Category: The Conversation

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Imraan Valodia, Pro Vice-Chancellor, Climate, Sustainability and Inequality and Director, Southern Centre for Inequality Studies, University of the Witwatersrand

The vulnerability of the world economy to oil prices was painfully visible in the first half of 2026 following the US and Israel war against Iran. The power of this commodity to upend economies has been apparent before. In his recently published book Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market, political economist Adam Hanieh provides an expansive history of the connections between oil and capitalism since the 1800s. Economist Imraan Valodia asked him about the book.

What was your motivation for writing this book?

A main motivation was a dissatisfaction with many of the standard ways of discussing the history of oil and its place in the global economy. Much of the dominant narrative around oil tends to invest it with some kind of innate power, separate from the social and economic logics of capitalism.

What I try to do in the book is foreground what these are. Things like the drive towards endless accumulation, the incessant speeding up of production and consumption, mechanisation and so forth. And I ask how these qualities have served to centre oil in our energy system.

So the book is not just a history of oil, but a history of capitalism seen through oil.

I also wanted to move beyond histories that are overwhelmingly focused on the US. It is obviously crucial to the story. But our oil-centred world was made through wider global relations. These included colonial extraction, the development of the Soviet oil industry, the transformations of post-Soviet Russia and, more recently, the rise of China and East Asia as central nodes in global energy demand, refining and petrochemical production.

Another major concern of the book is tracing what oil becomes after it is pumped from the ground, beyond simply a liquid transport fuel. So I examine areas such as the petrochemical industry (plastics, fertilisers, synthetic fibres and so forth) as well as oil’s crucial place in the contemporary financial system.

How important was the rise of the oil industry in the US, specifically the rise of Standard Oil?

Standard Oil (1870-1911) was owned by the Rockefellers. It established many of the organisational forms that would later define the global oil industry. John D. Rockefeller’s key insight was to grasp the power that came from controlling the whole value chain through which oil moves. Standard Oil integrated refining, transport, storage, pipelines, marketing and finance into a single corporate structure. It used its command over railroads and later pipelines to squeeze competitors, lower costs and shape the market around itself. Much of the subsequent history of the oil industry revolves around this basic lesson – corporate power comes from vertical integration, and the ability to control the infrastructures through which oil circulates.

The corporate structures built up around Standard Oil were closely connected to the wider architecture of American capitalism. Tax systems, corporate law, banking, capital markets and state policy all became central to how oil companies grew and operated. The later global dominance of US oil firms was built on these wider innovations, and remained closely tied to support from the US state.

We can see the legacy of this today. Many national oil companies, especially in the Gulf monarchies, are now pursuing similar strategies of vertical integration.

When did the Middle East emerge as a key player?

Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC), which was founded by Britain in 1908, exemplified the relationship between oil extraction and colonialism. The company’s rise in Iran depended on concessionary agreements protected by imperial power. Britain’s interest in Persian oil was closely tied to the needs of empire, especially the fuelling of the Royal Navy.

APOC became a way of linking Middle Eastern oilfields to British military and industrial strength. This set a precedent for the wider Middle East, where a handful of foreign oil companies sought long-term control over oil reserves, infrastructure, pricing and export routes.

This also shaped the subsequent political history of the Middle East. Oil became a focal point for struggles over sovereignty because foreign control of the industry revealed the limits of formal independence. Producer governments were often constrained by companies that controlled technical expertise, transport, marketing and access to world markets. In response, different forms of oil nationalism emerged, from demands for a greater share of revenues to full nationalisation.

Iran’s attempt to nationalise oil in 1951 under Mohammad Mossadegh is the most famous example. But the broader pattern was regional. Across the Middle East, oil became a battlefield for states and nationalist forces to challenge colonial domination and foreign corporate power.

The formation of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) in 1960 and the later rise of national oil companies has to be understood against this background.

He sits at the intersection of finance, empire and the making of the modern oil industry. He was an Armenian businessman born in the Ottoman Empire, educated partly in Europe, who became one of the most influential intermediaries of early 20th-century oil. His nickname, “Mr Five Per Cent”, came from the 5% stake he secured in the Turkish Petroleum Company, the consortium that eventually gained control over Iraq’s oil. Unlike the other members of that consortium, Gulbenkian did not own a major oil firm, but he was able to broker the agreements through which the big western companies divided up access to Middle Eastern reserves. He was also very skilled at writing himself into history in dramatic and fanciful ways.

He is especially associated with the 1928 Red Line Agreement, in which the main shareholders of the Turkish Petroleum Company agreed not to develop oil independently across much of the former Ottoman Empire without the others. This was a key moment in the cartelisation of world oil, in which the control of oil (including pricing) came under the sway of a handful of large firms. The Red Line Agreement linked Middle Eastern oil to these international oil companies who fully managed production, prices and market access on a global scale. Gulbenkian’s 5% share is thus a window into how the oil industry was built through networks of imperial diplomacy and corporate collusion at the time of the break-up of the Ottoman Empire.

What were the implications of the 1973 oil shock, during which oil prices quadrupled following an embargo by some Arab oil producing states?

It marked a rupture in the world economy because it revealed that the old structure of the international oil industry was no longer sustainable. For much of the 20th century, the global oil industry was controlled by just seven western companies, the so-called Seven Sisters. They controlled the extraction of oil in the Middle East and elsewhere, as well as its refining, pricing, transport and marketing. But by the early 1970s, this system was being challenged by producer governments, especially in the Middle East and Latin America, and by the growing assertiveness of Opec.

The dramatic increase in oil prices after 1973 was a sign of this shift in power towards oil-producing states.

The implications were enormous. Higher oil revenues generated vast financial surpluses in the Gulf and other producer states, and these surpluses were managed and invested through the international financial system. They were recycled through US and European banks, invested in dollar-denominated assets, placed in US Treasury securities, and channelled into equities, real estate and other financial markets. This helped strengthen the position of the dollar and deepened the role of American financial institutions in the world economy. In this sense, the oil shock played a major role in creating the global financial architecture that we live with today.

Saudi Arabia was especially important in this process. The consolidation of the US-Saudi relationship in the 1970s linked oil, finance and military power very tightly together. Oil continued to be priced in dollars, which reinforced global demand for the US currency. Gulf surpluses flowed into American markets, while the Gulf monarchies became major purchasers of US weapons and military services. The consolidation of oil as the world’s leading fossil fuel was therefore increasingly intertwined with the reproduction of American power.

Why are you critical of the net zero emissions framework that’s key to climate change policy?

My criticism of the “net zero” concept is that it makes the climate crisis appear as a technical or accounting challenge, rather than a systemic crisis rooted in the dynamics of capitalism itself. The term entered the mainstream climate policy vocabulary through the Paris Agreement in 2015. In its basic form it means balancing ongoing greenhouse gas emissions with equivalent removals of carbon from the atmosphere. That might involve forests, soils, carbon capture and storage, or technologies that directly remove carbon from the air.

