Word: liberia
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...company also began signing partnerships with Liberia's tens of thousands of small rubber farmers. Under the deals, BRE builds roads and bridges to the plantations, removes old rubber trees and pays the farmers for them, smooths the land, replants it with new saplings grown at a BRE nursery and even plants cash crops like beans and peanuts between the rows. These crops give the farmer an income for the five to seven years until the rubber trees start producing latex. The rubber farmers have to do or pay nothing. BRE even trains and employs up to 1,000 people...
...Liberia, Johnson Sirleaf is doing better. She set a three-year poverty-reduction strategy whose four pillars are peace and security, governance and the rule of law, infrastructure and basic services, and economic revitalization. A U.N. peacekeeping force and an embargo on arms are keeping conflict at bay. Schools and hospitals have reopened. Tax receipts are up. Bureaucracy is down. U.N. sanctions on diamond and timber exports have been lifted. Liberia is attracting foreign investment in iron ore, timber, palm oil and construction. Though steel giant Arcelor Mittal recently mothballed a $1.5 billion project to reopen an iron-ore mine...
...Liberia is far from out of the woods. Violent crime is rising. Johnson Sirleaf admits to "a capacity problem" in the professional classes, including government. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, so effective in postapartheid South Africa, has seen little of either in Liberia. Property rights remain confused. Concessions granted under Taylor amounted to almost three times Liberia's total forest area. (See pictures of Johnson Sirleaf...
...Drag of Corruption Most damaging to the president, political scandals are piling up. A hundred cars given to Liberia by Arcelor Mittal in 2008 and intended to improve logistics for government officials found their way into the hands of legislators responsible for approving mining deals. Last year, according to witnesses, a senior Liberian official greeted a delegation of foreign funders at his office apparently drunk and demanded one delegate sit properly or "get your ass out of here." The same month Johnson Sirleaf admitted she was "hurt ... deeply wounded" by the "very embarrassing" publication of e-mails from her former...
Then there is the discovery by the U.N. Panel of Experts on Liberia - the body that oversees the country's recovery - that a company headed by former Justice Minister Philip Banks took out copyright on the new national law code. The U.S. embassy in Monrovia found it had to pay Banks' company $5,000 for its 20 copies, says one Western diplomat; in theory, Liberian courts must do the same. The U.N. panel believes the firm's "grounds for claiming copyright are questionable and ethically dubious." Little wonder that Johnson Sirleaf struggles. "The President's default position...