French press review 16 November 2009

by Carly Jane Lock

Article published on the 2009-11-16 Latest update 2009-11-16 10:51 TU

Africa has pride of place on the front page of centrist daily Le Monde. The continent is emerging from the pressures of underpopulation, reports the paper. Cue drum roll... Africa's population has just hit the 1 billion mark.
 
So what does this long-coming demographic surge say about Africa's economic development? That it explains its stunted growth, suggests the daily.
 
Astronomical increases in birth-rates across Africa in the last three decades mean that the population is getting younger. Le Monde reports that each year, more children are born in Nigeria than in the whole of the European Union. Now one in four children born on Earth is African.
 
The paper underlines that, once again, these figures go hand-in-hand with poverty and wonders how the demographics will be met by participants at the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) summit in Rome, which kicks off later today.

Will Western countries channel more development aid Africa's way in light of the fresh statistics?
 
According to left-wing daily Libération, one country which is in dire need of aid is the Central African Republic. The severe six-month famine in CAR is the focus of a double-page spread. The piece carries a tear-jerker of a picture of mother and child with the caption, "It's a miracle if this baby lives till he's 20". 

Libération adds that the life expectancy for the average CAR citizen currently stands at 44, still among the lowest in the world.
 
While a decade of incessant political and military infighting hasn't helped matters, CAR's diamond and wood industries are the main culprits behind the country's crippling food shortages, according to the chief of police from the Mambéré-Kadéï region. People are starving because the agricultural industry has been impacted by the "exodus" to these seemingly more lucrative trades.
 
Le Monde turns its attention to a shadier side of Australia's national collective history. It looks back at childhoods lost in Australia where half a million children were mistreated and sexually abused in foster homes and orphanages between the 1930s and the 1970s.

Le Monde publishes several accounts by former child migrants who suffered years of abuse in state care. One victim from Sydney denounces what she called "politics based on perpetual humiliation".
 
Catholic daily La Croix also devotes a piece to Australia's latest mea culpa. Australia seems to have miraculously recovered its memory in the last two years, remarks the paper.

La Croix recalls Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's apology earlier this year, to all Black Australians for the pain and suffering they experienced during the "stolen generations", when aborigines were at the mercy of the Australian authorities' efforts to "civilize" them by assimilation into white society.