The problem is that this shifts attention away from the urgent need to reduce fossil fuel production and consumption in absolute terms. It allows companies and governments to say they are moving towards “net zero” while still expanding oil and gas extraction, as long as those emissions are, in theory, offset somewhere else.

Many net zero strategies rely heavily on carbon capture and storage. This technology remains unproven at the scale required to deal with the volume of emissions produced by global fossil fuel use. Historically, carbon capture has often been used for oil recovery: captured carbon is injected into oilfields to extract more oil. So a technology presented as a climate solution actually becomes a means of extending fossil fuel production. Another important example of a false “solution” presented within the net zero framework is carbon offset projects. These turn forests and other ecological systems into financial assets that can be counted against emissions elsewhere. These projects have been linked to land dispossession and numerous scandals, including some across the African continent, and often rely on highly dubious accounting schemes.

– How oil turned the motors of capitalism: a history
– https://theconversation.com/how-oil-turned-the-motors-of-capitalism-a-history-286072

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Timothy Krupnik, Director – CGIAR Scaling for Impact, CGIAR

The world’s food systems face real and urgent challenges. These include climate change, nutrition insecurity, food safety, and unequal access to markets. Research has produced practical solutions to each of these that could benefit hundreds of millions of people. Too few are moved into widespread use.

For years, the development sector has flattered itself with pilots.

A new tool works in a controlled pilot, a crop variety performs well in a field trial, and a digital advisory service shows promise in early testing. Evidence is written up, a case study or experiment is published, and then comes the familiar refrain: now we need to “take it to scale”.

That is the moment the real difficulty begins.

Solutions do not spread simply because they are good. They move, or fail to move, through systems where scientific supply and demand for innovative solutions are frequently misaligned. Policy environments are not ready, financing is difficult to mobilise, demand is weak, and markets are not designed to carry promising ideas beyond their pilot phase.

These are some of the challenges that have faced CGIAR, the world’s largest publicly funded research-for-development partnership focused on agriculture and food systems. But these challenges are not limited to CGIAR alone; they are common in research for development.

The world does not just need more breakthroughs. It needs more organisations that know how to turn scientific advances into adoption, investment and lasting use. Put plainly, it needs stronger efforts to move proven science into widespread use.

That sounds abstract. It is not. As director of CGIAR’s Scaling for Impact Program, which works with partners across Africa, Asia and Latin America to connect innovations with the systems and investments needed to scale them, I have seen this pattern myself. The evidence from that work consistently points to the same conclusion: scaling must be treated as a core part of the scientific process – built into research from the start, with systems thinking prioritised, not treated as a final phase.

What it takes to scale up

Scaling is about asking different questions earlier in the research process – identifying the challenges that prevent innovations from moving into use, and charting strategies and actions to overcome them. Not just: does this solution work? But: who will deliver it, who will pay for it, what incentive do they have, what regulations apply, what evidence unlocks funding, and what has to change in the surrounding system for uptake to last beyond a project cycle?

Those questions are rarely asked early enough in the research process. Yet they determine whether a promising idea becomes a public good or another stranded pilot.

One example of what this looks like in practice is a “clearinghouse” created under the African Development Bank’s Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation programme, now integrated into the CGIAR Scaling for Impact programme. Its role is not to invent new technologies, but to make proven ones usable at scale: validating them, packaging them with complementary innovations, and linking them to large public investments and agricultural delivery systems.

That model is now positioned to connect agricultural innovations to a US$1.5 billion AfDB-backed portfolio in 2026, expected to benefit 3.4 million additional smallholder farmers.

In Nigeria, it helped connect heat-tolerant wheat varieties – developed to maintain yields as temperatures rise – to an AfDB-financed programme backed by US$134 million, contributing to a sharp expansion in wheat area over two years. The point is not only that the varieties worked. It is that someone built the bridge between science and investment.

Sometimes the real bottleneck is not the innovation itself. It is the absence of systematic scaling support for the organisations working to deliver it.

That is why building scaling capacity matters. In 2025, Enabel, Belgium’s development agency, drew on the Scaling for Impact Program’s scaling fund to apply a structured approach to two African innovation projects: Tap & Track Asset Management in Uganda and the Abalobi Monitor fisheries platform in the Western Indian Ocean.

The value of the support, through the Scaling for Impact Program’s scaling fund, was not simply more investment. It was a more disciplined way of thinking about scaling. Enabel found the approach “practical” and “doable” because it surfaced constraints the teams had not previously recognised as part of the innovation system. These included government roles, how systems need to connect, institutional gaps and coordination failures.

For Tap & Track, that process fed into a medium-term scaling plan and a long-term ambition to reach 30 utility companies across seven countries. What the support produced most clearly was stronger planning and strategy. And that is precisely the point: scaling capability is itself part of the infrastructure of impact.

These examples point to the same conclusion.

We spend a great deal of time celebrating innovation and far less time understanding how innovations can be moved into use. But the gap between a successful pilot and a durable outcome is where much of the important and scientifically exciting work sits. It is where solutions are translated into investment cases, fitted into public and private delivery systems, adapted to institutional realities, and made credible to the actors who have to carry them forward.

That is why scaling should not be treated as a final phase or a dissemination exercise. It should be treated as a discipline. A capability. A scientific endeavour in its own right.

Good science remains indispensable. But it is not self-propelling.

The science to address food systems challenges exists. What remains insufficient is the systematic capacity to move proven innovations into widespread use at scale. Building that capacity and treating scaling with the rigour it requires is among the most important tasks facing food and agricultural research today.

– The world has the science to transform food systems. The next frontier is scaling it
– https://theconversation.com/the-world-has-the-science-to-transform-food-systems-the-next-frontier-is-scaling-it-282881

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Rod Crompton, Visiting Adjunct Professor, African Energy Leadership Centre, Wits Business School, University of the Witwatersrand

South Africa is moving away from coal-fired electricity, which currently supplies 74% of the country’s power, to wind and solar energy. But as the country’s experience shows, the transition is complex and is being slowed down.

This is because renewable energy works very differently from coal. It needs a different kind of electricity system and new ways of planning and managing the grid.

The transition also requires major changes at the state-owned electricity utility, Eskom, which has long dominated South Africa’s power sector. It involves transforming an electricity system built around a few large coal-fired power stations into one that can absorb power from many renewable energy producers while keeping electricity reliable, affordable and accessible.

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Read more: Competition in South Africa’s electricity market: new law paves the way, but it won’t be a smooth ride

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I’ve been working in the field of energy and economic regulation in South Africa for 40 years. I sat on the Eskom board for six years until I resigned in 2024 and I was involved in drafting key energy policies.

Based on my experience, I argue that there are five key factors slowing down the energy transition:

• Eskom’s dominance over the country’s electricity system

• inconsistent and politically driven government electricity planning, favouring certain technologies and restricting private energy providers

• a grid that has not been designed to keep up with technological change

• crumbling municipal electricity distribution networks and high levels of local government debt to Eskom

• inability of rooftop solar to sell surplus power into the grid.

