BUILDING NEW FOUNDATIONS Aditya Birla company could end up building a 1-2 MT cement plant in the African country
Aditya Birla group’s UltraTech Cement, India’s largest cement maker, is in talks to acquire a large limestone mine in Mozambique for about . 1,500 crore.

Estimated to have a reserve of about 225 million tonne

Jindal Steel and Power Ltd (JSPL) today said it will begin production from its Utkal B-1 coal block in Odisha, that is estimated to have a reserve of about 225 million tonne, by August this year. Besides, the Naveen Jindal-led steel making firm will also begin shipping coal from its mines in Mozambique in next 3-4 months, JSPL's Deputy Managing Director & CEO (Steel Business) V R Sharma told reporters here on the sidelines of the 'Steel Guru' conference.

Low-cost solar panels and solar batteries will be provided to poor communities in 14 countries in Africa and Asia in the next four years, the UN Development Programme said Thursday.

A total of 33 million people in the 14 countries will be able to make use of solar energy for commercial businesses and economic development, using the solar panels to be developed by a Mauritius-based company called ToughStuff, UNDP said.

Rainfall patterns in southern Africa are becoming erratic as climate change takes its toll, threatening long-term production of staple and cash crops in the region.

Countries like South Africa, Zambia and Malawi have enjoyed bumper harvests of their staple maize crop in recent years, ensuring food security in a region which has often known hunger.

But farmers, who for centuries have known when to expect summer rains, are now finding planning difficult.

Brazil is a world leader in the fight against hunger and its experience can be shared with other countries, visiting World Food Program chief Josette Sheeran said Monday.

"As a world champion in the fight against hunger, Brazil has a wealth of experience that can be shared with governments eager to learn how they achieved that success and adapt it to their own countries," she noted.

The UN official made the remarks in the northeastern city of Salvador while inaugurating a local branch of a newly established Center of Excellence Against Hunger based in Brasilia.

The world's governments and relief agencies need to plan now to resettle millions of people expected to be displaced by climate change, an international panel of experts said on Thursday.

Resettlement is already occurring at the rate of some 10 million people a year, said the report's lead author, Alex de Sherbinin. Climate-related resettlement projects are under way in Vietnam, Mozambique, on the Alaskan coast, the Chinese territory of Inner Mongolia and in the South Pacific.

Eni SpA, the Italian energy giant, has made a very large natural-gas discovery off the coast of Mozambique, big enough that it could turn the East African country into a major exporter of gas to Asia.

The company's first well in a deepwater exploration campaign has found about 15 trillion cubic feet of gas, according to people briefed on the discovery. They said the gas reservoir is of very high quality and Eni should be able to get an unusually large percentage of the gas out of the ground.

The level of hunger worldwide has dropped in recent years but 26 countries still face extremely dangerous food shortages and are threatened by rising prices, a major report said Tuesday.

The Global Hunger Index, released by the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), measures food insecurity. Its level has dropped by 26 percent since 1990, the institute said.

World rice production is expected to touch a record 480.5 million tonnes this year on the back of higher output in Asia, Egypt, Argentina, Mozambique, the US and Russian Federation, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations.

“The outlook for global rice production in 2011 has improved over the past two months and the latest FAO forecast has been raised by 1.6 mt to 480.5 mt (milled rice basis), 3 per cent up from 2010 and a new record,” the FAO said.