(Reuters) &#8211; Tesla Inc shares continued their meteoric rise on Thursday, scoring yet another record high and further expanding the distance between the Silicon Valley electric carmaker and its traditional auto industry rivals.



Tesla shares rose to $2,290 in mid-day trading before leveling out at $2,240, the highest price since the company went public at $17 a share in 2010.



Tesla’s shares have risen more than 420% since the beginning of this year, turning some retail investors into millionaires.



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://www.cnbcafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/hqdefault-19.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-361692" width="704" height="527" srcset="https://cms.cnbcafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/hqdefault-19.jpg 480w, https://cms.cnbcafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/hqdefault-19-300x225.jpg 300w, https://cms.cnbcafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/hqdefault-19-80x60.jpg 80w, https://cms.cnbcafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/hqdefault-19-265x198.jpg 265w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 704px) 100vw, 704px" /><figcaption>How Elon Musk Took Tesla To Hell And Back With The Model 3</figcaption></figure>



While other carmakers are forced to invest billions to overhaul their internal combustion engine operations to produce battery-powered cars, investors are confident that Tesla can make the shift from a niche carmaker into a global leader in cleaner cars.



Tesla became the world’s most valuable carmaker by market capitalization when it overtook former front runner Toyota Motors Corp on July 1. The company now accounts for 41% of the total market cap of a group of 12 of the world’s largest automakers.



(Graphic: Tesla stock rally dwarfs rivals&#8217; market cap Tesla stock rally dwarfs rivals&#8217; market cap &#8211;&nbsp;<a href="https://graphics.reuters.com/TESLA-STOCKS/xklvynnqepg/chart.png">here</a>)



<figure class="wp-block-image"><a href="https://graphics.reuters.com/TESLA-STOCKS/xklvynnqepg/chart.png" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><img decoding="async" src="https://graphics.reuters.com/TESLA-STOCKS/xklvynnqepg/chart.png" alt="Reuters Graphic"/></a></figure>



Tesla produces only a fraction of the vehicles sold by established global carmakers, many of which are considered growth engines for their local economies.



Japan’s Toyota and Germany’s Volkswagen AG (<a href="https://www.reuters.com/companies/VOWG_p.DE">VOWG_p.DE</a>) sold 10.46 million and 11 million vehicles, respectively, during the 2019 financial year. That compares to the 367,200 vehicles Tesla delivered in 2019.



Tesla has said it would deliver at least half a million vehicles by the end of 2020, less than 5% of Toyota’s and Volkswagen’s annual sales.



But Tesla withstood industry-wide fallout from the novel coronavirus pandemic and in July reported a second-quarter profit, clearing a hurdle that could lead to the electric carmaker’s inclusion in the S&amp;P 500 index.

Which Automakers Can Seriously Challenge Tesla?

Tesla shares surge to record high, leaving rivals behind

(Reuters) &#8211; Fear is ebbing on Wall Street, with stocks on a bull run in the midst of the global coronavirus pandemic.



The Cboe Volatility Index , known as Wall Street’s “fear gauge,” is near its lowest level since late February and options markets are showing diminishing concerns of a near-term drop in equities.



The S&amp;P 500&#8217;s&nbsp;<a href="https://www.reuters.com/finance/markets/index?symbol=.SPX">.SPX</a>&nbsp;run to fresh highs has come as some of Wall Street&#8217;s biggest banks, including Goldman Sachs, UBS Global Wealth Management and Morgan Stanley, turn more bullish on stocks and are urging clients to remain exposed to equities. The index ended at a record high on Tuesday, confirming a bull market, according to one definition.



Investors may well heed their advice: nearly 80% of fund managers surveyed by BofA Global Research, the highest level in more than a decade, expect the global economy to grow over the next year. The survey also showed falling allocations to cash, another sign of increasing bullishness.



The growing optimism is in contrast to the fear and gloom that prevailed on Wall Street only months ago, after the S&amp;P 500 plunged 34% in just 23 trading days and the economy entered a recession that would turn out to be its worst since the Great Depression.



Although financial pain remains acute for many Americans, monetary support from the Federal Reserve and expectations for advances in fighting the coronavirus pandemic have made investors more confident in betting on the future, said Quincy Krosby, chief market strategist at Prudential Financial.



“You have a market that sees that we’re getting closer and closer to a more normal world,” she said.



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://www.cnbcafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/wall-street-1.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-376568" width="661" height="494"/></figure>



Options markets are among the areas reflecting fading investor worries. Demand for protection against drops in U.S. equities of 30% or more has fallen as volatility has eased in recent months, said Paul Sandhu, BNP Paribas Asset Management’s head of multi-assets quant solutions in the Asia-Pacific region.



“The fear has definitely lessened over the (past) couple of months,” he said.



