News stories by Annelise Sander

Colonisation can be blamed for Africa’s underdevelopment but today Africans must take their fate in their own hands and become ambitious. The continent badly needs industrialisation but it has fallen back into the trap of merely exporting commodities because of booming prices.

The Group of 20’s pledges of trade finance and aid for trade are too vague, according to the editors of the e-book ‘‘Rebuilding Global Trade’’, published last week. And the London summit of this group of developed and developing economies last week failed to make a strong commitment to the multilateral trade regime.

Trade experts are sceptical about the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development’s renewed emphasis on South-South trade to counter the global economic crisis.

With the current economic crisis, questions are being asked about the viability of further liberalisation as envisaged in the Doha Round at the World Trade Organisation (WTO). In particular, the North’s pressure on poor countries to open financial markets may be ‘‘obsolete’’ because of the role of the financial sector in the crisis.