Labeling of 'Blood Diamonds' and Other Conflict Minerals Rejected as Court Sides With Corporations (Video)

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By DemocracyNow

TRANSCRIPT:

Since 1998, more than 5 million people have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo in what has been described as the deadliest documented conflict in African history. Much of the fighting has been over precious minerals including tantalum, tin, tungsten and gold. Tantalum has become a precious commodity in the digital age — it’s found in cellphones, DVD players, laptops and hard drives. Human rights groups have long pushed for mandatory labeling of so-called "conflict minerals" in order to allow consumers and investors to avoid fueling the bloody conflict through the purchase of their products. The mandatory disclosure policy became law as part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act. But this week a federal appeals court ruled the Securities and Exchange Commission cannot force companies to disclose whether minerals come from the Democratic Republic of Congo because the mandatory labeling would violate the companies’ freedom of speech. We speak to Zorka Milin, senior legal adviser with Global Witness.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Since 1998, more than 5 million people have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo in what has been described as the deadliest documented conflict in African history. Much of the fighting has been over precious minerals, including tantalum, tin, tungsten and gold. Tantalum has become a precious commodity in the digital age—it’s found in cellphones, DVD players, laptops and hard drives.

Human rights groups have long pushed for mandatory labeling of so-called conflict minerals in order to allow consumers and investors to avoid fueling the bloody conflict through the purchase of their products. The mandatory disclosure policy became law as part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act.

AMY GOODMAN: But this week, a federal appeals court has ruled the Securities and Exchange Commission cannot force companies to disclose whether minerals come from the Democratic Republic of Congo because the mandatory labeling would violate the companies’ freedom of speech.

For more, we go directly to Washington, D.C., where we’re joined by Zorka Milin, a senior legal adviser with Global Witness. The group works to improve transparency and accountability in extraction of natural resources.

Welcome to Democracy Now! Why don’t you start off, Zorka, by talking about what the judge has ruled and what exactly are the minerals you’re talking about?

ZORKA MILIN: Thank you, Amy. It’s great to be here on the show. And it’s very fitting, because what’s really at stake in this decision is democracy and transparency. And what we have is renegade judges who have turned the First Amendment on its head and allowed corporations to use it as a deregulatory tool. The decision from this week has sweeping implications for all kinds of important consumer disclosures, ranging from nutrition labeling on foods, country-of-origin labeling, health and safety warnings in products. So it is certainly a very momentous decision and is a continuation and intensification of this trend that we have seen, including with Citizens United, of corporations kind of weaponizing the First Amendment—a provision which was really intended to protect the free speech rights of citizens, of individual citizens, and not corporations.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, what specifically was the provision of the Dodd-Frank Act that was at question here? And could you give a little bit more detail on that?

ZORKA MILIN: Sure. The provision is much broader than the phrase that was challenged here, which is just the use of the phrase, "not found to be conflict-free," which the companies did not want to use in their disclosures. And to be clear, it’s not an issue of labeling on a product; it’s a phrase that appears in a filing that’s made with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The companies did not object to the rest of the law, which really is much broader. And the heart of that law requires companies to engage in due diligence to ensure that their supply chains and the minerals that they’re purchasing are not funding the terrible conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo. So the rest of the law still stands, and companies still have to perform those kinds of due-diligence measures.

The phrase, "not found to be conflict-free," was intended to be a spur to companies to ensure that they
have the right processes in place. And it’s really shameful that rather than focusing their energies on that, companies have instead chosen to bring dubious constitutional challenges.

AMY GOODMAN: So, can you name a company and tell us exactly what’s happening in the Democratic Republic of Congo, why you want conflict minerals to be identified?

ZORKA MILIN: Well, it’s an interesting question: Can we name these companies? You know, the lawsuit itself was brought by a group of business lobby associations that include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the Business Roundtable. So, effectively, individual companies are hiding behind these powerful business lobbying groups, and so it makes it difficult to really kind of name and shame individual companies that have been challenging this law. This is, unfortunately, a broader trend that’s not limited to this case, and is something that we see in other cases where business groups are challenging regulations that they don’t like.

When it comes to what we see on the ground, of course, it’s a very complicated conflict, and minerals are one of the factors, certainly a significant contributing factor, to the conflict. But there are numerous other complications with different armed groups and different actors. So it’s really difficult to kind of oversimplify the situation. That said, we firmly believe that this law can contribute to positive change on the ground.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Now, this was a decision in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which is known as a very pro-business, conservative circuit of the federal judiciary. What’s the next step here?