Meanwhile, selling of protective put options in individual stocks is up over the past week, said Christopher Murphy, co-head of derivatives strategy at Susquehanna Financial Group. Put sellers profit if the underlying stock does not drop to a specified level.



The put selling suggests investors are less worried about the downside, Murphy said.



In futures markets, net long equity positioning is now at its highest level since early March, with increases in both large-cap and small-cap stocks, Deutsche Bank data showed.



The increasingly bullish positioning dovetails with the messages coming from big Wall Street banks. Goldman Sachs, for instance, raised its year-end target for the S&amp;P 500 earlier this week to 3,600 from 3,000, citing expectations for outsized growth in U.S. corporate earnings and gross domestic product next year.



Stocks have dipped since Tuesday, but several market strategists said they saw the pullback as routine rather than a sign that equities had been overbought.



Yet there are plenty of reasons for investors to be nervous and some remain skeptical of buying near all-time highs.



One concern is the potential of market volatility stemming from delayed or contested results in November&#8217;s U.S. presidential election. The Dow Jones Industrial Average&nbsp;<a href="https://www.reuters.com/finance/markets/index?symbol=.DJI">.DJI</a>&nbsp;fell 5% in two weeks on the heels of a vote recount in the 2000 presidential election, UBS noted.



Other risks include a resurgence of COVID-19 cases, delays in a vaccine or delays by lawmakers in providing more stimulus to the still-ailing economy.



Some of that uncertainty has been reflected in the price of gold, a popular haven that has climbed to record highs this month. Prices recently got an additional boost after Berkshire Hathaway Inc (<a href="https://www.reuters.com/companies/BRKa.N">BRKa.N</a>) disclosed a stake in Barrick Gold Corp (<a href="https://www.reuters.com/companies/ABX.TO">ABX.TO</a>).



Still, some investors believe the prospect of economic recovery now outweighs those risks. Keith Lerner, chief market strategist at Truist/SunTrust Advisory Services, is maintaining an overweight position in U.S. equities.



“We’re not taking anything off the table,” he said. “We’re staying with the primary trend, which is still higher.”

wall street

Fear fading on Wall Street as investors learn to love the new bull market

The United States and Kenya formally launched negotiations for a free trade agreement on 8 July 2020. With the US gearing up for presidential elections in a few months, these talks may not draw much global attention. But as&nbsp;<a href="https://www.csis.org/analysis/going-solo-what-significance-us-kenya-free-trade-agreement">a prototype for evaluating the substance of future US-Africa trade</a>&nbsp;relations, a lot rides on Washington using this deal to make a bold statement of its commitment to effective North-South free trade agreements.



The US is the third most important destination for Kenyan exports after Uganda and Pakistan,&nbsp;<a href="https://oec.world/en/profile/country/ken">accounting for 8% of its total exports</a>. Kenya exported goods worth US$ 527 million in 2018, primarily apparels, coffee and nuts. Its imports were mainly commercial aeroplanes and other spacecraft, polymers and medicaments. Kenya has a slim trade surplus that the US will probably be keen to balance.



Washington has a penchant for using free trade agreements to signal the status of partner states as regional strategic allies. Such agreements with Morocco, South Korea, Colombia and Bahrain were all intended to signal much deeper strategic alliances beyond trade.



For the European Union and China the Kenyan agreement further signals America’s intent for commercial expansion and competition in Africa. The principal objective is to secure duty free access for American industrial, apparel and agricultural goods in Africa. Its all about making American exports competitive.



US trade officials have described the Kenyan deal as a&nbsp;<a href="https://ustr.gov/about-us/policy-offices/press-office/press-releases/2020/march/trump-administration-notifies-congress-intent-negotiate-trade-agreement-kenya">model</a>&nbsp;for other African free trade deals. Terming Kenya a “strategic partner, regional leader and commercial hub”&nbsp;<a href="https://ke.usembassy.gov/joint-statement-between-the-united-states-and-kenya-on-the-launch-of-negotiations-towards-a-free-trade-agreement/">statements</a>from both the US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and the US ambassador to Kenya Kyle McCarter highlight the seriousness with which Washington wants this deal done.



This vigour affirms President Trump’s strategy outlined by the 2018 US-Africa policy. But since the Kenyan deal is an&nbsp;<a href="https://ustr.gov/about-us/policy-offices/press-office/press-releases/2020/march/trump-administration-notifies-congress-intent-negotiate-trade-agreement-kenya">initiative </a>&nbsp;of President Trump, the palpable pressure to conclude agreement could be detrimental to Kenya’s interests. The pressure hampers Kenya more given the asymmetry of capacity between the two states.



Free trade agreements are protracted affairs which take more than a year to complete. The US-Morocco agreement, for instance, took 15 months. Talks with Peru (18 months) and Colombia (20 months) lasted even longer. The Kenya-EU economic partnership agreements took more than 10 years to conclude.



