Author: anadmin

Luau – Over 100 hectares of rice and maize crops have been devoured by hippos in the municipality of Luau, eatern Moxico province, from January to date.

According to the head of the municipal office of Agriculture in Luau, Cahilo Chijica, the large and small animals, as well as consuming fish along the Cassai river, have been devouring and feeding on rice, maize and other crops from farms located in that confluence.

He informed that the solution to the problem will be to transfer the farmers, from the locality of Hota northeast of Luau, to other fertile areas and abundant in water.

Source: Angola Press News Agency

Luanda – The Programme for Reconversion of the Informal Economy (PREI), which began in 2020, has now formalized around 168,000 entrepreneurs, from 14 provinces, of the 200,000 expected by July of this year.

According to the director of the Office for Population Policy of the Ministry for the Economy and Planning, Adriano Borja, 74 percent of entrepreneurs are women, with Luanda province accounting for 52 percent of formalized operators.

He said that four provinces remained to receive PREI, namely Kwanza Sul, Benguela, Cuando Cubango and Cabinda, where 32,000 entrepreneurs are expected to be registered and formalized.

In the provinces of Kwanza Sul and Benguela, the Programme for Reconversion of the Informal Economy will begin on 26 and 27 of this month, respectively, whilst in Cabinda and Cuando Cubango it will begin in June, thus marking the end of this first cycle, which runs until July of this year.

Source: Angola Press News Agency

The world’s billionaires have increased their wealth by trillions of dollars since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, while the world’s poorest people are struggling with soaring prices and rising debt, according to an analysis by charitable organization, Oxfam.

As the global business elite gather in the Swiss mountain resort of Davos for the World Economic Forum, Oxfam says it has reason to celebrate: An analysis by the charity shows the wealth of the world’s 2,668 billionaires has risen by $3.78 trillion since 2020.

The report’s authors calculate that 573 people became new billionaires during the pandemic, at the rate of one every 30 hours. Conversely, Oxfam says 263 million more people will crash into extreme poverty in 2022, at a rate of a million people every 33 hours.

“It’s an extraordinary moment in history,” Max Lawson, head of inequality policy at Oxfam International, told VOA. “We’ve seen this explosion in billionaire wealth during the pandemic, and now off the back of food and energy price increases. And then you’re seeing this historic rise in poverty worldwide, which we also haven’t seen for decades.”

He added that the super-rich have become more wealthy thanks largely to taxpayers’ money.

“Because of the trillions of dollars that rich countries poured into the economy in response to COVID-19. So, that was the first thing, and that drove up asset prices. And now we’re seeing this really sharp increase in addition in the fortunes of food and energy billionaires, as you see the profits in those sectors soar because of prices rising,” he told VOA.

According to Oxfam, the world’s 10 richest men now own more wealth than the poorest 40% of humanity, or 3.1 billion people. The report says the richest 20 billionaires are worth more than the entire GDP of sub-Saharan Africa.

As the rich have gotten richer, the past two years have put decades of progress against poverty at risk, Lawson said.

“A crisis of inequality. A crisis of climate-induced hunger all over the world. And then on top of that, the food price increases, and the problems of COVID-19. You put that together and you have more than a perfect storm,” he said.

Meanwhile, the World Food Program warns that 49 million people are at immediate risk of famine in 43 countries.

“Our needs right now are an extra $68 billion that we need. We are only asking for one to two days’ worth of [the billionaires’] net worth increases. Is that too much to ask to stabilize the world against famine, destabilization and mass migrations?” David Beasley, executive director of the WFP, told The Associated Press in Davos.

The WFP says Ukraine supplies enough grain to feed 400 million people, but its ports are blockaded by Russia.

“If we don’t get those ports open, you will be talking about a food pricing problem over the next 10 to 12 months,” Beasley warned. “But next year, it’s going to be a food availability problem, and that is going to be hell on earth.”

Oxfam says governments have the power to tackle the growing inequality through fairer taxes.

“This is a product primarily of government interventions. Huge amounts of money poured into the economy. This is our money. It’s driven up the fortunes of these companies. Let’s claw it back. Let’s have a series of taxes — one-off solidarity taxes, windfall taxes, wealth taxes — and bring the world back to balance,” Lawson said.

Some European countries, including Portugal and Italy, have imposed windfall taxes on energy firms. Others, including Britain, argue that such taxes would deter investment at a critical time as Western nations try to wean themselves off Russian energy imports.

