From Zambia to Ghana, African countries have very different attitudes to the application of biotechnology to food production. In a context of systemic inequality, the process raises key issues of good governance and global justice as well as science. Can the new technology be used to address poverty and advance sustainability, or will it be a means of increasing global corporate control?

The rabid political behavior of the 84-year-old Robert Gabriel Matibiri Mugabe has once more rained shame on the continent! The political barbarism Mugabe has carried out in Zimbabwe has no competent phrase to describe it. The desire was to totally leave him out of the publication, but the bad news is that Zimbabwe's old dog still has some bite left in him and a slew of African leaders who seem to admire his do!

Zimbabwe's 29 March 2008 elections opened a new chapter in the country's long-running political crisis. For the first time since independence in 1980, Robert Mugabe came in second in the presidential voting, and the opposition - the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) – won control of parliament. Instead of allowing democracy to run its course, Mugabe fought back by withholding the presidential results and launching a vicious countrywide crackdown ahead of a 27 June run-off against MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai. But severe state repression led Tsvangirai to withdraw, and Mugabe ran as the sole candidate in a poll condemned by African observers as neither free nor fair. With Mugabe having started his sixth term in office on 29 June, the international community must now move quickly to support a new regional effort to halt the violence and broker a political solution. As we headed to press talks aimed at forming a government of national Unity were on life support.