Additionally, there’s no guarantee that Trump will be in office come January 2021. For this reason, Kenya’s team in Washington should consider informally engaging the democrats in case the deal has to be concluded under President Biden.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Kenya’s negotiating objectives</h2>



It is my view that Kenya’s negotiations should be guided by four principal questions and objectives as follows:



<ul class="wp-block-list"><li>Does the proximity of the November election in the US unduly compromise the quality of negotiations?</li><li>What are the prospects for renewal of the&nbsp;<a href="https://agoa.info/about-agoa.html">African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA)</a>&nbsp;in 2025? If extended, would Kenyan exports not covered benefit from US tariff removal?</li><li>Can Kenyan negotiators defend against US pressure to liberalise industrial goods under the East African Community Sensitive List and</li><li>Can the US extend to Kenya the “qualified industrial zones” model to bolster US foreign direct investment in Kenya?</li></ul>



From a political perspective, a trade agreement makes sense. It shields Kenya from the uncertainties over the extension of the African deal and the vicissitudes of political party changes in Washington. As a trade tool, the merits of a free trade agreement depend a lot on the extension (or not) of AGOA after 2025 under President Trump or Biden.



More principally, whether democrats or Republicans win in November, the extension of the Africa market access law will depend on the extent to which sub-Saharan Africa states will be regarded as important flashpoints for US-China commercial competition in Africa.



Trump is certainly more combative in wanting to nullify China’s huge commercial advantage in Africa. But a Biden presidency would be more receptive to the appeals of the&nbsp;<a href="https://agoa.info/news/article/15634-us-house-black-caucus-to-advocate-extension-of-agoa.html">US Congress Black Caucus which champions</a>&nbsp;the unilateral extension of AGOA. Because of the uncertainty about the whims of the US presidency, it is in Kenya’s interest to concurrently lobby US democrats on the importance of this deal in case of a Biden presidency.



If AGOA is not extended without a free trade agreement, Kenya’s three biggest exports to the US –&nbsp;<a href="https://oec.world/en/profile/country/ken">apparels, macadamia nuts and cut flowers</a>&nbsp;– would face duty increases of 5%, 0.5% and 4% respectively. This would undoubtedly negatively affect exports.



But if it is extended, and the US-Kenya agreement ratified by Congress, elimination of duties on Kenyan non-AGOA exports (mainly minerals) will not amount to much in terms of export enhancement.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Jordanian model</h2>



Constraints to Kenyan exports to the US are not primarily tariff based. From Kenya’s standpoint, therefore, these trade talks are less about tariff and trade, than they are about attracting foreign investment into Kenya. The most useful potential outcome will be the extent to which Kenya draws manufacturing foreign direct investment from the US and other states, into its economic processing zones.



To achieve this, Kenya should negotiate for liberal rules of origin requirements. Such rules should not unduly constrain investors to use only US or Kenyan inputs for Kenyan exports to qualify for the duty free entry into the US. A rules-of-origin threshold of no more than 30% value add should be the target.



As an investment vehicle, the Kenya US agreement should be modelled on the Jordanian “qualified industrial zones model” which increased bilateral trade between the two states&nbsp;<a href="https://jo.usembassy.gov/us-jordan-joint-committee-meets-in-amman-praises-7-5-percent-increase-in-jordanian-exports-to-the-united-states-in-2018/">tenfold since its inception in 2001</a>.



This model permits foreign owned companies situated in select export processing zones to qualify for duty free exports into the US market. With apparel as Kenya’s principal target export, the success of its negotiating dexterity will be judged on how well it integrates the inputs and outputs of its export processing zones. An agreement that considers all apparel exports “Kenyan” irrespective of ownership and input source for a reasonable duration should be the target.



Finally, the US will no doubt be keen on Kenya’s liberalisation of agriculture and services as part of its ambition to compete with the EU as preeminent agricultural exporters. Every country keeps a short list of goods that it is allowed to protect either for infant industry protection or security reasons. Kenya’s highly protected commodities include wheat, matches, rice and cement which can attract customs tariffs of up to 75% in the case of certain types of rice.



My view here is that Kenya should grant the US the same agricultural exports conditions as those granted to the EU under the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.tralac.org/news/article/13865-epa-test-of-unity-as-kenya-breaks-away.html">Economic Partnership Agreement</a>. But at the same time, it should defend the continued protection of the “industrial” goods in the sensitive list such as cement, natural gas and most importantly worn clothing. These should be protected for purposes of the modest infant industry already in existence in production of these products. But it could end protection for some agricultural products like wheat.



If properly negotiated the agreement has the potential to rapidly enhance Kenya’s foreign industrial investment and overall export volumes. To do so, Kenya must pay more attention to the role of this agreement as an investment attraction vehicle and not just a simple tariff centred ‘traditional’ pact.

