A remarkable feature of the Cold War is its coincidence with the period of apartheid in South Africa, in which it played an important role. This is evident in school textbooks, where it is a major topic in the final years of history. But while there is a growing body of work on the Cold War in Africa, there is a very small literature on its manifestation in South Africa and, with one exception, nothing on how school textbooks may have reinforced or challenged its main precepts. Linda Chisholm and Davig Fig seek to fill this research gap with a study of curricula and textbooks, showing that the most significant change since the apartheid period is that the convergence of anticommunism with black liberation movements has given way to a friendlier approach towards movements for decolonisation and the East than was previously evident.

South Africa suffers from a considerable health burden including communicable disease, violence and injury as well as non-communicable diseases. Its formal health system is significantly challenged. Reducing morbidity and mortality for all South Africans requires an approach that transcends health services, where public policy addresses the broader social determinants of health by designing and implementing interventions that improve people's health more effectively than individual interventions within the health sector. Legislative, regulatory and fiscal policies could substantially and cost-effectively reduce the burden of nutrition-related non-communicable diseases. South Africa has successfully reduced the salt content of foods and there is evidence demonstrating that a 20 per cent tax on sugary beverages will reduce obesity. Facilitators and barriers for such interventions have been covered in a separate article. Some challenges are particularly difficult to overcome. This article focuses on the deep historical roots of the South African sugar industry and its influence on dietary sugar consumption at the population level. The sugar industry is a prime example of a colonial activity shaping the economy, polity, penetration of sugar content into food products, and diets over an extended historical period. In the modern, and specifically the post-apartheid, period the sugar industry has proved resilient. The priority for black empowerment in policy matters since the end of apartheid, and recent economic policy, have facilitated the promotion of products regardless of their known economic, social and health harms. These pressures have led contradictorily to the retention of a large privileged sector in the South African sugar industry, while simultaneously enriching a few select black entrepreneurs on the one hand, and impoverishing the greater number of small and informal producers on the other. Similar developments have characterised the South African experience with other harmful product industries - notably alcohol and tobacco. It is argued that understanding the historical roots and dynamics of the SA sugar industry illuminates the setting of a research agenda on policy processes involving the role of corporates producing harmful products.

A growing body of evidence indicates that excessive sugar consumption is driving epidemics of obesity and related non-communicable diseases (NCDs) around the world. South Africa (SA), a major consumer of sugar, is also the third most obese country in Africa, and 40% of all deaths in the country result from NCDs. A number of fiscal, regulatory, and legislative levers could reduce sugar consumption in SA. This paper focuses on a sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) tax. The purpose of the paper is to highlight the challenges that government might anticipate. Policies cannot be enacted in a vacuum and discussion is focused on the industrial, economic, and societal context. The affected industry actors have been part of the SA economy for over a century and remain influential. To deflect attention, the sugar industry can be expected either to advocate for self-regulation or to promote public-private partnerships. This paper cautions against both approaches as evidence suggests that they will be ineffective in curbing the negative health impacts caused by excessive sugar consumption. In summary, policy needs to be introduced with a political strategy sensitive to the various interests at stake. In particular, the sugar industry can be expected to be resistant to the introduction of any type of tax on SSBs.

This paper examines the politics of large-scale commercial biofuels production and mega-land–water deals, with special reference to the dynamics of changes in land/water use and property rights and how these impact on the lives and livelihoods of the socio-economically marginalised rural sectors in the countryside. The main argument is that the assumption about existing, available marginal lands is fundamentally flawed. It is demonstrated by examining the ProCana sugar cane ethanol plantation in Gaza province in Mozambique.

The biofuel project is an agro-industrial development and politically contested policy process where governments increasingly become global actors. European Union (EU) biofuels policy rests upon arguments about societal benefits of three main kinds - namely, environmental protection (especially greenhouse gas savings), energy security and rural development, especially in the global South. Each argument involves optimistic assumptions about what the putative benefits mean and how they can be fulfilled. After examining those assumptions, we compare them with experiences in three countries - Germany, Brazil and Mozambique - which have various links to each other and to the EU through biofuels. In those case studies, there are fundamental contradictions between EU policy assumptions and practices in the real world, involving frictional encounters among biofuel promoters as well as with people adversely affected. Such contradictions may intensify with the future rise of biofuels and so warrant systematic attention.