ZORKA MILIN: Well, we don’t think that the decision can stand, and we think that the SEC will agree with us. The SEC was the defendant in this case, and so it is up to them to bring further appeals and to make sure that this incredible, misguided and damaging decision is overturned. And we certainly expect to see that, because the sweeping implications that I was describing earlier apply, perhaps especially, to the kinds of disclosures that the—the stock exchange disclosures that the Securities and Exchange Commission routinely requires from its issuers. So, we very much hope and expect to see further review and, you know, this terrible decision to be overturned.

AMY GOODMAN: Zorka, we have less than a minute, but with people increasingly walking around with smartphones, are conflict minerals a growing problem?

ZORKA MILIN: Well, I think that conflict minerals are not a necessary component of the electronics products that we all use. And it is possible to source minerals responsibly, including from the Democratic Republic of Congo. An analysis that our group did of some of the first filings under this law, which were made last year, shows that about 20 percent of companies have complied with the law fully, and so that shows that it’s possible. And we certainly hope that more and more companies will engage with the law in a more positive way and contribute to a responsible sourcing of minerals in the Congo for mines which are not controlled by the armed groups.

AMY GOODMAN: Zorka Milin, we want to thank you for being with us, senior legal adviser with Global Witness, a group that’s working to improve transparency and accountability in the extraction of natural resources.

Africa’s Last Colony: Western Sahara

In lieu of a solution: Oxfam and the European Commission deliver humanitarian aid to the camps
around Tindouf. Flickr / European Commission DG ECHO. Some rights reserved.

By Oscar Güell

As 2015 opens, the Sahrawi people of Western Sahara have been waiting for a self-determination referendum for four decades. They will wait longer due to the passivity of the international community.

“The biggest poverty that exists in the world is to lose your territory; we are not in our land and others are taking advantage of our wealth,” said Mahmoud Dellal, asked about the poverty in the refugee camps of Tindouf in Algeria, where he had spent more than 25 years of his life. He is one of the thousands of inhabitants of Western Sahara who had to leave the country 40 years ago, when it was occupied by Morocco.

Dellal lived in a refugee camp until 2000, when he moved to Spain because his wife had health problems which could not be addressed by the precarious health service there. But he doesn’t feel Spain is his home—only the Sahara. “Any person feels fine where he comes from; when you live in exile you lose your dreams,” he said. He is convinced that “Sahrawis will never stop fighting for what is theirs”.

The last colony in Africa, Western Sahara is divided by the second longest wall in the world (after the Great Wall of China). Located between the west of the desert and the Atlantic, it was assigned to Spain in the Berlin Conference of 1885, when the major European states distributed the African continent among themselves.

In 1965, with the world immersed in a decolonisation movement, the United Nations asked Spain to do likewise (it was then called Spanish Sahara). Spain abandoned the territory but it did not let the Sahrawis express their self-determination right as the UN resolution had sought: it transferred control to Morocco and Mauritania in 1975, by means of a tripartite agreement, the Madrid Accords.

When the agreement became effective, the Polisario Front, born in 1973 to fight the Spanish coloniser, waged war against Morocco and Mauritania, proclaimed the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) and created refugees camps in Algeria to host Sahrawis who escaped persecution by the occupying armies. In 1979 Mauritania withdrew but Morocco (with the support of France and the United States) continued the war against Polisario (supported by Algeria).

Hostilities were prolonged until 1991, when the parties agreed a ceasefire overseen by the UN, which organised a mission (MINURSO) to monitor the situation and organise a referendum on Sahrawi self-determination. But the referendum never took place, due to irreconcilable differences between the parties as to who had the right to vote. The UN continued renewing the MINURSO mandate annually, without any progress.

Unique

Nowadays, Western Sahara is the unique non-self-governing territory in Africa. The UN never recognised the Madrid Accords, because the arrangement “did not transfer sovereignty over the territory, nor did it confer upon any of the signatories the status of an administering Power”. Nor has the International Court of Justice recognised Moroccan sovereignty.

Therefore, according to international law, Spain remains the ‘administering power’, and decolonisation should end with the application of “the principle of self-determination through the free and genuine expression of the will of the people of this territory”. Nevertheless, any solution to the conflict seems remote.