Uhuru_Kenyatta_2015

Kenya-US free trade talks are under way: what Nairobi must get right from start

NEW YORK (Reuters) &#8211; Investors are girding their portfolios for market moves ahead of the U.S. presidential vote, as election season kicks into higher gear with the Democratic National Convention in the coming week.



Though elections have loomed large on investors’ radar this year, their influence on markets has taken a backseat to the coronavirus pandemic and unprecedented stimulus from U.S. policymakers.



That may change in coming weeks, investors said. Some are beefing up cash positions or making bets on a flare-up in volatility as they eye a range of outcomes, including the possibility that the contest between President Donald Trump and presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden may yield a result that is not immediately certain or likely to be disputed.



“There’s plenty of reasons to believe that the election outcome is going to be drawn out,” said Lamar Villere, a portfolio manager at Villere &amp; Co. “That’s going to show the cracks in a market that’s been priced for perfection.”



Villere’s firm has raised its cash levels to as high as 20% of assets as a hedge against election-induced volatility in a stock market some say has become richly valued &#8211; the S&amp;P 500 has rallied more than 50% from its lows of the year and trades at its highest forward price-to-earnings multiple in around two decades.



Some investors believe the market’s performance over the next few months could point to which candidate will triumph in November.



The incumbent president has tended to win the White House when the S&amp;P 500 index has risen in the three months before the election, data from TD Securities going back to 1930 showed.



That may be bad news for Trump. While the index is up about 3% for this month, August kicks off what has historically been the weakest three-month stretch of the year for equities, where the average historic return stands at about 0%, according to data from BofA Global Research.



At the same time, no incumbent has been awarded a second term in the midst of a recession, TD securities wrote.



Biden leads Trump by 8 percentage points, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released Wednesday after Biden had selected U.S. Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate.



A Biden victory &#8211; as well as a possible Democratic sweep of the House and Senate &#8211; could threaten policies championed by Trump and generally favored by Wall Street, including lower corporate tax rates and fewer regulations, analysts said.



“The full implications of a future Biden presidency could unsettle markets in the first instance,” analysts at Oxford Economics said in a recent note.



A proposed corporate tax rate increase to 28% could shave about 5.5% off 2021 S&amp;P 500 earnings, lower capital spending by around $50 billion and lead to a $100 billion decline in stock buybacks, according to J.P.Morgan.



At the same time, a Biden administration would likely move away from Trump’s trade tariffs in Europe and China, helping international and emerging market stocks outperform U.S. equities in the year ahead, said Stuart Katz, chief investment officer of Robertson Stephens Wealth Management.



At least one of Biden’s flagship policies &#8211; a $2 trillion increase in infrastructure spending &#8211; could further weigh on the already weakened U.S. dollar, Oxford Economics said.



A Trump re-election, meanwhile, could allay concerns over higher taxes but spark renewed fears of U.S.-China trade tensions, said Stephen Innes, Chief Global Market Strategist at AxiCorp.



A second term for Trump could also be positive for oil and gas companies which may benefit from a further relaxation of Obama-era regulations, Innes said.



Investors should also prepare for the possibility that the president could cast doubt on the veracity of the vote or pull out of the race altogether, wrote Joseph Amato, CIO of equities at Neuberger Berman, said in a recent note.



Trump escalated fears of a contested election in a late July tweet, suggesting the election be delayed until people can “properly, securely and safely vote.”



“The further behind he is in the polls, the more provocative his decision-making could become,” Amato wrote.

Wall Street Week Ahead: Biden victory? Disputed election? Wall Street prices in November outcomes

According to unconfirmed reports, suspected Islamist militants have once again attacked and occupied Mocímboa da Praia in the northern Cabo Delgado province. Reports suggest that the port town was first attacked overnight on August 5/6, with intense fighting continuing until August 11. 



Security forces are said to have been given air support by the South Africa-based private security company Dyck Advisory Group (DAG), which has been active in the region since May. 



DAG is currently based in the port city of Pemba, more than 300 km to the south. Although unconfirmed, both militants and security forces are believed to have suffered multiple casualties. Mocímboa da Praia has been targeted numerous times in 2020, including on March 23 when it was temporarily occupied. recently, the town was attacked and occupied overnight on June 27, the same day eight employees of Fenix Constructions Service, a subcontractor of Total, were killed when their vehicle was ambushed by gunmen near Palma, some 80 km north of Mocímboa da Praia. Both attacks on Mocímboa da Praia were claimed by the Islamic State Central African Province (ISCAP) militant group. ISCAP has claimed or been blamed for the most recent attacks in Cabo Delgado.



