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So what do the world’s great investors have their eyes on in Africa, in addition to the usual natural resources – minerals, petroleum and timber – that they’ve always coveted? In a word, land. Lots of it. The land-grabbing 'investors' are purchasing or leasing large chunks of African land to produce food crops or agrofuels or both, or just scooping up farmland as an investment,

At the moment, the grabbing of Africa’s land is shrouded in secrecy and proceeding at an unprecedented rate, spurred on by the global food and financial crises. GRAIN, a non-profit organisation that supports farm families in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems, works daily to try to keep up with the deals on its farmlandgrab.org website.[vi]

Apart from the African governments and chiefs who are happily and quietly selling or leasing the land right out from under their own citizens, those who are promoting the new wave of rapacious investment include the World Bank, its International Finance Corporation (IFC), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and many other powerful nations and institutions. The US Millennium Challenge Corporation is helping to reform new land ownership laws – privatising land – in some of its member countries. The imported idea that user rights are not sufficient, that land must be privately owned, will efface traditional approaches to land use in Africa, and make the selling off of Africa even easier. GRAIN notes the complicity of African elites and says some African 'barons' are also snapping up land.

Do high oil prices cause recessions? The US economist James Hamilton is famous for his 1983 finding that oil price spikes had preceded all but one post-war US recessions[1]. Hamilton recently claimed that the current recession can be fully accounted for by the high oil prices of 2007-08. But while oil prices are certainly an important macroeconomic variable, it is just not plausible that they have anything like the impact that Hamilton suggests.

Failure is not an option, they say. But Polish veto threats, Italian resistance, and German insistence that it will not jeopardise jobs to help save the planet, suggest that the action plan will be diluted. The risk is the EU will draw withering criticism from climate campaigners and signal weakness and indecision to the US, China, India and other key players in the global warming fight.