The parties have very distant positions and the international community does not press them to achieve a solution. “Unless an unforeseen event will occur, this problem will not be solved because nobody wants it to be resolved,” said a Spanish expert on the Maghreb, Tomás Bárbulo. In the documentary Hijos de las Nubes the former French foreign minister Roland Dumas said that “no solution is the solution”. But what is really making this conflict irresolvable?

Polisario, recognised by the UN as the representative of the people of Western Sahara, is determined to get a referendum on self-determination. International law supports this, so the front is immovable. “We are not asking for anything strange—it is written in all UN resolutions and in the International Court of Justice,” said Mohamed Yumani, a member of Polisario and president of the Saharan Immigrant Association in Aragon (Spain).

On the other side, Morocco has always claimed—despite the UN’s contradiction—to have held sovereignty over Western Sahara before the Spanish colonisation and it attaches complete validity to the Madrid Accords, as “duly registered at the UN’s Secretariat General”. It accuses Polisario of blocking negotiations and having a “biased” understanding of self-determination, which it says need not necessarily be exercised through referendum—although this was already what the UN had called for in 1966. Morocco proposed an autonomy plan in 2007 but it is not in hurry to find a solution.

The Moroccan government feels comfortable with the status quo, which allows it to control and act as de facto administrator of most of the territory. Western Sahara is divided from north to south by a sand wall of 2,700km—further than from Madrid to Copenhagen—built by Morocco during the 80s. Nowadays, the Alaouite kingdom controls everything west of the barrier, including all the habitable territory and the natural resources.

Reserves

Phosphates and fisheries and (possibly) offshore oil and gas make Western Sahara one of the richest parts of the Maghreb. The BuCraa mine in the north contains one of the biggest reserves of phosphates in the world and, according to Western Sahara Resources Watch, generated the equivalent of $330m for Morocco last year. The EU is negotiating a fisheries agreement with Morocco for access to Western Sahara’s waters, worth €40m per year.

East of the wall, the area controlled by Polisario, there is only desert inhabited by some nomadic tribes. In the area occupied by Morocco, 70,000 natives mix with 150,000 Moroccan settlers, while there are some 165,000 refugees in the camps in Algeria and a further-scattered Sahrawi diaspora. Mohamed Yumani, who spent two decades in a camp, said that “life there is extremely difficult”. Sandstorms are common and the temperature reaches 50C in summer.

The camps, controlled by Polisario, are completely dependent on international aid, which has been reduced since the onset of the economic crisis. Gonzalo Moure, a Spanish aid worker who has visited several times, has seen evidence of child malnutrition. Yet Dellal envisages being back in Tindouf when his wife recovers.

Rabat has invested in Western Sahara—indeed its development and social services are superior to Morocco proper. But freedom is denied to those who favour independence or even a referendum. The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, echoed complaints of abuses of civil and political rights in his last Western Sahara report—“particularly in the form of arrests without warrants, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in detention, confessions extracted under torture or violation of the right to a fair trial”.

Realpolitik

But the international community remains inert. “Western countries are interested in the Moroccan occupation because it provides iron control in a region that is a space of jihadist activity,” said Bárbulo. Their governments are applying Realpolitik, prioritising geopolitical and economic interests over international law and human rights.

Stephen Zunes, Middle East expert at the University of San Francisco, said in Hijos de las Nubes that the US “is unfortunately quite willing to sacrifice fundamental principles of international law in the name of supporting a strategic ally”. In his book about Western Sahara, Zunes asserts that France and the US have not only provided Morocco with material support but have dominated the approach by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to the conflict, avoiding condemnation of the occupation.

In 2013, during the debate on the annual renewal of MINURSO, the US proposed monitoring human-rights violations in Western Sahara but, due to Moroccan pressures, this was left out of the final resolution. In November that year, the king, Mohammed VI, visited the US president, Barack Obama, and the White House declared Morocco’s autonomy plan “serious, realistic, and credible”. Morocco has also invested roughly $20m since 2007 in “lobbying policymakers and soliciting sympathetic coverage from journalists in the United States”, according to an article published in Foreign Policy last February.