These five problems are closely linked to slow-moving institutions, outdated ways of thinking, poor management and corruption. Many countries face similar challenges, but South Africa is a politically fractured society, with low trust in government, weak education systems and high rates of crime. All this shows in the slow pace of the energy transition.

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Read more: South Africa and renewable energy: a 12-year-old programme offers insights for countries moving to cleaner power sources

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The slow pace comes at a cost. Communities living near coal-fired power stations continue to face health risks. And South African exports could become less competitive as the European Union introduces border taxes on products produced with coal-fired electricity. The country’s coal-fired power stations continue to produce high levels of greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change.

Five bottlenecks

I have ranked the factors slowing the transition from most to least influential. Others may rank them differently.

The first bottleneck is Eskom: state-owned and slow to respond to change. It controls electricity generation, transmission and distribution. Because it controls so much of the system, Eskom has had the power to influence who can connect to the grid and how quickly new competitors can enter the market.

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Read more: South Africa’s power utility Eskom tried to block a gold mine from going solar – but lost in court

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Eskom is also struggling financially. As more households and businesses generate their own cheaper solar power, its sales have declined. It has tried to slow down the energy transition by challenging licences for electricity traders and by resisting plans to make the national transmission grid fully independent.

It has also backed expensive coal projects. In 2024, Eskom decided to extend the lives of the Camden, Grootvlei and Hendrina coal-fired power stations until 2030 at a cost of about R90 billion (about US$5.5 billion). That money could instead have gone towards new renewable energy projects that would have lasted much longer.

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Read more: South African court orders Eskom to disclose R70 billion coal and diesel contracts – why the ruling matters

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The second bottleneck is the government’s electricity plans (known as Integrated Resource Plans). They are supposed to set out the cheapest ways of providing the country with the electricity it needs. But instead, the government uses them to pick technologies that it prefers, like nuclear and gas, over cheaper renewable energies.

The country passed law setting up a wholesale electricity market, but in contradiction, the government intervenes in the market using the Integrated Resource Plans to limit the operation of market forces.

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Read more: South Africa’s plan to move away from coal: 8 steps to make it succeed

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The third bottleneck is the electricity grid itself. There are two problems here. The first is that South Africa’s grid was built decades ago to carry electricity from coal-fired power stations in the eastern province of Mpumalanga to the country’s main cities and industries. But the best wind and solar resources are mostly in the west of the country. So the grid now needs to become a two-way street, able to move electricity from west to east as well.

The National Transmission Company of South Africa (a wholly owned subsidiary company of Eskom) plans to build 14,500km of new transmission lines over the next decade to help this happen. Until then, some renewable energy projects have to cut back how much electricity they produce because the grid cannot carry it. Coal-fired power stations continue to fill the gap. Years of poor planning and Eskom’s financial problems have made this bottleneck worse.

The second problem is that managing a national grid with thousands of renewable energy providers is more complex than one based on a few coal plants. To keep the system stable, there have to be services in place to respond to sudden changes in power and to restart the grid after a blackout.

Wind and solar need a suite of such services. South Africa is still working out how to organise, fund and allocate responsibility for these services.

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Read more: South Africa finally has a masterplan for a renewable energy industry: here’s what it says

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The fourth bottleneck is crumbling municipal electricity distribution networks which create a serious risk to the electricity system. Local governments also owe over R100 billion (about US$6 billion) to Eskom, and this debt is rising fast.

Rising non-payment is worsening the problem, making it harder to fund and maintain electricity services. With weak public finances, government support is limited. Eskom has received R464 billion (US$28 billion) in bailouts. But some of these have gone towards covering losses linked to non-payment, crime and corruption.

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Read more: South Africa’s electricity supply: what’s tripping the switch

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The fifth bottleneck is is that renewable energy from rooftop solar systems is being wasted. Over the past five years, solar generation has shot up to about 8%-10% of total generation, powering about 3 million to 4 million households. Excess electricity generated is not used or sold back into the grid because municipalities and Eskom make it difficult and costly to do that.

When people disconnect from the grid, it reduces Eskom’s revenue and raises costs for those who remain. Over time, a weaker grid also makes it harder for large renewable projects to deliver power where it is needed.

What needs to happen next

To address the electricity crisis, the Presidency has set up a National Energy Crisis Committee. This is a collaborative effort by relevant national government departments, Eskom, and representatives from the private sector.

It has made progress but still faces many problems.

There is no magic solution for all these challenges. However, the focus of attention needs to be the establishment of a fully independent National Transmission Company. This will allow private capital to invest in removing the bottlenecks from the grid, and limit some of Eskom’s market power.

– South Africa’s move to renewable power is complex, but clearing 5 bottlenecks would speed it up
– https://theconversation.com/south-africas-move-to-renewable-power-is-complex-but-clearing-5-bottlenecks-would-speed-it-up-286002

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Rennie Naidoo, Professor of Information Systems, University of the Witwatersrand

Generative artificial intelligence (AI), and especially large language models deployed as chatbots and digital assistants, are now part of everyday digital life.

These models are being framed as a helpful assistant, a patient tutor, a customer service agent and even a source of emotional support. But what happens when even more human encounters are mediated by machines?

This question matters especially in South Africa, where apartheid not only separated people by law, but also shaped who was seen, heard and recognised as fully human. Its legacy still lives in unequal access to education, healthcare, work, technology and public services.

This is also why ubuntu has become such an important part of South African debates about social life. Ubuntu is a way of thinking about personhood. It sees personhood as relational. It reminds us that dignity is not only individual. It is also formed through mutual belonging.

Ubuntu is expressed through the idea that “a person is a person through other persons”. People become themselves fully through relationships of recognition, care, responsibility and shared life.

As a scholar of technology and society, I have been exploring how AI is reshaping human relationships.

In my research on ubuntu and generative AI, I set about asking what this means in practice. What happens when machines begin to replace the human relationships through which people experience care, recognition and dignity? To answer this question, I used ubuntu as a lens to examine whether AI-mediated interactions can support the kinds of relationships through which human dignity is affirmed.

I argue that the rise of generative AI is more than a technical issue in two ways. Firstly, it is a relational one. Secondly, it’s about who gets access to human beings. In my paper, I describe this risk as a form of “relational apartheid”. By this I mean a social and technological pattern in which access to meaningful human engagement becomes unequally distributed. Some people are met by persons. Others are managed by systems.

This is not apartheid in the legal sense of the past. It is a warning about how old inequalities can reappear in new digital forms.

Simulated care is not the same as shared life

Large language models can now produce fluent and emotionally sensitive responses. They can apologise, encourage, advise and offer language that sounds consoling. They can remember details within a conversation and adjust their tone to the user. For many people, this can feel surprisingly human.

Yet the appearance of a relationship is not the same as a relationship.

