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Most governments provide some kind of financial assistance to boost energy supply or reduce prices for certain energy consumers. Fossil fuels have been widely subsidized for decades. The exact scale of these subsidies is not known because a comprehensive study has never been undertaken. What is clear is that fossil-fuel subsidies can drain government budgets and increase greenhouse gas emissions. In recognition of these unwanted impacts, the leaders of the Group of Twenty (G-20) countries agreed in September 2009 to phase-out inefficient fossil-fuel subsidies in the medium term. The Global Subsidies Initiative is well aware of the complex issues surrounding fossil-fuel subsidies and their reform. That is why last year, in anticipation of the current calls for such reform, it commenced an ambitious program to identify, measure, and analyze the effects of fossil-fuel subsidies. Key findings from the first five in-depth reports, which together make up the series Untold Billions: Fossil-fuel subsidies, their impacts and the path to reform, are summarized above. Below, each of the individual reports can be freely downloaded. Support for one of the papers, Gaining traction: the importance of transparency in accelerating the reform of fossil-fuel subsidies, was generously provided by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).

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.