Word: gabon
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Port Gentil is also the home of what they told me was the "largest plywood factory in the world," the Compagnie Forestiere du Gabon. It's about the size of five football fields, just in floorspace. It has three lakes in which you can hardly see the water, there are so many logs and it has a dozen hangars where the finished product is stored. It takes about fifteen minutes for a twenty-foot log to be stripped of its bark, clamped into the peeling machine, and transformed into a few hundred feet of "veneer," one-quarter to one-eighth...
Port Gentil, Gabon--The flags were out in Port Gentil, too. The President of Gabon, Albert Bongo, and the President of neighboring Cameroun, el-Amidji, were in town to demonstrate Central African unity and boost their egos. It turned out later that the welcome signs--"Vive la cooperacion Africaine"--and the clean streets weren't enough. The presidents were pissed because the clapping hadn't been enthusiastic enough, and Bongo made vague threats about funds to the local authorities...
...Gabonese who changed my money at the bank (Union Monetaire du Afrique Centrale--a relic of the French colonial administration) laughed as told me the story. It seems that nobody in Port Gentil really cares about the central government of Gabon: Port Gentil is in effect an island at the mouth of southern Gabon's largest river. No highway or railroad connects it with the rest of Gabon and it's pretty much self-sufficient. Logs comes down the river to Port Gentil's sawmills, oil is beginning to be pumped from under Port Gentil, and ships come to take...
...members of OPEC, in order of last year's earnings are: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria, Libya, Kuwait, Iraq, United Arab Emirates, Al geria, Indonesia, Qatar, Ecuador and Gabon, which is an associate member. The United Arab Emirates is a federation of Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm al Quwain, Ras al Khaimah and Fujairah...
...worst hurt victims of the oil squeeze. Indeed, the developing countries' extra costs for oil last year totaled $10 billion, wiping out most of their foreign aid income of $11.4 billion from the industrialized world. In black Africa, only Nigeria has any big known reserves of oil, and Gabon, the Congo Republic and Angola possess some oil. For the other black African countries, the petrobill came to $1.3 billion last year. Development plans were stymied because so much money was drained off for oil. Drought-induced hunger became worse, in part because those countries could no longer afford as much...