A chatbot may respond warmly to a lonely student, a frustrated customer or a patient seeking reassurance. But it does not share in that person’s life. It cannot be vulnerable in return. It cannot be held accountable as a person. It cannot forgive, be forgiven, carry a moral burden or be transformed by the encounter.

Human relationships are difficult because they involve more than responsiveness. They involve mutual risk. We disappoint one another. We misunderstand one another. We apologise, repair and try again. These imperfect processes are part of what makes human relationships morally meaningful.

AI often offers a form of responsiveness without the mutual resistance found in human relationships. It can always be available, endlessly polite, and easily reset. That convenience is attractive. But it may also train us to expect relationships without the hard work of relationship.

The concern is not that every interaction with AI is harmful. AI tools can help people find information, write better, learn faster and access services. Used carefully, AI can create more space for human care rather than replace it.

The danger comes when AI is used as a substitute for human presence in areas where recognition matters.

Inequality is also about who receives human attention

Customer service offers one example. As organisations automate front-line support, people are increasingly routed through chatbots before they can reach a human being. This may reduce costs. It may also improve speed for simple queries. But it can create a tiered system in which some customers receive human attention while others are left with automated interaction.

The labour implications are also becoming visible. Salesforce, one of the world’s largest providers of customer service and business software, has reported that AI agents now handle a growing share of customer interactions. The company has also reduced thousands of support roles in recent years, although it would be simplistic to attribute all of these changes solely to AI. This does not mean all customer service work will disappear. But it does show how quickly routine service work can be reorganised once AI becomes the default front line.

Something similar could happen in healthcare, education and social support. Where human professionals are scarce, AI counselling tools, tutoring systems and advice bots may appear to offer a practical solution. In some cases they may help. But they also risk normalising a situation in which those who are already underserved are increasingly spoken to by machines rather than people.

In a society that the World Bank describes as among the most unequal in the world, old differences in income, education, language, geography and institutional power could reappear in new digital forms.

The problem is not only whether machines give accurate or inaccurate answers. The deeper problem is that some people may be denied the kind of encounter through which dignity is affirmed. A person does not only need a response. A person often needs to be recognised by another person.

Building ubuntu into AI

What about efforts to build ubuntu-aligned AI?

Scholars have explored how ubuntu might inform AI design, ethics and governance.

There is value in designing AI systems that are more sensitive to African languages, local histories and communal values. There is value in involving communities in decisions about how AI is built and used. There is also value in ensuring that technology does not simply import the assumptions of powerful companies and distant markets.

But can ubuntu simply be programmed into a machine?

Ubuntu is not only a set of polite phrases or cultural preferences. It is a way of thinking about persons in a relationship. It depends on shared life, mutual vulnerability and accountability. A system can be designed to support these values, but current AI systems cannot live them in the way people do.

This distinction is important for policy and design.

AI systems should be presented clearly as tools, not companions. They should not blur the difference between simulated care and real care, especially when used by children, elderly people, patients or socially isolated users. In sensitive settings, AI should support human professionals rather than replace them.

It may help South Africa improve public services, widen access to knowledge and support overburdened institutions. But it may also deepen the distance between people if efficiency becomes the main measure of progress.

– Could AI create a new form of inequality in South Africa?
– https://theconversation.com/could-ai-create-a-new-form-of-inequality-in-south-africa-283725

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Mwangi Chege, Lecturer, American University

More and more of Kenya’s farmlands are coming under the control of people who live and work in urban centres. Over the past two decades, the proportion they control has grown to nearly a third of Kenya’s total agricultural land.

This trend has also been recorded in Ghana, Malawi, Tanzania and Zambia. Urban residents acquire rural farmlands because they see land as an attractive investment. They think of farming as potentially rewarding because of rising food prices, liberalised agricultural markets and the growing demand for food in rapidly urbanising areas.

The rural, small-scale farmer has long been the focus of agricultural transformation efforts on the continent. But some researchers and policymakers regard urban residents engaged in farming from afar as more innovative and entrepreneurial – capable of advancing commercial agriculture. These urban residents have better access to financial capital as well as information on markets and commodities.

Other researchers have pointed out that the impacts of urban-based farmers are either ambiguous or negligible.

For my PhD in Geography I investigated whether and how Kenyan urban residents engaged in farming from afar were shaping the development of commercial agriculture in the country. I also looked into the relations that these urban residents have with the rural people and places where they are active.

I found that the increasing control of rural farmlands by urban residents is reshaping the agricultural profiles of rural areas. This happens through the decisions they make about what to grow on their farms. They also influence the livelihood opportunities that are available to rural residents as well as prevailing regimes of labour, expertise and food systems.

Their impact has also been felt through farming practices which prioritise profit over sound land stewardship. My research points to the need to pay closer attention to the impacts of these farmers on rural agricultural landscapes.

Focus on financial returns

A popular term for people who farm from afar in Kenya is “telephone farmers”. Sometimes they’re called “weekend farmers” or “briefcase farmers”. I use the term “translocal farmers”.

The concept of translocality draws attention to how this type of farmer straddles rural and urban settings.

Over 14 months, I interviewed 50 translocal farmers, their farm managers, and county agricultural officials. I focused on the counties of Nakuru and Narok in Kenya’s Rift Valley region. These two counties have highly productive rural farmlands which jointly contribute about 9% of Kenya’s total agricultural production.

These farmlands attract urban residents who are interested in commercial farming, partly because they are close to the cities of Nairobi and Nakuru, and because land is available.

With the permission of the translocal farmers, I visited the farms to observe and record the activities there, including interactions between labourers and managers. The visits also enabled me to verify information obtained from the interviews.

This research revealed that translocal farmers were shaping the agricultural landscape through their decisions on types of crops to plant.

Translocal farmers said they preferred crops that promised decent financial returns and did not require a lot of attention. They chose to cultivate tree crops such as avocados, or grass varieties which could be used as fodder or hay. Vegetable crops such as cabbage, tomatoes and potatoes, or cereals like wheat require regular applications of pesticides and fertilisers. But tree crops and grasses typically only require close attention during planting and harvesting.

That makes them less costly in terms of labour and agricultural inputs, as well as time spent in supervision of farm activities. Vegetables have shorter growth cycles than tree crops or grasses and so can provide faster financial returns, but that means farmers have to source buyers on a regular basis. And vegetables perish fast, which might compel farmers to sell their produce at low prices.

This trend of translocal farmers choosing to plant trees or crops that require less intensive care has also been seen in areas of Tanzania and Uganda where urban residents have expanded their control of rural agricultural land.

Viewed against the reality of increasing control of rural agricultural land by urban residents, these choices shape the agricultural profiles of rural spaces.

Translocal farmers and soil degradation

Farming from afar may also have negative impacts on soil conservation and land degradation because translocal farmers are often absent from their land.

Agricultural officials pointed out to me that translocal farmers were frequently unavailable when the county was undertaking land and soil conservation initiatives that required farmer participation.

