Luanda, Angola (GenevaLunch) – The match was off to a slow start and the score remained low, but in the end what mattered was the one goal that gave Egypt a 1-0 win over Ghana for the title of the Africa Cup of Nations.It is the seventh time Egypt has taken the title, and it is the first time in any major football tournament that a team has won three successive titles. The winning goal came only five minutes before the end of an otherwise unexciting match, with substitute Mohamed Nagui coming “almost out of nowhere”, reports allAfrica, which notes that it was his fifth goal of the tournament, making him the top scorer despite not starting in a single game.
Links to other sites: allAfrica photo essay, BBC photos, GhanaWeb
The world food security conference in Rome, Italy closed 18 November with promises to invest more in agriculture and “to eradicate hunger at the earliest date”, according to the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), which hosted the three-day event. FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf expressed his disappointment at the lack of measurable targets and specific deadlines.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said that each day 17,000 children die of hunger in the world. He urged immediate action on long-term remedies to hunger in the world, noting that there was enough food in the world for everybody.
The Minister for Food and Agriculture of Ghana, Kwesi Ahwoi, reminded the conference that the last food security summit in 1996 had pledged to cut the world’s hungry by half, to 420 million by 2015. The conference was told that more than one billion people go to bed hungry every night.
Links to other sites:FAO media site, Ghana Broadcasting Corporation, Guide2.co.nz
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Nineteen countries have now secured their places in the Fifa World Cup finals to be held in South Africa in 2010 after the penultimate games in the qualification series. In the African group Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire are through and six places are up for grabs. Australia, Japan and the two Koreas take the Asian places with one more team entering a playoff with New Zealand. Seven of the 13 European places are decided:
Basel, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Switzerland moved to the top of its qualifying group for the 2010 Fifa World Cup with a 2-0 win over Greece in their match. The Swiss scored two goals in the final 10 minutes after playing much of the game with an extra man as Vyntra was sent off for receiving two yellow cards.
[includes AllAfrica video, world media coverage] Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Africa is back on the world media map for more than poverty and wars: US President Barack Obama’s speech Saturday 11 July in Accra, Ghana, sparked widespread interest, nowhere more than in Africa itself.
Updated 10 April 13:10 London, England and Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Mars has become the latest chocolate maker to go green with its products, making a commitment ” to spend tens of millions of dollars annually certifying that the cocoa used in the $10bn of chocolate products it sells every year is sustainably sourced by 2020,” reports the Financial Times. Mars claims to be the world’s largest end-user of chocolate. The company joins Cadbury (whose European head office is in Rolle, Vaud, Switzerland), the largest chewing gum and sweets maker in the world, which has a significant chocolate business. Cadbury announced in March that it would increase direct Fair Trade buying from farmers, spending £45 million in the next 10 years to “to secure the sustainable socio-economic future of cocoa farming in Ghana, India, Indonesia and the Caribbean where the cocoa farming industry is facing increasing challenges.”
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Switzerland will give CHF27 million in aid to Ghana, which it cites as an exemplary sub-Saharan African country in terms of political and economic development.
