Ghana

Touted as having as much as 70 percent of West Africa’s gold deposits, Ghana has, for centuries, attracted numerous foreigners seeking to trade and invest in its mineral riches.

The colonial expansion of European states in Africa was usually accompanied by missionary efforts to proliferate Christianity and European civilization.

In many parts of Africa, a highly flexible system of town and village marketplaces, staffed primarily by women, maintains, a trickle of income, consumer goods, and food with remarkable resilience through stresses of political upheaval, economic crisis, and seasonal and extended drought.

The Hagahai are a recently contacted group of seminomadic hunter-horticulturalists living in the fringe highlands of Madang Province in Papua New Guinea. Although occasional explorers and miners probably walked through their territory in the Schrader Mountains as early as the 1930s and several attempts were made to census them during the 1970s, the Hagahai effectively remained hidden from mission and government influence until the 1980s.

FOR more than thirty years, the Amuesha Indian community of Miraflores (Oxapampa, Peru) has provided young girls as servants to neighboring haciendas and the homes of the region's lumber barons. During the past ten years, as the demand for servants in the urban areas has grown, more and more Amuesha girls have been taken to Lima to work in middle class homes.

Whether as displaced people or labor migrants, millions of Africans join the desperate, massive population movements across national boundaries on the African continent and to the West.

The most frequently used remedies for health problems in the Third World are drugs and vaccines. Evans, Hall, and Warford, in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), write, "In looking to the future...[health] problems may [result from the] excessive and irrational use of drugs..." The pharmaceuticals industry is a big foreign exchange earner for developed countries. Developing countries, where 70 percent of the world's population live, produce only 7 percent of the drugs they consume.

The average expenditures on drugs is from 40 to 60 percent of total health care expenditures.

The Atebubu District of Ghana borders the Volta Lake and is inhabited by Brong farmers and more recently Ewe from Togo. Lake and river fishing are important income earning activities in the area. The fishermen in the small fishing villages on streams and small feeder rivers to Lake Volta work under extremely exploitative conditions. Market middle people own the boats and buy the catch. Fishermen have no control over their market or their basic equipment.

On March 15, the United Nations General Assembly voted 170–4 to create a new Human Rights Council, effectively dissolving the oft-criticized Commission on Human Rights. Candidates for the Council will need to be elected by an absolute majority of 96 votes in order to secure a position, and once elected members can serve a maximum of two consecutive terms.