 However, it is only one of several groups known to be active in the region, with the group commonly known as Ansar al-Sunna or Ahlu Sunnah Wa-Jamo (also referred to by locals as Al-Shabaab) operating there since 2017. The groups are not thought to have direct links with their better-known namesakes, but rather identify with them ideologically. Indeed, most analysts agree that socio-economic issues, underdevelopment, and perceived marginalisation are major drivers of the Islamic insurgency in the region, along with militants’ links to organised crime. The government has struggled to contain the escalating insurgency, which has threatened major liquified natural gas projects in the province, deploying additional security forces and engaging private security companies to try and contain the growing violence.



 On May 14, Interior Minister Amade Miquidade announced that 50 militants were killed in a security operation launched in the Meluco, Mocímboa da Praia, Mueda, Muidimbe, Nangade, and Quissanga districts. However, security forces have also suffered major reversals, impacting morale and operational capacity. The insurgency has been considered at a multilateral level with the Southern African Development Community (Sadc) discussing it at a special summit in Harare on May 19.



 A communiqué released after the conclusion of the Extraordinary Organ Troika Summit plus Mozambique “urged Sadc member states to support the Government of Mozambique in fighting the terrorists and armed groups in some districts of Cabo Delgado”. However, there have been no concrete commitments by either the bloc or any individual member to provide military support.



 Senior figures in South Africa have made comments suggesting that the possibility was at least under discussion. South Africa’s Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, Naledi Pandor, briefed Parliament in May, saying that government was in discussion with Mozambique about how it could help fight the insurgency, prompting the Islamic State to issue threats to “open a fighting front inside [South Africa’s] borders”. The chairperson of the country’s National Joint Operational and Intelligence Structure (Natjoints) has since been quoted as saying, “We can’t interfere in a country’s sovereign matters, but we make sure we are keeping our forces ready.”



 In a development that may be related to the situation in Cabo Delgado, Tanzania’s military has been conducting military exercises along that country’s shared border with the troubled province since August 10. Tanzania first announced that it would be deploying soldiers to the border in May, in response to the insecurity. Islamist militants have significantly stepped up their activities in Cabo Delgado in 2020 and have become increasingly emboldened with its usual modus operandi evolving from targeting small villages and rural dwellers to launching relatively sophisticated attacks on district capitals, like Mocímboa da Praia and Quissanga. 



This has seen them driving security forces from towns they were garrisoned in, allowing militants to achieve psychological victories and capture weaponry. The security situation in Cabo Delgado is not expected to improve significantly over the short to medium term as there is no purely military solution to the insurgency. Most analysts agree that a coordinated, regional response to the insurgency is required as porous borders and organised crime activities are some of the key drivers of the violence. Mozambique is said to be reluctant to agree to a regional force being deployed, partly due to its poor relationship with Tanzania and Botswana, which will soon take over from Zimbabwe as chair of the Sadc Troika. Media reports allege that President Filipe Nyusi had proposed a bilateral arrangement to his Zimbabwean counterpart, Emmerson Mnangagwa, which was rejected as the latter preferred a coordinated response. A coordinated response appears unlikely in the immediate future. Louw Nel, Political Analyst

Mozambique records first COVID-19 death

Analysis: Why Mozambique is suffering from terror attacks

WASHINGTON (Reuters) &#8211; Joe Biden’s selection of Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate provides a brand-new target for President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign that has struggled to find an effective line of attack against his Democratic rival.



But going after Harris comes with its own risks and challenges.



Within minutes of Biden’s announcement on Tuesday, Trump had called Harris “nasty,” “horrible” and “disrespectful,” while his campaign painted her as an extremist who would yank the moderate Biden to the left.



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="540" height="720" src="https://www.cnbcafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/540px-Senator_Harris_official_senate_portrait-1.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-378750" srcset="https://cms.cnbcafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/540px-Senator_Harris_official_senate_portrait-1.jpg 540w, https://cms.cnbcafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/540px-Senator_Harris_official_senate_portrait-1-225x300.jpg 225w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 540px) 100vw, 540px" /></figure>



But there is little evidence at the moment that suggests that the public views Harris, a former California prosecutor and attorney general with strong ties to the Democratic establishment, as a radical.



In fact, she’s more liked by Republicans than Biden, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted on Aug. 10-11, just before she was announced as Biden’s pick. The poll showed 21% of registered Republican voters have a favorable impression of Harris, compared with 13% who had a similarly favorable view of Biden.



More concerning for Trump: Attacks that could appear sexist or racist against the first Black woman on a major party ticket in U.S. history could complicate his campaign’s effort to shore up his standing among suburban women, a critical voting bloc he must win back in order to get re-elected, strategists on both sides say.



Already, leading Democratic women warned against a replay of Trump’s match-up in 2016 with then Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, who was subject to gender-based critiques as the first female presidential candidate. Trump has also called Clinton “nasty” and accused her of playing the “woman’s card.”



“If he wants to use misogynistic tropes against Kamala Harris, I think that is deeply challenging for him,” said Neera Tanden, a top aide to Clinton during her presidential bid. “He has no room for error with suburban women.”