In Narok especially, farmers largely gained access to rural agricultural land by leasing from local land owners. County agricultural officers pointed to the high turnover of translocal farmers who would farm for a period and then disappear at the end of the lease period or if their enterprise failed.

As a result, county agricultural officials often did not know who was farming where. Further, translocal farmers felt greater pressure to maximise the returns from their farming so as to recover the funds spent in obtaining access to the land.

Sometimes they would farm in ways that degraded the land – like ploughing along the length of a slope instead of across it to conserve tractor fuel, or neglecting terracing and cover-cropping. Those soil conservation measures would reduce the ground area available for planting crops.

Agricultural policy often takes it for granted that farmers live where they farm. This research has shown that the increasing control of rural agricultural land by urban residents demands greater attention from Kenya’s government. At the national level, policymakers must understand what changing agricultural profiles mean for food security and rural livelihoods. And local government officials need to put more effort into engaging with the people who farm in their respective counties, whether or not they reside there.

– Kenyans living in towns are farmers too: what this means for rural landscapes
– https://theconversation.com/kenyans-living-in-towns-are-farmers-too-what-this-means-for-rural-landscapes-281901

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Enrico Nichelatti, Postdoctoral researcher, University of Luxembourg

Climate-related disasters are becoming more frequent and more intense across sub-Saharan Africa. Floods, droughts, heatwaves and storms are no longer isolated environmental events. They increasingly shape livelihoods, inequality, public trust and the relationship between citizens and the state.

Governments rely on taxes to finance schools, healthcare, infrastructure and climate adaptation policies. However, taxation depends on more than just enforcement: it depends on whether citizens believe the state is capable, fair and responsive in times of crisis.

Our research has focused on taxation, inequality, public finance and climate-related shocks in sub-Saharan Africa. In a recent study we examined an underexplored consequence of climate-related disasters in Africa: their effect on tax morale, in other words people’s willingness to pay taxes voluntarily.

Tax morale matters because many African countries struggle to raise enough domestic revenue. And citizens are more willing to pay taxes when they trust governments to be fair, effective and responsive.

We analysed data from 25 sub-Saharan African countries between 2011 and 2021. We combined Afrobarometer survey data with climate disaster records from the Emergency Events Database, an international disaster database. Our study looked at five types of disasters: droughts, floods, extreme temperatures, storms and wildfires.

We matched disaster events to respondents based on their location and interview date. We then used statistical models to examine how disaster exposure was associated with tax morale. The analysis also looked at the roles of inequality and trust in public institutions.

The findings reveal a complex picture. They show that disasters don’t all affect tax morale in the same way. Droughts and extreme temperatures are associated with lower tax morale. Floods, by contrast, go with slightly higher tax morale. Repeated exposure to multiple climate-related disasters is associated with an overall decline in tax morale.

We also found that disasters are associated with rising economic inequality. When inequality increases, trust in public institutions declines and tax morale weakens. The results of our analysis support this argument by incorporating the climate-disaster dimension. Climate-related disasters exacerbate inequality. In turn this erodes trust in public institutions and ultimately reduces tax morale.

Although climate disasters tend to reduce tax morale, our analysis shows that the institutional environment may mitigate the impact. On this issue we focused on Kenya, Benin and South Africa. All three are highly vulnerable to climate-related disasters. All three have introduced disaster management and climate-related legislation over the past decades.

This additional analysis allowed us to examine whether formal disaster-response frameworks can reduce the impact of disasters on citizens’ fiscal attitudes. The results indicate that these institutional frameworks substantially weakened, and in some cases completely removed, the negative effects of natural disasters on tax morale.

These findings suggest that citizens respond to the capacity of governments to manage and respond effectively to disasters.

Why would climate disasters influence attitudes towards taxation?

Taxation is not only an economic issue. It is also a social contract. Citizens are more willing to comply with taxes when they believe governments use public resources fairly and provide protection during crises.

Evidence from African countries suggests that trust plays a central role in shaping tax morale. Higher levels of trust in public institutions are associated with a greater willingness to comply with tax obligations. This is particularly true of local governments and public agencies.

The quality of public service provision appears to matter too. Effective service delivery tends to strengthen tax morale.

Previous studies demonstrate that climate disasters can erode this relationship in several ways.

First, disasters destroy livelihoods and reduce incomes, making it harder for households to meet basic needs. Where families struggle to afford the basics, survival comes first and paying taxes is less important.

Second, disasters can erode trust in government when responses are perceived as slow, unequal or politicised. Willingness to comply with taxes declines – even among higher-income taxpayers – if citizens believe disaster relief benefits only certain groups, or if corruption affects aid distribution.

Third, climate shocks place extra pressure on public finances. Governments may collect less revenue while facing higher spending demands for reconstruction and emergency assistance.

What affects the willingness to pay

Our study showed that the strongest negative effects on tax morale came from droughts and extreme temperatures. This is not surprising. Droughts directly affect agricultural production, food security and rural livelihoods. Heatwaves also reduce labour productivity and increase health costs, particularly for vulnerable populations.

Floods produced different results. In some cases, they were associated with slightly higher tax morale. One possible explanation is that visible and effective government responses during floods, such as emergency relief and infrastructure, may strengthen perceptions of state responsiveness.

Our research also suggests that the effects of climate disasters are not uniform across countries and communities. The negative effect on tax morale is stronger in poorer countries and in rural areas. Here livelihoods depend more heavily on climate-sensitive activities such as agriculture. And rural households are often more exposed to floods and droughts. They also have weaker access to public services, financial protection and state support.

In these contexts, repeated climate shocks can reinforce perceptions that governments are unable or unwilling to protect vulnerable populations.

The role of climate policy

Climate adaptation policies need to address inequality and strengthen public trust. Otherwise, repeated climate shocks may undermine willingness to contribute to public finances.

Targeted social protection, equitable disaster relief and transparent public spending are essential. So are investments in climate resilience for vulnerable communities.

Our findings suggest that climate disasters don’t only threaten economies and livelihoods. They may also undermine the fiscal relationship between governments and citizens where inequality is high and institutional trust is low.

– Can climate shocks change how people feel about paying taxes?
– https://theconversation.com/can-climate-shocks-change-how-people-feel-about-paying-taxes-284097

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Justin Visagie, Associate Professor at the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies, University of the Witwatersrand

South Africa is in the midst of its most significant anti-immigrant mobilisation in years.

The emergence of the March and March movement, calls for the mass deportation of undocumented migrants by 30 June 2026, growing anti-immigrant violence, and the repatriation of foreign nationals by several African governments have pushed immigration to the centre of national debate.

The anti-immigrant protest movement argues that it is responding to rising unemployment, deteriorating public services and growing insecurity.

The question is not whether these grievances have merit. They do. It’s whether immigrants are, in fact, responsible for them.

This article draws from research by the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. It examines the drivers and consequences of inequality. It focuses on the world of work, public spending, production and ownership, technological change and innovation, and the effects of climate change.

