Gates also pumping funding into biotech research at bodies such as the African Agriculture Technology Foundation, Myatt said, AGRA might end up as the unwitting Trojan horse that eases GM crops — and Western corporate interests — into Africa.
“It will go a long way towards laying the groundwork for the entry of private fertilizer and agrochemical companies and seed companies and, more particularly, GM seed companies.”
(Source: Reuters. Writing by Ed Cropley; Editing by Jim Impoco and Walter Bagley)
Windows 7 is faster than Vista, makes better use of your system resources, is packed with interesting features, and looks great. But that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. If you’ve moved to Windows 7 recently then you might have noticed various upgrade problems, interface issues and features that seem to have disappeared entirely, among many other complications with the new system.
Don’t despair. While these problems can be really frustrating, answers are beginning to appear. We’ve uncovered some of the best and most effective solutions around, so follow our guide and your Windows 7 installation will soon be back on track.
18 cool things Windows 7 does that Vista doesn’t
1. Vista upgrade hangs at 62%
Windows 7 can start causing problems before it’s even installed, as many people report their upgrade hangs forever at 62%. Which is annoying.
Reboot, and your PC should roll back to Windows Vista. You can then open the setup log file \$WINDOWS.~BT\Sources\Panther\setupact.log to view what happened. Microsoft says this is usually caused because the Iphlpsvc service has stopped responding, and just adding an environment variable to ignore it will fix the problem. Point your browser at http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/975253 for the fix.
If this doesn’t help (or your upgrade hangs at something other than 62%) then browse the setup log for other clues. And you might also try to boot and install from the Windows 7 disc, if possible, as that reduces the chance of any conflict with your existing Vista (or XP) setup.
INSTALL WINDOWS 7: Windows 7 upgrades are usually quick, but sometimes it doesn’t install at all
2. DVD drive not found
In some cases your DVD drive may not be found by Windows 7, even if it’s visible in the BIOS and using the standard driver.
The standard solution here is to run REGEDIT, browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\, then delete both UpperFilters and LowerFilters in the right-hand pane (UpperFilters.bak and LowerFilters.bak entries can be ignored).
No change? Resetting the drive letter has worked for some. Click Start, type Disk Management and choose the “Create and format hard disk partitions” link. If your optical drive is visible here then right-click it, select Change Drive Letter and Paths, click Change and choose a new letter. If the drive is now visible in Explorer, then repeat the process to change the drive letter back; if it’s still not visible, reboot and it should appear.
3. Aero isn’t running
If Windows 7 isn’t looking its best, then the Aero theme may not have been fully enabled on your system. Click Start, type Aero, choose the “Find and fix problems with transparency and other visual effects” link, and click Next to launch the Aero troubleshooting wizard. It’ll try to identify and resolve and problems. And if it doesn’t, then install the latest driver for your graphics hardware. That could be all your system needs.
Some Aero features may be disabled in the Registry, though. For example, if Aero Peek (the ability to make open windows transparent to display your desktop underneath) doesn’t work for you, then launch REGEDIT, browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\DWM and make sure EnableAeroPeek is set to 1, rather than 0.
NO AERO: Windows 7’s troubleshooting wizards will fix many display problems while you watch
4. Aero Snap irritations
Windows 7’s new ability to move and resize windows, all in one movement, can be a genuine productivity boost. But if you find windows moving around when you don’t expect it then Aero Snap is more of an annoyance than anything else, though at least it’s one you can disable in just a few seconds.
Launch Control Panel, click Ease of Access, and select either “Change how your mouse works” or “Change how your keyboard works”. Then browse down to the “Make it easier to manage windows” section, check “Prevent windows from being automatically arranged when moved to the edge of the screen”, click OK, and program windows now won’t go anywhere unless you specifically command it.
5. iPhone won’t sync in Windows 7
Irritated iPhone users are beginning to report major difficulties in getting their iPhone to sync with Windows 7 systems. Particularly 64-bit Windows 7 systems, based around the P55 chipset. The iPhone is usually (though not always) recognised, but iTunes then complains that it can’t connect to the unit because of an “unknown error”, usually (though again, not always) 0xE8000065.
Disabling USB power management appears to be one solution. Click Start, type DEVMGMT.MSC and press [Enter] to launch Device Manager, then click View > Devices By Type. Expand the Universal Serial Bus controllers section of the tree, right-click each USB Root Hub entry in turn, select Properties > Power Management, and clear “Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power”.
