Thursday December 01, 2011

From Creamer Media in Johannesburg, I’m Brad Dubbelman

Making headlines:

At 26% in the first quarter this year, the Gauteng city-region has the highest unemployment rate among about twenty metropolitan territories reviewed by the Organisation for Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD), the ‘Territorial Review of the Gauteng city-region’ report revealed. Compounding this is that in 2008, the GDP per capita in US dollar purchasing power parity was 92.4% lower than the OECD metro-region average. “Surprisingly, intraregional inequality, as measured as the difference in GDP per capita between municipalities is not excessive by OECD standards. However, household inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, is one of the highest in the world,” OECD representative Michael Donovan pointed out during the launch of the report in Johannesburg. To tackle low growth and high economic inequality, the OECD suggested Gauteng boost employment through improved labour market interventions.

Africa will rely on non transgenic crop breeding to boost food output to feed its rapidly growing population in the coming decades but will also need genetically modified (GM) products, the head of a pan-African farm think tank said. The world needs to boost cereals output by 1-billion tons and produce 200-million extra tons of livestock products a year by 2050 to feed a population projected to rise to 9-billion from about 7-billion now, the UN estimates.
Africa's population is expected to double to about 2-billion people by 2050 and the continent would need to double its food output by that time with some countries having to triple food production, Monty Jones, executive director of Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa says.

Major global banks are exacerbating the fight against global warming by supplying power utilities and mining firms with ample funds to build coal-fired plants, according to a report released by non-governmental groups at the global climate talks in Durban. The study examined the portfolios of 93 major banks and found that coal financing supplied by those institutions to the coal industry totalled €232-billion since 2005 when the Kyoto Protocol came into force. The Kyoto pact was set up to reduce greenhouse gases emitted by developed countries by an average of 5.2% below 1990 levels during the five-year period up to 2012. At the same time many countries still invest in coal-fired plants, especially India and China, to supply their growing economies.

Also making headlines:
Congolese opposition candidate Vital Kamerhe withdrew his call for the November 28 presidential and parliamentary elections to be annulled on the grounds of widespread irregularities.
The Muslim Brotherhood claimed to have a lead in the early vote count in Egypt's first free election since army officers ousted the king in 1952.
And, South Africa hopes Europe will increase its bail-out fund and reassure global markets about resolving its deepening debt crisis that has led to a "most unwelcome" uncertainty, Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan said.

That’s a roundup of news making headlines today.