Among Western countries, Spain has an added responsibility as the de jure administering power. It acts, however, like the others: it doesn’t defend Moroccan occupation openly but its inaction supports it. A report that sets the basis of Spanish foreign policy for the next years says that an independent Western Sahara would be “non-homogeneous”, with inhabitants “susceptible to radicalisation”.

Gulf remains

Is any solution possible? Juan Domingo Torrejón, researcher in international relations at the University of Cadiz, points out that Chapter VII of United Nations Charter allows the Security Council to press ahead without the agreement of the parties. Yet the substantive gulf remains: “A solution based on the strict application of the self-determination right would be totally contrary to Moroccan interests, and France would veto it in the UNSC, but I neither see it possible to impose a formula favourable to Morocco without asking the population, because it would raise serious legal questions.” Torrejón also warned that “a favourable solution for any of the parties could cause instability in the Maghreb”.

This risk of instability favours the status quo, as a 2007 cable involving European diplomats published by Wikileaks indicates: “For Europe as a whole, the principal interest is that Morocco has been an island of stability in a crucial but shaky near neighbourhood; this stability must be preserved, so a solution to the Sahara problem that destabilises Morocco proper is undesirable.”

Last April, the MINURSO mandate was extended for one year more without any relevant change. In August, the Canadian Kim Bolduc was supposed to replace Wolfgang Weisbrod-Weber as head of MINURSO but at time of writing she had not been able to travel to her post—Morocco was apparently displeased that it had not been consulted about the appointment.

For Torrejón the stagnation can be also dangerous because the situation may deteriorate further: “There is not a solution on the table, the humanitarian conditions in the refugees camps are getting worse and tension between the parts in the territory controlled by Morocco has increased.” Meanwhile, said Bárbulo, young people in the camps wanted to go to war because they had seen how their parents lived “and they don’t want to live like them”.

Joining a war without prospect of victory makes no sense but the perspective is different in the camps: the emotions play a bigger role there and refugees have lost faith in the international community. “Young people don’t want to bear more and, even if we don’t arrive until the end, at least we will teach something to Morocco,” said Yumani.

And Dellal takes the long view: “Who thought that apartheid was going to end in South Africa?”

Reprinted with permission from openDemocracy.

ABC's 'Middle Ground' on Climate Change: Who Knows? — Plays Stupid While California Suffers Historic Draught and Southern States Flood

By Peter Hart
Yesterday ABC's This Week (10/26/14) profiled George P. Bush, a Texas land commissioner candidate who is a grandson and nephew of the more famous George Bushes. It was part of This Week's "Closer Look" series, which seems to be intended as a place for upbeat profiles of political heavyweights. But a brief exchange about climate change showed the limits of this kind of journalism.

Given its impact on land issues, correspondent Jonathan Karl had good reason to ask Bush about climate change.

KARL: As land commissioner, he'll oversee millions of acres of oil and natural gas reserves. But he also talks about the need for renewable energy and he attempts to stake out a middle ground on climate change. Well, sort of.

How big a threat is climate change to the Texas coastline?

BUSH: The Texas coastline is impacted by rising sea levels. And again, the question is whether or not that's man-made, and I'll leave that to the scientists. But, at least in Texas, the facts showed that on average, about 17 feet of wet beach is lost due to coastal erosion and so….

KARL: Which is a huge problem for Texas.

BUSH: It's a huge problem.

KARL: But you don't doubt that human activity contributes to climate change?

BUSH: Well, we'll see in terms of the science, there's a wide range that has been discussed. And, again, I'm not a scientist by any stretch. But everywhere from, you know, no impact at all to 100 percent.

So Bush's position is that coastal erosion is a problem linked to rising sea levels, but he's not sure that's linked to human activity. I suspect Karl's "sort of" quip is intended as a signal to viewers, but some clarity would be helpful. The position that Bush is taking–maybe humans are causing climate change, maybe they aren't–is not a "middle ground" in any sense. It's certainly a good position to take if you don't want there to be any action to stop climate change.

Are scientists right in saying human activity is causing ocean levels to
rise? "I dunno" is not a neutral position. (cc photo: Van Sutherland)

This isn't the first time Karl has been able to get a Republican politician on the record on climate change. In May of this year (FAIR Blog, 5/12/14), Karl interviewed Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who gave him a nonsensical answer to a direct question about the scientific consensus on climate change. Rubio said that "natural disasters have always existed" and that scientists were taking "a handful of decades of research and say that this is now evidence of a longer-term trend." What was Karl's response to that?