Our research provides important context for understanding the economic and social conditions in which anti-migrant sentiment has exploded – and its underlying causes. Immigration is not irrelevant to the multiple and overlapping crises facing South Africans. But it’s not their primary cause.

Joblessness and informality

Few issues illustrate this more clearly than employment.

South Africa has one of the highest unemployment rates in the world. More than four in every ten working-age adults who want work are unable to find it (this includes discouraged work seekers). The scale of this crisis understandably creates pressure to identify a cause and demand action.

Many South Africans have concluded that immigrants are taking jobs away from local workers. Our analysis of public opinion data shows that as many as 70% of South Africans believe that immigrants take jobs from people born in the country.

These views help explain the growing support for anti-immigrant mobilisation. But public perceptions do not always align with reality.

Administrative tax data suggests that foreign nationals occupy a very small share of formal employment in South Africa. Our researchers have found that less than 4% of formal jobs are held by foreigners. This share has remained largely unchanged for more than a decade.

The picture is somewhat different in the informal economy, where foreign-born workers represent a limited but larger 20% share of participants.

Related research by Southern Centre for Inequality Studies scholars together with the international informal workers’ organisation StreetNet and Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) in South Africa found that as the informal sector expands amid rising unemployment, competition has increased. This has made livelihoods more precarious and earnings more difficult to sustain.

Competition is particularly rife among spaza shop owners (informal neighbourhood grocery stores) and street traders, who purchase goods in the formal sector and resell them at a small profit margin. Foreign-owned spaza stores tend to run larger and collective operations – a similar role to wholesalers. This enables them to offer a wider range of products for lower prices.

Creating a supportive environment for informal operators would require policy shifts. They could include: access to start-up capital, wholesale sourcing of goods, secure access to public space, investment in affordable public infrastructure and services, and reduced harassment by municipal authorities.

Despite recent government plans to revitalise the township (historically segregated poor neighbourhoods) and rural economies, South Africa’s economic policy remains focused on the formal sector.

The frustrations experienced by South Africans are therefore understandable. But South Africa’s unemployment crisis is simply too large to be explained by immigration alone.

For example, our research suggests that the unemployment rate would fall by only six percentage points – from 43.6% to 37.6% – if all foreigners’ jobs were somehow handed to unemployed South Africans.

This is a relatively modest reduction given the scale of South Africa’s unemployment crisis. It highlights that foreigners do not dominate the labour market overall, even if some sectors and locations have higher concentrations of immigrant workers.

Yet, not only is it unrealistic to expect that jobs could be swapped one-to-one between immigrants and South Africans. It could even result in net overall job losses for South Africans because of the reduction in entrepreneurship, investment and skills which foreigners bring.

This was the conclusion of a World Bank report which found that one immigrant worker actually generates approximately two jobs for locals.

The economic contribution of migrants may also help explain why attitudes towards immigration vary across South Africa. A Southern Centre for Inequality Studies scholar found that residents of more deprived municipalities were sometimes more supportive of cross-border movement than those living in better-resourced areas. One possible explanation is that direct contact with migrants helped challenge stereotypes and helped make their economic contributions more visible.

If immigration is not the primary cause of joblessness, why does the perception resonate so strongly?

Part of the answer lies in the economic pressures experienced by ordinary households.

Economic pressures facing households

Households face rising costs associated with food, transport, electricity and other essentials. These pressures come on top of the deterioration of public services. Power outages, unreliable public transport, overcrowded schools, and long waits at public clinics have become part of everyday life for many South Africans. This has reinforced a sense that living standards are steadily declining.

Our research confirms that the reduction in government borrowing, mainly through reduced budgets and the collection of more revenue, has been squeezing out public services for a decade. This has contributed to worsening teacher-learner ratios, longer waiting periods at public health facilities, and increasing backlogs at courts.

These pressures are likely to intensify in the years ahead for a number of reasons.

First, climate change places disproportionate burdens on vulnerable groups, such as women, particularly through its effects on care work, livelihoods and access to essential resources.

Our recent research also suggests that the green transition will create highly uneven labour market impacts across South Africa. Some communities will bear significant job losses and economic disruption that could intensify social and political tensions.

Second, the limits of South Africa’s social protection are becoming more apparent. Social grants have become a lifeline for millions of households and play a vital role in preventing destitution. But they cannot substitute for decent work and economic opportunity. Our research on social protection shows people want something more than survival. They want meaningful work, dignity, independence and opportunities to build better lives.

The challenge facing South Africa is not simply to reduce poverty, but to expand opportunity. South Africa’s economic prosperity is actually tied to trade and investment with the rest of Africa. Anti-immigrant politics may deliver short-term political gains. But they risk damaging the relationships and openness on which South Africa’s long-term growth depends.

A warning signal

The rise of anti-immigrant sentiment is a warning signal. It reflects genuine frustration with economic conditions and declining opportunities faced by the average South African. Ignoring those frustrations would be a mistake.

But so too would be blaming migrants for a crisis they did not create. Economic hardship may help explain anti-immigrant sentiment, but it cannot justify directing hostility or violence towards people whose rights and dignity deserve equal protection.

South Africa’s challenges demand better policy, not scapegoating, prejudice or violence against migrants.

The statement on which this article is based was signed by the following Southern Centre for Inequality Studies research staff: Comfort Molefinyana, David Francis, Geci Karuri-Sebina, Glen Robbins, Gontse Mabaso, Imraan Valodia, Julia Taylor, Khanimamba Masuluke, Khumisho Moguerane, Niall Reddy, Nirvana Pillay, Nishal Robb, Rahul Gandhi, Rashaad Mohamed Amra, Rheyna Pattni, Rozeena Das, Ujithra Ponniah.

– Blaming migrants ignores the real causes of South Africa’s economic crisis
– https://theconversation.com/blaming-migrants-ignores-the-real-causes-of-south-africas-economic-crisis-286157

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Hamza Benattia, Prehistory, University of Cambridge

For decades, stories about the ancient Mediterranean have centred on the grand cultures of Greece, Rome, Phoenicia and Egypt. North-west Africa seldom enters the picture before the arrival of Phoenician traders on the Moroccan coast about 3,000 years ago.

But archaeology is now revealing a different story.

Long before the first Phoenician ships (from today’s Middle East) sailed the western Mediterranean (between today’s north Africa and southern Europe), communities in what is now Morocco were farming and herding animals. They were also crossing the Strait of Gibraltar and participating in long-distance exchanges.

Over the past decade, I’ve worked on archaeology projects across Morocco. We’ve been investigating the origins of farming, long-distance exchange and the emergence of complex societies there. In my most recent study, I brought together archaeological evidence, radiocarbon dates and genetic data spanning nearly three millennia.

The study reveals that between roughly 3800 and 500 BCE – a period that saw the construction of Stonehenge, the flourishing of New Kingdom Egypt and the rise of Phoenician maritime trade – north-west Africa was not a marginal frontier. It was a crossroads linking the Mediterranean, Atlantic and Saharan worlds.

