Despite the rhetoric, the people of Sub-Saharan Africa are become poorer. From Tony Blair's Africa Commission, the G7 finance ministers' debt relief, the Live 8 concerts, the Make Poverty History campaign and the G8 Gleneagles promises, to the United Nations 2005 summit and the Hong Kong WTO meeting, Africa's gains have been mainly limited to public relations. The central problems remain exploitative debt and financial relationships with the North, phantom aid, unfair trade, distorted investment and the continent's brain/skills drain. Moreover, capitalism in most African countries has...

Can global warming be mitigated by carbon trading? With climate change posing perhaps the gravest threat to humanity in coming decades, and with free market economics still dominated by a few wealthy nations, it is little wonder so much effort has gone into creating a carbon market, no matter how much evidence has recently emerged about its flaws. South Africa, a revealing pilot site, has initiated carbon trading projects with adverse economic, environmental, and social impacts. This country pollutes at a rate 20 times higher than even the US, measured by CO2 emissions generated by each GDP...