Neo-colonialism hard at work in Africa

This sounds like a modern-day purchase of Manhattan for a few beads and trinkets.

More than 150 contracts covering an area of rainforest nearly the size of the United Kingdom have been signed with 20 companies in the Democratic Republic of Congo over the past three years. Many are believed to have been illegally allocated in 2002 by a transition government emerging from a decade of civil wars and are in defiance of a World Bank moratorium.

And the price for the logging rights?

To gain access to the forests for the next 25 years, the European companies have made agreements with village chiefs, offering bags of salt, machetes and bicycles, and in some cases promised to build rudimentary schools, the report states.

Yesterday the companies admitted that many of the agreements that they have signed with local communities in return for gifts needed to be reassessed.

Maybe it is time we start examining such cases at an international level instead of continuing to allow business to manipulate poor and hungry populations who had been caught up in war for years. Examining the role of the World Bank on this process could be an interesting exercise as well, though it might not help its image in the developing world.