This has important implications for how we understand Africa’s past. For too long, interpretations of the continent’s history have underestimated the complexity and dynamism of its societies. By bringing north-west Africa back into the picture, archaeology is helping to correct that imbalance and reveal a richer, more interconnected reality.

A centre of multiple worlds

Geography helps explain why north-west Africa occupied such a strategic position in Mediterranean prehistory. The Strait of Gibraltar, which separates present-day Morocco and Spain, is only about 14km wide at its narrowest point. It served as a natural corridor linking Africa and Europe.

Far from being isolated, communities in today’s northern Morocco were embedded in long-distance networks for millennia. They maintained contacts with Iberia and other Atlantic regions and they interacted with Saharan populations. Later, they engaged with Mediterranean traders and settlers.

They were not passive participants in these exchanges. Archaeological evidence increasingly suggests that local communities actively participated in the networks that connected the western Mediterranean.

Early farmers and innovation

Farming was present in north-west Africa from at least 5400 BC, during the Neolithic period when agriculture was spreading across much of the western Mediterranean.

By around 3800 BC, communities in what is now Morocco were practising increasingly intensive farming and animal husbandry. One striking example is Oued Beht. At this large open-air settlement people cultivated crops, raised livestock and stored surplus food in hundreds of large underground pits.

Recent excavations reveal this was no small farming village. Covering around ten hectares, Oued Beht is among the largest agricultural settlements known in prehistoric Africa. The site may have supported a population of more than a thousand people, pointing to a level of organisation rarely documented in north-west Africa at this time.

These developments coincided with broader environmental changes, including the Sahara gradually becoming a desert. The dryness may have encouraged communities to invest more heavily in agriculture, food storage and long-term settlement in order to adapt to a less predictable environment.

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Read more: A 5,000-year-old farming society in Morocco fills a major gap in history – north-west Africa was a central player in trade and culture

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At the same time, there’s clear evidence of interaction with Iberia, the peninsula that includes today’s Spain and Portugal. Shared painted pottery styles, together with ivory and ostrich eggshell objects, point to regular contacts across the Strait of Gibraltar. These local communities were already active participants in wider networks of exchange.

New influences and local continuity

During the third millennium BC, north-west Africa became part of the wider Bell Beaker phenomenon. It takes its name from distinctive bell-shaped drinking vessels which appear across a network of communities that stretch across Atlantic Europe and the western Mediterranean.

For decades, the presence of Bell Beaker pottery in the region was interpreted as evidence that local communities were simply adopting cultural innovations from Europe.

Yet in Morocco, Bell Beaker objects are found alongside distinctive local traditions. This suggests local communities were selectively integrating new elements into existing cultural frameworks.

This was clearly a process of exchange, adaptation and local agency.

The elusive Bronze Age

The second millennium BC remains one of the least understood periods in north-west African prehistory. In Iberia, large, fortified settlements and clear social hierarchies emerge. The archaeological record in north-west Africa is more fragmentary.

Even so, there are important clues.

Burial practices such as stone-built cist graves point to changes in social organisation. At sites like Kach Kouch, there is evidence for settled farming communities with round houses, storage facilities and animal herding.

There are also signs of long-distance connections continuing into this period. For example, a bronze sword recovered from the bed of a river in northern Morocco has close parallels in the British Isles. This suggests links extending far beyond the Mediterranean.

Encounters with the Phoenicians

By the early first millennium BC, Phoenician traders and settlers from the eastern Mediterranean – today’s Lebanon – began establishing settlements along the north African coast. Traditionally, this has been interpreted as a process of colonisation, with local populations as passive recipients of a more advanced culture.

Recent archaeological evidence challenges this.

At sites like Kach Kouch, local communities continued their own architectural traditions and lifestyle. They selectively adopted new elements, like wheel-made pottery and iron tools.

Kach Kouch and other settlements suggest that these societies negotiated encounters with incoming groups. They incorporated new ideas into existing cultural traditions on their own terms.

The arrival of the Phoenicians, then, did not mark the beginning of complex societies in Morocco. It was a new chapter in a much longer history of interaction, adaptation and exchange.

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Read more: Discovery of a 4,000-year-old Bronze Age settlement in Morocco rewrites history

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These advances reflect decades of work by Moroccan and international research teams. Much remains for archaeologists to do. Large parts of the region are still underexplored and new discoveries have the potential to transform our understanding even further.

What is already clear, however, is that the prehistory of north-west Africa is a story of local communities actively shaping their own place in the ancient world.

– Morocco’s hidden history: archaeology, DNA and carbon dating rewrite the story of the ancient world
– https://theconversation.com/moroccos-hidden-history-archaeology-dna-and-carbon-dating-rewrite-the-story-of-the-ancient-world-279226

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Danny Bradlow, Professor/Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria

The international legal order that was created after the second world war is no longer fit for purpose. Its response to urgent global problems like climate, poverty and pandemics is inadequate. Its key institutions like the United Nations are incapable of restoring peace in Ukraine, Iran, Sudan or the Democratic Republic of Congo or stopping genocides in places like Myanmar or Palestine.

The World Trade Organization is paralysed because its most powerful member states have lost confidence in the trading system that they created. The international community is unable to reform the global financial system so that it provides adequate development finance to Africa and other parts of the global south.

These developments lead many people to conclude that international law is merely nice-sounding words that hide a more cynical truth: the only effective international legal rule is (and has always been) that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”, as the ancient Greek historian Thucydides put it.

There is indeed a history of international law being used by the strong for evil purposes. For example, international law was used to justify slavery and colonialism. It was also used to force newly liberated Haiti to compensate its French colonisers for the loss of their slaves.

The International Court of Justice initially relied on legal technicalities to uphold South Africa’s unlawful post-second world war control of Namibia.

My experience as a scholar and practitioner of international law convinces me that this view ignores the many ways in which international law is essential for the functioning of the world. Without it, for example, planes would be unable to fly people around the world. Ships could not carry goods across the globe. And the services on which we all rely, such as the internet and cross- border payments, would not function efficiently. Governments could not be held accountable when they abuse the human rights of their citizens. Multilateral development banks would be able to avoid responsibility when they fail to comply with their own policies and procedures, causing harm in their borrower countries.

Although international law has failed to stop the current illegal wars, at least two of their perpetrators – Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and Russia’s Vladimir Putin – have been charged with international crimes. They now find it difficult to travel outside their home states.

Most states know that without widely understood and accepted international laws and principles it would be harder to resolve their disagreements peacefully or to structure their international economic transactions with confidence. Their own sustainable development would proceed more slowly and unpredictably.

Consequently, they continue advocating for a world based on international legal principles. For example, this view motivated South Africa and The Gambia to bring cases to the International Court of Justice seeking to stop alleged genocides. It inspired students in Vanuatu to advocate for an advisory opinion from that court on the legal implications of climate change.

