The IMF’s April 2025 Regional Economic Outlook for Sub-Saharan Africa presents a clear warning: regional growth is slowing, debt pressures are mounting, and donor assistance is declining. Yet the report outlines critical opportunities particularly in domestic revenue mobilization, structural reform, and private sector activation that can shape a more resilient …
ENVIRONMENT is a class issue. The attempt to obfuscate this fact is also motivated by class interests. Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg drew attention to what had emerged as the outstanding global reality: predatory capitalism carved out colonies and empires as much for obtaining raw material at low prices as for …
The Greens in the European Parliament have asked the European Community to cancel the debts of poor countries, to safeguard the planet's ecological balance, and generate sustainable forms of development. Holding the IMF and the World Bank responsible for creating a scenario in which, for over five years, the net …
TAKE CARE of your economics, your lifestyle and your environment, and your health will also take care of itself. The report of the WHO Commission on Health and Environment, Our Planet, Our Health, prepared for the forthcoming Earth Summit, inextricably links environment and health. Yet, the report argues, health rarely …
ALMOST half of India's urban population is in favour of protecting the environment "even at the risk of slowing down economic growth" as against one-fourth who feel that economic growth should be the topmost priority. This is the major finding of an all-India survey conducted recently by the Indian Institute …
THE BIODIVERSITY treaty which was finalised last fortnight has been hailed as a major victory for the South. As the US and France have both pulled out of the treaty, calling it fundamentally flawed, this belief has grown further. But is the treaty really so desirable? The treaty, which deals …
THERE IS A missing link that keeps the work of our scientists very insulated. It keeps their work from reaching potential beneficiaries. These are educated people who ought to know. They visit Delhi regularly from areas where such work could be of use but are totally unaware of what is …
PATRICIA ADAMS attributes the current environmental imbroglio of developing countries to their debt crisis, which has been aggravated by loose lending, corruption and anti-democratic policies. She unearths various links between borrowing, lending and "development" projects to expose the mercantilism of Third World development. She does this by asking simple questions …
MANEKA Gandhi, eat your heart out. India's Green Queen was nowhere in evidence as the mother of all summits (as one TV commentator described it) was discussed repeatedly on television. It was Kamal Nath all the way, trotting out the same arguments and examples each time over, on Doordarshan's current …
Last November, at an international meeting on women and the environment, some of us were arguing with UNFPA officials over the use of risky, long-acting contraceptives like Norplant in population control strategies. A German environmentalist interrupted: "But your women are already dying for want of health care and drinking water." …
THE average global life expectancy may be an unprecedented 65 years and still climbing, but according to the annual report of the World Health Organisation (WHO), people are not living healthier lives. Over the next half-decade:lone, life expectancy will increase by another four months, thanks to improved water supply and …
WHILE the developed world gears up to phase out ozone depleting gases by AD 2000, Mafatlal's Navin Fluorine Industries has set up India's first halon-1211 manufacturing plant, in Surat. Halons are major ozone destroyers. Under the Montreal Protocol, industrialised counti-les have agreed to phase out ozone-depleting gases completely by AD …
THE biodiversity convention is ready for signature at the Earth Summit. But from the negotiations just concluded in Nairobi, it is clear that the South is in for a bad bargain. It stands to lose access over its biodiversity - plant and animal genetic resources - while it gains only …
What are the main issues at the UNCED summit? The various conventions. These have to be ratified at the summit. Are these conventions going to be on a partnership basis or on the old psyche of aid and assistance? When I see the rigidity and inflexibility of some of the …
MR BUSH says he will go to Rio as he is now satisfied with the global agreement of climate. Nothing can be a sharper indictment of the climate convention. Whereas the world needs long-term cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, the western nations on whom the onus of change falls, have …
BY coincidence, I happened to read two recent reports together. They were UNFPA's State of the World Population 1992 and Towards a Green World by Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain. Both are lucidly written, carefully documented and cogently argued. And yet I find it difficult to understand the nexus between …
THREE kilometres off the Hoshangabad-Itarsi road in Madhya Pradesh lies the village of Nitaya. If you can't get hold of a bicycle to get to this village then you'll have to walk down. And that was what I was doing one afternoon in early March. On my way to a …
THAT America rules the waves became abundantly clear to me when I witnessed USA flex its muscles over the entire world at the last session of the Climate Change Convention. The UN was reduced to functioning as an extension of the US state department. And George Bush made a "neutered" …
It was something that nobody would have expected to hear at a global environment conference. The scene: the last preparatory committee meeting for the Rio conference. The US delegation suddenly threw a bombshell. It demanded that all references to control of overconsumption be deleted as these had -very low priority" …
What will UNCED discuss? Theoretically, everything. But it will focus on: Long-term issues like global warming. National resources in the South like tropical rain forests and conservation of biological resources. Mechanisms to transfer aid to the South. Quantum of aid that the South should get to avoid exacerbating global environmental …
Hot aluminium THE aluminium industry is responsible for spewing out two potent greenhouse gases - CFC-14 (tetrafluoromethane) and CFC-116 (hexafluoroethane). In terms of their global warming potential, they are over 8,000 times more effective than carbon dioxide, their atmospheric lifetime being over 10,000 years, according to Dean Abrahamson of the …