It's talk like that that Rubio hopes will appeal to the conservatives he would need to win the Republican nomination.

In Karl's worldview, it would seem, Rubio's position is one that will appeal to the conservative base. And Bush, with his more rhetorically evasive version of scientific denial, is somewhere near the "middle." Both positions, of course, are outside the overwhelming scientific consensus–which should be the most important benchmark for journalists who are describing where a politician stands on the issue.

Climate change is rarely discussed on the Sunday talk shows. It'd be nice if when they did discuss it, the conversation was less about political positioning and more reality-based.

Reprinted with permission from Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Disaster Capitalism in California: Right-Wingers Told to View Drought and Skyrocketing Water Prices as a Major Investment Opportunity

California Drought Dries Up Bay Area Reservoirs.

By Jessica Mason
As a historic drought grips the U.S. southwest, towns in Texas and California are taking action to make sure precious fresh water is not wasted and spoiled through fracking.

At the same time, some investment advisors are urging right-wingers at the annual libertarian "Freedom Fest" to view drought and skyrocketing water prices as a major investment opportunity.
Fracking Concentrated in Drought-Stressed Regions

Hydraulic fracturing, commonly called "fracking," is a procedure for extracting oil by injecting a mixture of fresh water and chemicals into the earth at high pressure to fracture rock formations deep underground.

The EPA has estimated that a fracking well in a coal bed formation uses up to 350,000 gallons of water, although wells in more complex shale formations--like California's Marcellus Shale--may use between two to five million gallons of water. Nearly 100,000 new fracking wells have been drilled since 2005, which have used and contaminated at least 250 billion gallons of water.

A record 14-year drought, combined with population growth and increasing industrial and agricultural water use, has drained the Colorado River basin, which feeds water to Colorado, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Wyoming. Amid the drought, water use by the fracking industry is prompting criticism by farmers and other local residents as well as national environmental organizations.

Over ninety five percent of fracked wells in Colorado and California are in areas with high or extremely high water stress, according to a report by Ceres, a nonprofit that advises businesses on environmental issues. The Ceres report calls Texas "ground zero for sourcing risks," as fracking-related water use is expected to double over the next ten years, although more than two-thirds of the state is expected to remain in drought.
Activists Fight Back with Fracking Bans at the Local Level

Grassroots activists in the town of Denton, Texas want it to become the first city in Texas to ban fracking--even though it has taken in over $30 million in revenue from natural gas extraction over the past decade.

Officials in Denton, Texas temporarily halted fracking after the Denton Drilling Awareness Group and other local activists collected signatures from almost 2,000 registered voters in support of a ban, more than three times the number required to force the city council to consider a resolution.

Texas nurse and activist Cathy McMullen told the Associated Press that drillers' defiance of common-sense city rules requiring them to line wastewater pits and prohibiting them from burning off waste gas in residential areas spurred local opposition. "All that did was make people so fired up," she said. University of North Texas professor Adam Briggle, who helped McMullen organize the Denton Drilling Awareness Group, got involved after he learned the Denton city council's advisory panel on fracking was dominated by industry interests. "The official task force they formed to advise the City Council had three of five members from industry groups," Briggle told the press.

On Tuesday night, an estimated 500 people came to watch the city council vote on a ban, filling the hall and satellite rooms. The hearing lasted into the early hours of Wednesday morning, with over 100 people registered to give testimony. While the measure failed in a 5-2 vote, voters will have their say on a ballot referendum in November.

In California, activists are also working county by county to place fracking bans on local ballots for the November election. The strategy bypasses the state legislature, where efforts to pass a state-level moratorium on fracking have repeatedly stalled. Organizers have already succeeded in placing fracking bans on the November ballots in San Benito County and Santa Barbara County. They follow in the footsteps of cities like Longmont, Colorado, which became the first city to ban fracking in Colorado in November 2012.

Rebecca Claassen, a volunteer with the Santa Barbara County Water Guardians, told Northern California's KQED that environmental and economic concerns were driving support for the ban. “We have a lot of agriculture and tourism that both depend on clean water,” Claassen says, “and so the risks of water contamination really resonated with most everyone.”

