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"Keep the Oil in the Soil": Ecuador Seeks Money to Keep Untapped Oil Resources Underground
Pambazuka - Land grabs: Africa's new ‘resource curse’?
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Studies by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) revealed, ‘Many countries do not have sufficient mechanisms to protect local rights and take account of local interests, livelihoods, and welfare. Moreover, local communities are rarely adequately informed about the land concessions that are made to private companies. Insecure local land rights, inaccessible registration procedures, vaguely defined productive use requirements, legislative gaps, and other factors all too often undermine the position of local people vis-à-vis international actors.’[1]
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In Madagascar, a 99-year lease on 3.2 million acres of land – 50 per cent of Madagascar’s arable land, granted to multinational Daewoo ‘ensuring food security’ for South Korea, lead to a coup. ‘In the constitution, it is stipulated that Madagascar’s land is neither for sale nor for rent, so the agreement with Daewoo is cancelled,’ said current president Andry Rajoelina, a baby-faced former DJ, backed by the army – and allegedly, the majority of Malagasys, 70 per cent of whom depend on farmland for income. ‘One of the biggest problems for farmers in Madagascar is land ownership, and we think it’s unfair for the government to be selling or leasing land to foreigners when local farmers do not have enough land,’ an official from Madagascar’s Farmer’s Confederation revealed to Reuters.
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International Crisis Group - B65 Tchad: sortir du piège pétrolier
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Add Sticky Noteoil has become a means for the regime to strengthen its armed forces, reward its cronies and co-opt members of the political class. This has further limited political space for the opposition and helped keep the country in a state of political paralysis that has stoked the antagonism between the regime and its opponents. As a result, there is recurrent political instability that is likely to ruin all efforts to use oil for the benefit of the country and its enduring stability. For the people who have not seen their lives improve and who are subjected to increased corruption, oil is far from a blessing. Given the current situation, the following measures should be taken to extricate Chad and its external partners from the petroleum trap:
- This report attempts simply to assign the "oil curse" appellation to Chad, as well as to promote the same institutional changes that were supposed to be in the original projects. Instead, one should ask: Why is oil flowing well while the country continues to implode? Why is this situation very similar to the history of the Niger Delta? - on 2009-10-05
Africa: The Next Victim in Our Quest for Cheap Oil | ForeignPolicy | AlterNet
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What have you learned from your experience on the book?
MW: I have learned several things. The first is that oil is not always a curse, meaning that oil dependency does not always produce poverty or conflict or corruption. It did not in Norway or the U.K. But vast oil wealth captured by oil-producing governments always places the question of how that wealth is to be allocated and spent at the center. If oil is inserted into a corrupt federal system, then the combination of non-transparent Big Oil and authoritarian Big Government produces a perfect storm of violence, corruption, ecological destruction and poverty. And this storm will have a huge blowback.
A New Governance Hybrid: How the EITI Aligns the Public and Business Interest in Good Governance
allAfrica.com: Ghana: Government Prepares to Battle the 'Oil Curse' (Page 1 of 2)
"At this point we acknowledge that we lack the know-how to manage this enormous resource but we are blessed with the experience of others," said Francis Ackah, engineering manager of the Ghana National Petroleum Company (GNPC), the agency which oversees the country's petroleum resources.
Oil and Turmoil - chad
Despite oil's tortured history and eventual demise as a fuel, it must not be summarily dismissed as a cause of turmoil in Africa. Rather it should be considered as a resource that needs to be managed with effective development planning.
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