Search Results for: Zimbabwe

BY PACIFICA GODDARD

CIGARETTE MARKET

With a population of 192 million, Brazil is among the top 10 cigarette markets in the world. In 2008, 91.09 billion sticks were sold, valued at US$8.58 billion according to Abifumo, the Brazilian tobacco manufacturers association.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

A KILLER disease is decimating fish stocks in the Zambezi river valley, threatening rural livelihoods in Angola, Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe, the UN Food & Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has warned. Its ‘global information and early warning system’ (GIEWS) says the disease ‘epizootic ulcerative syndrome’ (EUS) (caused by a fungus ‘aphanomyces invadans’ with "a high rate of mortality") is spreading through the Zambesi system.…

BY DAVID HAWORTH

WHISTLEBLOWER MEP Paul van Buitenen, who is standing down from the European Parliament in June, will shortly apply to re-join his previous employer, the European Commission, following an unpaid leave of absence for the past five years.

Under its personnel rules, the Commission must take back former officials who left to serve on the parliament.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

UNITED Nations experts have said the global food price crisis continues, despite the global recession and linked oil price falls. Economists from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) told a World Trade Organisation agriculture committee meeting its global food price index is still 51% higher than in September 2006, albeit at its lowest for nine months.…

BY CLEMENCE MANYUKWE

"DO not shake hands with anyone," Ropafadzo Hunduru, a city health worker bellowed into his loud hailer early last month in Chitungwiza town in Zimbabwe. Hunduru was warning residents in the face of a cholera outbreak that claimed the lives of four people with city authorities saying they were verifying the death of eight others.…

BY CLEMENCE MANYUKWE

SHYLETTE Chifamba, 38, works for 12 hours each day at Harare’s Baines Avenues Clinic, one of the country’s elite private hospitals. Mrs Chifamba has worked for 13 years as an operating theatre nurse, five of which were at the government-run Harare Central Hospital, where she was also trained.…

BY CLEMENCE MANYUKWE

"IMAGINE a country with no Coca Cola," a headline in Zimbabwe’s weekly independent newspaper the Financial Gazette asked its readers recently.

The article quoted from the Bible, Proverbs chapter 31 verse 7 that reads: "Let him drink and forget his poverty and remember his misery no more", aptly summing up the drinking patterns in a nation where poverty is widespread due to a current world record inflation of 11.7 million % (and rising).…

BY CLEMENCE MANYUKWE

ZIMBABWE tobacco farmer Kobus Joubert looks to the heavens gloomily as he prepares to sleep by the roadside next to his Chegutu farm. Those who know him say they have only seen that look when there is an impending drought.…

By Eric Lyman in Rome

There are problems in the world that cannot be confronted with any success by a single state, no matter how powerful. Big environmental issues and world hunger and poverty immediately come to mind, along with many regional peacekeeping needs and most economic and trade-related problems.

Enter multilateralism, the consensus-driven process that democratically pulls countries together for collective problem solving, usually under the auspices of an umbrella organisation such as the United Nations or the World Trade Organisation.

Multilateralism has been hailed as the natural evolution from the bipolar world order that marked the period after World War II – with influence split between the camps of US and the Soviet Union – and the unipolar order based on the power and influence of the US since the end of the Cold War.…

BY BILL CORCORAN

WITH a crippled economy, inflation running at over 2.2 million per cent and a government partial to confiscating the assets and local operations of foreign companies when it sees fit, doing business in Zimbabwe is undoubtedly a risky undertaking.…