Source: Voice of America

China is trying to navigate its biggest coronavirus outbreak without a tool it could have adopted many months ago, the kind of vaccines that have proven to offer the best protection against the worst outcomes from COVID-19.

As early as spring of 2020, a Chinese pharmaceutical company, Fosun Pharma, reached an agreement to distribute — and eventually manufacture — the mRNA vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech. It still has not been cleared in mainland China, despite being authorized for use by separate authorities in Hong Kong and Macao.

Now health experts say that delay — a result of putting politics and national pride above public health — could lead to avoidable coronavirus deaths and deeper economic losses because whole cities would be locked down to insulate the country’s unprotected population.

“The biggest issue is about the delay of the reopening,” said Xi Chen, a health economist at Yale University’s School of Public Health. “The consequences will be huge, the supply chain disruption, the disruption to all kinds of service sectors.”

Studies have consistently shown that vaccination with mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna offer the best protection against hospitalization and death from COVID-19. Chinese vaccines made with older technology proved fairly effective against the original strain of the virus, but much less so against more recent variants.

As this evidence became clearer, even countries that initially used Chinese vaccines and some other less effective Western-made vaccines have turned to mRNA vaccines for booster shots and new vaccinations.

Not China. Regulators have not publicly said why they have not acted — the mRNA vaccines are authorized in much of the world and have proved safe and effective in hundreds of millions of people. But a Chinese health official and another person directly involved in the negotiations told The Associated Press that authorities have held back because they want to master the technology in China and not depend on foreign suppliers. Both spoke on condition of anonymity, given the sensitive nature of the issue.

For more than a year, the approach seemed defensible. The country was able to keep the virus at bay better than any other large nation with its strict “zero COVID” approach that isolates infected people and locks down communities when infections pop up.

But now, the highly transmissible omicron variant is testing that strategy, requiring ever wider and longer lockdowns that are taking a greater economic and human toll. While other countries are able to operate close to normal because their people are protected by vaccination or previous infection, China is left with only its lockdown strategy to avoid huge numbers of hospitalizations and deaths.

China may be changing its mind. The Communist Party-owned Global Times newspaper reported last month that Fosun Pharma is still working with health authorities on its approval and that Shanghai authorities recently issued new policies that could allow the import of COVID-19 vaccines. Fosun, based in Shanghai, did not respond to questions about the announcement.

China’s National Health Commission directed questions to the country’s drug regulator, the National Medical Products Administration. That agency did not respond to a faxed request for comment.

In the meantime, hopes for a Chinese-developed mRNA vaccine center on Abogen Biosciences, a startup founded in 2019 by Bo Ying, an American-trained scientist who once worked for Moderna.

The company has partnered with more established companies in the country such as Walvax, a private company founded in 2001, and the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, the military’s medical research facility. Abogen has raised more than $1.7 billion since 2020.

The company’s vaccine candidate succeeded in eliciting an immune response in a small, preliminary test in humans designed to evaluate safety, according to a study published in the journal Lancet Microbe.

The results were “promising,” said Dr. Vineeta Bal, who studies immune systems at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Pune, India. But she also said that a direct comparison of the immune response triggered by the test shot with the response triggered by the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines would have helped scientists better evaluate its performance.

But large studies that are needed to show whether the shot works to prevent infections or symptoms have not been completed. Abogen did not respond to requests for an interview.

Even if the studies can be completed and the vaccine proves effective, manufacturing the millions of doses required will be a challenge, experts say. Abogen built a manufacturing facility in December 2020 with a projected capacity of up to 120 million doses a year.

Manufacturing that vaccine and ensuring quality at scale will be a difficult hurdle to clear because mRNA is still a new technology, said Scott Wheelwright, chief operating officer at BioInno Bioscience, a Chinese biopharmaceutical contract manufacturer, who has held conversations with Abogen.

In the meantime, Chen, the Yale health policy expert, said the Chinese government should better protect its elderly population by approving the Pfizer vaccine and encouraging booster shots.

Using a Chinese phrase that means “giving up completely,” Chen said the change from “zero COVID” does not have to be all or nothing. “It doesn’t have to be tang ping or sticking to zero COVID,” Chen said. “I don’t think there are only two solutions, and we can stick to a middle ground.”

Source: Voice of America