According to the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll, Biden had an advantage of 10 percentage points among women and a 6-point lead among those who live in the suburbs. Overall, Biden leads Trump by 11 points, less than three months to go before the Nov. 3 vote.



Sarah Longwell, a Republican pollster, said Trump’s advisers would likely want the president, known for fiery and bombastic rhetoric against his political rivals, to be more cautious about attacking Harris unless they had reason to believe suburban women distrusted or disliked her.



“But there’s no evidence yet that they do dislike or distrust her,” Longwell said. “In fact, my guess is that she’ll play pretty well with suburban women.”



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">LOOKING FOR AN EDGE</h3>



Trump’s standing with the public has faded badly amid the coronavirus pandemic, the economic downturn and nationwide protests over police brutality and racial injustice.



Scrambling for something to alter the trajectory of the race, Trump and his Republican allies quickly launched a fusillade of attacks at Harris moments after the pick was announced.



The campaign hosted a conference call with reporters to assail her early stances during her own White House bid, when she supported progressive policy proposals such as the Green New Deal, a sweeping clean energy plan, and Medicare for All, a single-payer, government sponsored healthcare plan. Biden has not backed either proposal.



Harris shifted several of her policy stances in the course of the campaign in a bid to move toward the center. But the Trump campaign made clear it will attempt to paint her as an unrepentant leftist, while suggesting that the 77-year-old Biden could soon be out of office and replaced by her.



At the same time, the campaign said it will also seek to highlight criticism of Harris from the African-American community over her criminal justice record, hoping to drive a wedge between her and the Democratic Party’s most loyal constituency.



Privately, however, Trump’s aides acknowledged Harris would be a formidable adversary. One senior White House official said that the Harris pick means Vice President Mike Pence would have a tough debate in October.



Trump, in his White House news conference, acknowledged Harris’ aggressive questioning of then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh at his 2018 confirmation hearing.



“She was nasty to a level that was just a horrible thing the way she treated now-Justice Kavanaugh, and I won’t forget that soon,” Trump said.



Harris and Biden’s immediate challenge, in fact, will be to stamp out any brush fires among progressives who had urged Biden to choose a more overtly progressive candidate, such Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democratic activists say. [L1N2FD2IE]



During her presidential bid, Harris was fiercely criticized by progressives who viewed her prosecutorial record as overly supportive of law enforcement. She has since become a vocal supporter of progressive criminal-justice reforms.



Rashad Robinson, executive director of Color of Change, an advocacy group that has worked with Harris on police reform efforts, said the nominee will have to engage her progressive critics to win them over.



“These are questions she has to answer head-on,” Robinson said. “She has to answer questions about her evolution. Talk about the challenges that she has and talk about where she has moved.”

540px-Senator_Harris_official_senate_portrait

Why Kamala Harris may prove an elusive target for Trump

NAIROBI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) &#8211; In the last three months, teacher Faith Njeri has been a regular customer at a courier service office in Nairobi, collecting parcels sent from her village three hours drive north of the capital.



When the coronavirus pandemic closed the private school where she taught, “I was left jobless,” she said. Efforts to feed her family by washing clothes failed “as people avoided any intrusions in their homes for fear of getting infected with the virus.”



With three hungry children and no alternatives, she called her parents in her home village, asking them to send food to keep the family afloat.



“We did not have any money, and we needed to survive,” she said. “When it became apparent that hunger would kill us instead of the virus, we turned to our people back in the village.”



As coronavirus-related restrictions and economic downturns make bringing in an income harder, many urban families in Kenya &#8211; and in other countries around the world &#8211; are looking to their rural families for help.



In some cases, the calls for help represent an abrupt turnaround in relations, as city dwellers with jobs, who once sent regular cash to support their families at home, now find themselves the ones in need of help.



The added burden on rural families &#8211; some of them struggling to feed themselves as more extreme weather linked to climate change hurts harvests &#8211; has been substantial, they and farm experts say.



“Most (rural) families have been constrained as the little they had was sent to Nairobi to sustain their relatives,” said Phillip Oketch, a dairy expert with the Kenya Climate Smart Agriculture Project.



Njeri’s mother, who farms in Gathuthi, in Nyeri County, said 30% or more of her earnings have gone to sustain her jobless children and grandchildren in Nairobi through the pandemic.



Previously, her four children sent home about $500 each year, she said &#8211; but this year they have instead sent four of her grandchildren to live with her in the village, to try to ease costs in the city.



Joseph Kimathi, another farmer from the village of Katheri in Meru County who has sent food to his children in Nairobi, said the pandemic had created a substantial financial burden for farmers.



“I had to forego profits and ensure the survival of my three children in the city, whose forms of livelihoods were suddenly cut by the pandemic,” he said.



