Patterns and determinants of urban chicken consumption in Haiti and Cameroon: similar contexts, differentiated prospects

Since the beginning of 2000s, in order to let poor people accede to meat consumption, several African and Caribbean countries have opened their domestic chicken market to foreign imports, by reducing import tariffs. Thus imported frozen pieces of chicken from the European Union or America compete with local chicken meat, causing the collapse of many poultry husbandry and the loss of many jobs in the local chicken food chain. In order to highlight the determinants of urban consumer’s choice relative to chicken types, and assess the opportunity for local chicken to restore its market share, investigations have been done in 2005 in Yaoundé (Cameroon) and in 2006 in Port-au-Prince (Haiti) applied to 180 urban households in each country. While imported frozen pieces of chicken have almost entirely substituted for the local chicken which has already quite disappeared in Port-au-Prince, Yaoundé consumers still prefer the local flesh chicken to the imported ones, at least for particular uses.chicken, urban consumption, developing countries, globalization, Cameroon, Haiti

The Politics of Vodou: Aids, Access to Health Care and the Use of Culture in Haiti

During the past few years, the AIDS campaign in Haiti has been targeting Vodou officiants and organizations. These awareness and training programmes in- form officiants about the transmission and prevention of AIDS, tests for HIV and anti- retroviral drugs, or even try to encourage them to become involved in a medical referral system. These culturalist interventions are grounded in an essentialist concept of culture that can have harmful effects on the targeted groups. The concept of culture underlying such interventions is deconstructed along with the categories of tradi- tional medicine and the ‘tradipractitioner’. An approach to public health is advocated that would contextualize medical pluralism in Haiti

Revitalizing African Libraries: The Challenge of a Quiet Crisis

Explores issues of literacy, information technology, and access to global knowledge as they relate to African public and university libraries. Highlights the need to develop partnerships between donors and African leaders

Port-au-Prince, Washington, Santo Domingo Premières leçons d'un embargo (Note)

After three pro-embargo resolutions from the OAS and five from the Security Council, an American military intervention authorized by the United Nations has enabled the democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide to return to office. This article seeks to trace the escalation from embargo to military intervention with reference to the transnationalization of social, economic, and political relations in which Haïti, the United States, and the Dominican Republic are directly involved. Large-scale population movements - deemed to be "threats to peace", and the importance of a "humanitarian" form of discourse and, even more so, a form of discourse about the "suffering" of the "unfortunate people of Haïti who are bearing... the full weight of sanctions" (Boutros-Ghali) are components of such transnationalized relations. These relations have developed in a setting that the boat people issue has determined in several ways, a setting where one can make out, on the one hand, a joining of forces between, among other people, the Haïtian priest-president and the U.S. congressional black caucus and, on the other hand, a shaky coalition comprising notably the president of the Dominican Republic, the Dominican archbishop, the Conference of Haitian bishops, the Vatican, and certain sectors of the American administration. Pena Gomez - a black man believed to be of Haïtian origin - ran as candidate for the Dominican presidential election and his candidacy was favoured for quite some time in the opinion polls. He ultimately failed, however, to provide an alternative in terms of political culture. The election on May 16, 1994 in the Dominican Republic was marked by incidents of fraud. The "international community", preoccupied as it was with re-establishing peace in Haiti, reacted feebly

Détecter le potentiel d'ambiguïté d'une requête - le cas des recherches portant sur l'actualité

International audienceL'objectif du travail que nous présentons ici est d'examiner la notion d'ambigüité à travers l'étude des requêtes produites dans un système de RI, le site 2424actu.fr d'Orange, opérationnel du 1/10/2009 au 1/09/2011. Celui-ci vise le traitement d'une base de documents relatifs à l'actualité française, domaine particulièrement mouvant et par conséquent propice à l'examen de la question de l'ambiguïté. Nous cherchons à déterminer la nature de l'ambiguïté des requêtes en examinant les logs de requêtes disponibles et en les confrontant à différents indices contextuels qui enrichissent la perception de la variabilité sémantique des termes de la requête