Reboot your PC after this tweak and try again. This works for some, but if you’re out of luck then check the Apple Discussions thread for other ideas.
SYNCING FEELING: iTunes on Windows 7 won’t always see, or sync with, your iPod
6. Windows 7 themes change your custom icons
Windows 7 has some spectacular new themes – there’s a great selection at the Microsoft site – but installing them can have one annoying side-effect. If you’ve previously changed a system icon like Computer or the Recycle Bin then that could disappear, replaced by the equivalent icon from the theme pack.
To prevent this, right-click an empty part of the desktop, select Personalize > Change Desktop Icons, clear the “Allow themes to change desktop icons” box and click OK. Your icons will now be preserved, and the only way to change them will be manually, from the same Desktop Icons dialogue.
7. Taskbar problems
We like the new Windows 7 taskbar, but many people seem less than impressed with the new approach to taskbar buttons, finding it difficult to tell at a glance whether an icon is a running application or a pinned shortcut. If this sounds like you then there’s an easy way to restore more standard taskbar buttons, though – right-click the taskbar, select Properties, and set Taskbar Buttons to “Never combine” or “Combine when taskbar is full”.
You can even restore the old Quick Launch toolbar in just a few clicks. Simply right-click the taskbar, click Toolbars > New Toolbar, type %userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch in the folder box and click Select Folder. The Quick Launch toolbar should then reappear, and you can move and resize it to suit your needs.
STANDARD TASKBAR: Just a few seconds work and your taskbar has that retro look
8. Missing Explorer folders
Click Start > Computer in Windows 7 and you’ll find system folders like Control Panel and the Recycle Bin are no longer displayed in the left-hand Explore pane. This seems like a backward step to us, but there’s a quick solution. Click Tools > Folder Options, check “Show all folders”, click OK and all your top-level system folders will reappear.
9. Missing applets
Windows 7 installs quickly and takes up less hard drive space than you might expect, but in part that’s down to cheating – Mail, Movie Maker, Photo Gallery and other applets are no longer bundled with a standard Windows installation. Instead you must download the programs you need from the Windows Live Essentials site.
Installing Live Essentials will also get you potentially unnecessary extras, though, like an ActiveX control to help in uploading files to Windows Live SkyDrive. And the Windows Live Sign-In Assistant, which can be useful if you want to switch between multiple Windows Live accounts. If you have only one Windows Live account, and no plans to use Live SkyDrive, then these can safely be removed from the Control Panel Uninstall A Program applet.
TAKE YOUR PICK: You can install as many, or as few of the Live Essentials programs as you like
10. Too many minidumps
By default Windows 7 now keeps the last 50 minidump files (memory images saved when your PC crashes). If you’re keen on using dump files to troubleshoot crashes then this is good news, but if you’ve no interest in that kind of advanced debugging then minidumps are just a waste of your valuable hard drive space. In which case you should run REGEDIT, browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CrashControl, and set MiniDumpsCount to 1. Windows will only now keep the last dump file and you’ll free up a little hard drive space.
11. HP Multifunction Printer problems
If you’ve an HP multifunction printer with its “Full Feature Software solution” or “Basic Driver solution” installed then, after upgrading to Windows 7, you may find the printer stops working. Press the buttons on the front of the printer and nothing will happen; launch the software manually and you’ll see reports that it can’t connect to your hardware.
The problem is that a few files and Registry entries have been lost in the migration to Windows Vista, and even reinstalling the original HP software won’t help. Fortunately there’s a new version of HP Solution Center that should get everything working again, though, and you can find out more about it at the HP support site.
12. Hidden extensions
And, of course, no list of Windows annoyances would be complete without a mention of Explorer’s default settings, which even in Windows 7 remain to hide file extensions, as well as system files and folders.
To fix this, launch Explorer and click Tools > Folder Options > View.
Clear the “Hide extensions for known file types” to show file extensions, reducing the likelihood that you’ll accidentally double-click on virus.txt.exe in future.
And as long as there are no novice users on your system who might go poking around in Explorer, we’d also choose to “Show hidden files and folders” as well as clear the “Hide protected operating system files” box. It’s often important to see these files when you’re troubleshooting, or following problem-solving instructions from someone else. (Source: Techradar.com)