They seem to accept a more optimistic view of international law, originally articulated by the legal scholar Louis Henkin:

Almost all nations observe almost all principles of international law and almost all of their obligations almost all of the time.

Henkin’s qualified endorsement cautions that international law is an imperfect instrument. States will ignore it when they think it does not suit their purposes. Over time, the gap between the state of the world and the content of international law expands. Eventually it becomes too large and, to remain credible, the law is forced to adapt.

We are approaching such a tipping point.

But the current breakdowns can’t be fixed easily. There are two complex challenges that must be addressed if a new international legal regime is to be formulated, agreed and respected. It requires the international decision making process to become more inclusive. States must also accept that there are some issues that they cannot control alone because the issues do not respect national borders.

What needs to change

First, global decision-making arrangements must change so that they reflect the interests and concerns of the whole international community. The existing global institutions need to more completely incorporate those who were not present when the current legal order was created. These include the many states that only gained their independence in the past 70 years and are not fully part of the structures of global governance. Non-state actors like corporations, civil society organisations and international organisations that are influential in international affairs should also be brought in.

The need for these changes drives states in the global south to promote more inclusive governance in institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and to advocate for reform of the UN Security Council. It inspires both states and civil society organisations to try to make businesses more respectful of human rights and their tax obligations to their host states.

All these actors must accept that they have international responsibilities and obligations towards the communities and individuals that are affected by their decisions and operations.

Second, the international community must adjust to the fact that states are no longer fully sovereign. To be sure, states can close their borders. They can refuse to allow goods, services or people from other countries into their territory. They can refuse to participate in the global financial system and can break off diplomatic relations. However, there is at least one problem, climate change, that they cannot stop on their own. It transcends national borders. Resolving it requires collaboration among all state and non-state actors that are affected by and that influence climate change.

The new international order must rethink sovereignty so that it respects the agency of states and their citizens to the extent feasible.

But it must not allow states to use sovereignty as the excuse to avoid their global responsibilities. The new international law must acknowledge that individuals, communities, corporations, sub-national and national governments and supranational organisations all have an impact on the climate and are affected by it.

– The international legal order is broken: 2 key shifts needed to fix it
– https://theconversation.com/the-international-legal-order-is-broken-2-key-shifts-needed-to-fix-it-285844

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Joan Silk, Professor, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University

Baboons are one of the most widespread of Africa’s primate groups. They range across sub-Saharan Africa and into the Arabian Peninsula.

Baboons’ ability to spread across such a vast geographic area is based on their great ecological adaptability and dietary flexibility. This enables them to flourish in a wide variety of habitats, including deserts, swamps, open grasslands, woodlands and tropical forests.

I am an evolutionary anthropologist. I rely on methods and theory from the field of behavioural ecology, which focuses on how ecological conditions and evolutionary forces shape the behaviour of organisms to enhance their chances of surviving and reproducing successfully. I am particularly interested in how studies of other species, particularly closely related ones like baboons, help us understand our own human origins.

Studies of non-human primates give us insight about how evolution may have shaped the behaviour of our ancestors and how it influences our own behaviour.

Over the last 40 years, I have been involved in long-term studies of three baboon species: chacma baboons, olive baboons, and yellow baboons. In these species, groups are composed of multiple adult males, multiple adult females, and immature animals. Males leave their birth groups near the time of sexual maturity to prevent inbreeding and may live in several different groups over the course of their lives. But females remain in their birth groups, and groups consist of multiple matrilines – sets of females connected through their maternal ancestors.

We have learned that females’ connections to their relatives shape their everyday lives and have long lasting effects on their survival and lifetime reproductive success (the number of surviving offspring they produce over the course of their lives).

Maternal training rules

Maternal kinship structures the lives of female baboons. Like other mammalian females, pregnant baboon mothers nourish their developing foetuses and buffer them from external stressors. After birth, mothers nurse their infants, carry them from place to place, and keep them warm and safe. After they are weaned at about 18 months, juveniles no longer depend on their mothers for food or transportation, but they maintain close ties to their mothers, spending much of their time near them and seeking their protection and reassurance when they are in danger.

Females sometimes intervene in support of their juvenile offspring, especially their daughters, when they are involved in conflicts. With their mothers’ help, young females can defeat all of the females that their mothers can defeat, and this leads to the formation of dominance hierarchies in which females acquire dominance rank positions just below their mothers.

As females mature and begin to reproduce themselves, they remain closely connected to their mothers and sisters. Adult females spend much more time grooming their mothers, daughters and sisters than they spend grooming others.

Close kin maintain close social bonds as long as they live together, while relationships among unrelated females tend to fluctuate in strength from year to year.

For behavioural ecologists like me, it is not only important to describe patterns of behaviour but to try to understand why evolution has favoured them. Grooming and support are forms of cooperation. When a female grooms another female, she painstakingly parts her partner’s fur and removes parasites from the skin. This is beneficial to the recipient because these parasites can cause irritation and diseases.

But the female who provides grooming gives up opportunities to forage or rest, and this may be costly.

The benefits of social bonds

Natural selection is expected to favour behaviours that increase the relative fitness of individuals, the number of surviving offspring that they produce over the course of their life time. Behaviours like grooming seem puzzling because they are costly to the actor, but beneficial to the recipient.

However, according to the theory of kin selection, altruistic interactions like grooming can evolve among genetic relatives because they share some fraction of their genes. For example, offspring acquire half of their genes from each of their parents. This may be the reason that baboons and other primates form such close ties to their kin.

It’s also important to understand how females benefit from social bonds. Several lines of evidence suggest that social bonds help females cope with stress. Glucocorticoids (like cortisol in humans) are released into the bloodstream to help animals mobilise energy to respond to acute threats, like predator attacks. But chronic activation of the stress response can be harmful.

Researchers can track glucocorticoid levels in wild primates by collecting faeces from known individuals and measuring the concentrations of metabolites (small molecules produced, used, or broken down during metabolism). Results from several studies suggest that close social bonds help females cope with stressful events in their groups and the disruption of close social bonds creates stress for females.

Females’ coping ability may have long-term consequences because sustained exposure to glucocorticoids decreases females’ life spans.

The quality of females’ social bonds may have long-term consequences too. Data from long-term studies of baboons in the Amboseli Basin, which lies along the border of Kenya and Tanzania, and in the Moremi Reserve of the Okavango Delta of Botswana, show that females that have strong and stable social connections live substantially longer than females who were more socially isolated.

It has taken decades of research by dozens of researchers at many different sites to construct this rich picture of the lives of female baboons. But there are still many questions to answer. Why are some females more sociable than others? What are the mechanisms that link social bonds and longevity? As we have learned more about the form and consequences of social bonds among baboons and other primates, we have come to appreciate the parallels between the benefit of social connections for baboons and for ourselves.

– Female baboons keep family bonds strong: research reveals the benefits
– https://theconversation.com/female-baboons-keep-family-bonds-strong-research-reveals-the-benefits-284860