Kenya’s lockdown eased in early July but an economic downturn linked to the COVID-19 pandemic means many urban residents are still receiving a reduced paycheck or struggling to find work, Oketch said.



Doreen Akinyi, who lost her job as a hotel waitress, said she continues to rely on a weekly pack of fish and maize flour sent by her aging mother in Mambo Leo, a village in Kisumu County.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">PRESSURE ON HARVESTS</h3>



Zaverio Chabari, executive director of the non-profit Strategies for Agro-Pastoralists’ Development Kenya, said the need for rural families to send food to city relatives has been particularly difficult as the country grapples with harvest losses to flooding and locust swarms this year.



“By the time the COVID pandemic struck, much of the food at the farms was already ruined,” Chabari said.



Transportation also for a period was a challenge thanks to coronavirus-linked movement restrictions and road flooding &#8211; though Kenya’s Ministry of Agriculture quickly classified food transport as an essential service.



Gladys Miriti, head of the Grassroots Development Initiative Foundation-Kenya and one of those receiving food from her home village during the pandemic, said the situation had provoked substantial psychological stress for many urban families.



At the height of the lockdown, “they did not have money as most of them lost their jobs, they had children to feed, movements were restricted, the virus cases kept on surging and so a mix of fear, hopelessness, and uncertainty engulfed the people,” she said.

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As coronavirus steals jobs, urban Kenyans look to their rural families

COVID-19 has wrought havoc on poor households in countries across the world. In South Africa, more and more people are facing hunger resulting from&nbsp;<a href="https://www.businesslive.co.za/fm/features/cover-story/2020-07-15-the-jobs-reckoning-is-here/">mass job losses</a>&nbsp;and small, poorly implemented supplementary cash grants.



On top of this the pandemic has put in stark relief the country’s poorly understood food system, in which powerful firms operate with little oversight while vulnerable actors in the informal food sector face over-regulation.



When the country went into lockdown on 26 March 2020,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.dti.gov.za/news2020/FAQs-EssentialServices.pdf">government placed</a>&nbsp;the formal food sector at the centre of continued food supply. Informal food vendors were restricted. Yet these vendors provide an important source of food and livelihoods for the majority of South Africa’s population.



The South African constitution recognises the right to food. But the government’s failure to enact specific legislation on food rights has resulted in incoherent food security policies. Even the smallest increases in prices of products in the basic food basket can have a significant impact on poor households and in local markets. Therefore, access to affordable and nutritious food through formal and informal food markets is critical for ensuring people’s right to food.



In this article, we highlight indicators of a distressing rise in the prices of essential food products that is contributing to South Africa’s hunger crisis. We call for the urgent expansion of price controls to items in the basic household food basket, as well as an inquiry into the price-setting of major retailers.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Have food prices increased?</h2>



StatsSA recently&nbsp;<a href="http://www.statssa.gov.za/publications/P0141/P0141April2020.pdf">published</a>&nbsp;the headline urban consumer price index (CPI) as having&nbsp;decreased&nbsp;by 0.5% month-on-month in April 2020. But the statistics body&nbsp;<a href="http://www.statssa.gov.za/publications/P0141/P0141April2020.pdf">explicitly cautioned</a>&nbsp;that its new price collection strategy had been severely limited by the lockdown regulations. The headline number potentially reflects very different pricing behaviour of major retailers that have an online presence. Moreover, smaller retailers are excluded from this methodology – despite comprising half of poor household food spending based on data from the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.statssa.gov.za/publications/P0100/P01002011.pdf">Income and Expenditure Survey</a>&nbsp;of 2011.



Evidence of large price increases on essential food items is recorded by the NGO Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice and Dignity’s&nbsp;<a href="https://pmbejd.org.za/index.php/household-affordability-index/">price surveys</a>. They find an 8.2% increase in the price of a household food basket for the three-month period from 2 March to 3 June 2020. This includes large increases in the prices of essential food items at the local level over the period, such as an 18% increase for sugar beans and a 14% increase for brown bread.



Table 1: Month-on-month price increases for essential food items, March to April 2020



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/349102/original/file-20200723-21-1boiwi4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip" alt=""/><figcaption>Source: StatsSA detailed weekly price data for April and PMBEJD weekly price data for April. Items have been matched by authors for comparability.</figcaption></figure>



Comparisons of the StatsSA and Pietermaritzburg surveys are limited by timing and availability of item specific data. But both sources show that prices of brown bread, eggs, potatoes, salt, and soup increased in March and April. These are essential food items not necessarily monitored under current COVID-19 regulations.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Why is this not a Competition Commission case?</h2>



The price hikes have drawn the attention of the country’s Competition Commission. In a recent food price monitoring&nbsp;<a href="http://www.compcom.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Essential-Food-Pricing-Monitoring-Report.pdf">report</a>&nbsp;it pointed out significant inflation in the prices of various food items. It commented that, in some cases, the increases and high margins were not justified by the changes in the operating costs of the suppliers.