Just this past month, New York courts approved the right of towns in that state to ban fracking, over the objections of fracking corporations and rightwing groups that have backed industry interests.
“Hurricanes, Tornados and Earthquakes: Volatility as an Asset Class”

While activists push to protect precious water resources during the extended drought, others are looking to profit from the crisis.

Participants in this month's Freedom Fest in Las Vegas, an annual libertarian conference, were advised to capitalize on water shortages due to fracking by David Norcom of NorCap Advisors, a Dallas-based investment management firm specializing in energy-related stocks.

"Now, let's have fun," Norcom told the audience near the end of his presentation, which was titled “Hurricanes, Tornados and Earthquakes: Volatility as an Asset Class.”

"This is the curve ball I wanted to throw at you. How many millions of gallons of water do you think it takes to frack one well?"

Norcom said that the total amount of clean water that could be spent on a single fracking well over its use is 10 million gallons, Norcom told the audience, "Those of you in California know how bad it's getting there, but you need to have a portfolio of water stocks in your account. If you had bought water stocks at the beginning of this year, they're up without dividends between fifteen and thirty percent."

The cost of water to Americans across the Southwest has risen dramatically since 2000, increasing more than sixty percent in cities like Phoenix, El Paso, and Los Angeles, and over one hundred percent in San Diego, Santa Cruz, and Las Vegas, according to a report by USA Today.

Some see this crisis in one of the essential needs for human life as an opportunity for profit.

"I will substantially argue to you that the water resource problem that we have in this country is very, very likely to continue, part of it being sucked up by the drillers over here," Norcom said.

From his perspective, that means water will have "a great place in a portfolio" of investments.

Whatever value fracking may have for speculators, its costs to those living near drill sites are serious. Fracking has been implicated in the record seven earthquakes that hit Oklahoma in just two days over the past weekend. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, which is investigating possible links between fracking and the quakes, Oklahoma's rate of earthquakes has increased by fifty percent since October 2013.

Perhaps seismometers will be the next "asset class."

-----

CMD's Research Director, Nick Surgey, contributed to this report.

Learn more about fracking at FrackSwarm.org.

Reprinted with permission from PRWatch.

The Financial Elite and the Global Land Grab

Farm Sunset. (Photo by Ruthanne Reid)

By Eric Draitser
The global financial crisis, which began in 2008, has significantly altered the way many speculators and financial institutions invest. Rather than taking huge risks with dodgy derivatives like credit default swaps and mortgage-backed securities, both of which have proven to be particularly volatile, many speculators have instead begun to invest in the most tangible asset of all: land. By doing so, financial institutions, and many governments, have engaged in “land grabbing” – a process by which large amounts of capital are invested in the purchase of land for large-scale agricultural production, while the farmers who have worked the land for generations are displaced and/or become renters on land that was once their own.

This worrying trend is part of a global shift, a consolidation of land and resources in ever fewer hands, while the mass of workers and peasants are made dependent on corporations and governments. Spurred on by the financial crisis and the exponential growth of food and commodity speculation, financiers and their investment institutions (hedge funds, big banks, sovereign wealth funds, etc.) are gobbling up the most fertile land around the world, leading many to wonder what the future of food production and land distribution will look like.

It should be further noted that this trend is not only affecting the poor of the Global South, but also the independent farmers of the so called “developed world.” As such, landgrabbing has become a global phenomenon, one that must be addressed by farmers and working people internationally, with broad-based coalitions and organizations mobilizing resistance and educating the people. Only comprehensive solutions to such a global problem can possibly hope to protect the land, and all of us who depend on it.

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China is Pillaging Africa Like an Old Colonial Power — Says Anthropologist Jane Goodall

Jane Goodall giving a speech at the 2012 Graduation class of Goldsmiths University
in London on December 17th 2012 (Photo by Peter Broster)

By Agence France-Presse
China is exploiting Africa’s resources just like European colonizers did, with disastrous effects for the environment, acclaimed primatologist Jane Goodall has told AFP.

On the eve of her 80th birthday, the fiery British wildlife crusader is whizzing across the world giving a series of lectures on the threats to our planet.

And the rising world power’s involvement on the continent especially raises alarms when it comes to her beloved chimpanzees and wildlife habitats.

During the last decade China has been investing heavily in African natural resources, developing mines, oil wells and running related construction companies.

Activists accuse Chinese firms of paying little attention to the environmental impact of their race for resources.

Read More