Abstract The threats to Africa' s protected areas are numerous. Climate change, economic and social dislocation, weak institutions and poverty are amongst the greatest challenges to efforts to protect biodiversity (Tukahirwa 2002: I , Dudley et al. 2005). An increasing factor experienced by African governments is the pressure emanating from the extractive industries (mining, timber, fishing, oil and gas) to provide concessions for these activities to take place irrespective of prior commitments to biodiversity conservation Oones (ed.) 2004: 23–4, Standing and Van Vuuren 2006: 8–13). Part of the reason for this is the short term flow of benefits to sections of the elite, particularly what Fanon called the ‘comprador bourgeoisie’, the intermediaries whose profits rely on foreign investment (Fanon, 1963).

Abstract This article is a preliminary attempt to understand the corporate social responsibility claims and impacts of Aracruz Celulose sa, Brazil's largest pulp and paper manufacturer. Aracruz locates its operations in the vulnerable biodiversity hotspot of the Atlantic Forest, having acquired 800 000 hectares of land in five states of Brazil for the planting of eucalyptus. It owns some of the largest pulp and paper mills in the country. Both its record of land acquisition and its impact on the environment have resulted in considerable social conflict with the indigenous inhabitants, former slave communities and other small farmers in the state of Espírito Santo, and with supportive activist ngos. The company's application of formal corporate social responsibility practices often flies in the face of its social and environmental impacts. This raises questions about the nature of corporate social responsibility and its claims in developing countries like Brazil and elsewhere.

This article is a preliminary attempt to understand the corporate social responsibility claims and impacts of Aracruz Celulose sa, Brazil's largest pulp and paper manufacturer. Aracruz locates its operations in the vulnerable biodiversity hotspot of the Atlantic Forest, having acquired 800 000 hectares of land in five states of Brazil for the planting of eucalyptus. It owns some of the largest pulp and paper mills in the country. Both its record of land acquisition and its impact on the environment have resulted in considerable social conflict with the indigenous inhabitants, former slave communities and other small farmers in the state of Espírito Santo, and with supportive activist ngos. The company's application of formal corporate social responsibility practices often flies in the face of its social and environmental impacts. This raises questions about the nature of corporate social responsibility and its claims in developing countries like Brazil and elsewhere.

Divisive plans to revive the nuclear programme in South Africa are more than likely to repeat apartheid mistakes: investing huge amounts of public money in high risk infrastructure, enrichment of cronies with political connections, and excluding citizens from any say in their energy future. Twenty years after Chernobyl, Cape Town is facing unprecedented and sustained electricity blackouts and the attendant economic disruption as the mismanagement of the two existing nuclear power stations at Koeberg becomes patently evident. The state's answer is to point to a broader power shortage in South Africa, and to propose a spate of pebble bed reactors as a panacea. The present article argues that this proposal is too expensive, creates more of a security state instead of building South Africa's new democracy, and leaves an unsustainable environmental and cost legacy. The argument is made in the context of South Africa's nuclear history—a sordid intermingling of proliferation and power provision as apartheid attempted to survive.

Uranium road provides rare insights into the history of South Africa's secretive nuclear industry. It explains how South Africa's uranium, a waste product of its gold mines, gave it entry into the exclusive international nuclear club. How the apartheid government turned to weapons of mass destruction when it started losing its grip on the country and the sub-continent in the seventies and eighties. And how current plans for the revival of the industry are nothing more than an expensive experiment with taxpayers' money. The title argues that these plans should be judged against the background of a dying nuclear industry worldwide, which has not been able to solve its basic problems - excessive cost, threats to human health and safety and long-term environmental contamination. An illustrated explanation of basic nuclear concepts and the nuclear fuel chain makes the history and arguments easy to follow.

‘Manufacturing amnesia’ argues that the term ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ has been abandoned by most South African firms in favour of the term ‘corporate social investment’. This has been done in order to divert attention from calls on business to redress the results of its historical contribution to the apartheid system. The discourse of reconciliation has further served to erase memories of past corporate behaviour. It also masks continuing inequalities and unsustainable practices. Business has responded weakly to the pressures for CSR, of which five broad areas are identified and analysed. Voluntary sustainability initiatives have not succeeded and compliance with black economic empowerment charters and environmental standards have to be legislated and regulated. Firms need to reassess their legacies more honestly until which time their CSR contributions will be regarded as cosmetic and self-serving.