<a href="https://www.gov.za/sites/default/files/gcis_document/202004/43205rg43205gon448.pdf">Regulations</a>&nbsp;introduced in March after the government declared a state of disaster to manage the COVID-19 pandemic empowered competition agencies to investigate firms believed to be charging excessive prices for certain essential healthcare and food items. But not a lot has happened. Although 38% of the 320 complaints received by the competition commission by the end of June related to food prices, only one has so far led to an administrative penalty for a firm. This was the Food Lover’s Market case relating to the price of raw&nbsp;<a href="https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2020-07-14-food-lovers-store-admits-to-charging-excessive-price-for-raw-ginger/">ginger</a>.



Cases of excessive pricing of goods and services are among the most difficult to prosecute. This is because of the complexities of determining the extent to which prices are high; relevant cost parameters that have to be considered; the reliability of benchmarks; and the availability of data.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">What can be done?</h2>



During the most severe part of the lockdown in the country, the government addressed the issue of higher food prices by concluding an agreement with major retailers to limit price increases on key items. But this lapsed immediately after the first easing of the lockdown on 4 May. Since then retailers have&nbsp;<a href="http://www.compcom.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Essential-Food-Pricing-Monitoring-Report.pdf">increased prices</a>&nbsp;of certain food items in response to higher input prices. We believe a renewed list of price limits should be put in place.



Along with capping price increases for key food items, we propose that the list of items subject to the price monitoring regime be broadened. The Competition Commission’s assessment – and our own – indicate that there has been some positive effect of the food price increase restrictions for food items already included in this list, such as maize meal and frozen chicken. But the published&nbsp;<a href="https://businesstech.co.za/news/business/383217/new-regulations-bring-coronavirus-price-controls-for-certain-high-demand-products-heres-what-is-on-the-list/">list</a>&nbsp;of 22 critical products and categories, including 11 basic food items that are price-monitored, does not go far enough. The list of 11 food items leaves out brown bread and dried foods such as legumes, for example, which are staple foods for the poor and a major source of nutrition. The inclusion of frozen vegetables, on the other hand, points to poor targeting and a limited understanding of what constitutes the food basket of low-income households. Frozen vegetables are staples among middle-income households.



Table 2: Comparison of essential food baskets



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/349109/original/file-20200723-29-105x169.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip" alt=""/><figcaption>Notes: Food poverty line basket compiled by the StatsSA. VAT zero-rated basic foodstuffs are defined by National Treasury/SARS. Price monitored goods are published by the National Consumer Commission list in Reg. 350 of Government Gazette No. 11057 of 19 March. PMBEJD household food basket is compiled in consultation with women living on low incomes in Pietermaritzburg.</figcaption></figure>



We recommend the urgent expansion of the list to include brown bread, fresh vegetables, eggs and sugar beans, among other products. A failure to do this may well reverse any positive impact of increasing the rand values of social grants. At its core, the right to food is about protecting people’s right to feed themselves.



While the expansion of social protection measures does in part contribute to access to food for poor and vulnerable households, government should play a role in monitoring and regulating the food sector to ensure a more equitable and sustainable food system for consumers and actors in informal food markets. Price limits should be complemented by an inquiry into the price-setting of major retailers. The weaknesses in the StatsSA pricing data highlighted above indicate the need for more comprehensive data to inform ongoing monitoring of food prices.



The effects of COVID-19 will endure for some time to come, including large-scale job losses, and so it is certainly not too late to intervene. Poorer South African households cannot continue to endure both a crisis of joblessness and food price increases.

Everyday_african_urbanism_yasser_booley_51990

South Africa needs better food price controls to shield poor people from COVID-19 fallout

GENEVA/BRUSSELS (Reuters) &#8211; Eight candidates from Mexico to Moldova are bidding to become the next director-general of the World Trade Organization to replace Roberto Azevedo, who steps down at the end of August.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">CHALLENGES</h3>



The next chief would broker international trade talks in the face of widening U.S.-China conflict, protectionism increased by the COVID-19 pandemic and pressure to reform trade rules.



U.S. President Donald Trump’s “America First” policies have upended the global trading order and presented an existential threat to the WTO. Trump has called the institution “broken” and “horrible”. Washington has blocked appointments to the WTO’s Appellate Body that settles trade disputes, which now no longer has the minimum number of judges to convene.



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="594" height="438" src="https://www.cnbcafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/gettyimages-642093036-594x594-1.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-352573" srcset="https://cms.cnbcafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/gettyimages-642093036-594x594-1.jpg 594w, https://cms.cnbcafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/gettyimages-642093036-594x594-1-300x221.jpg 300w, https://cms.cnbcafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/gettyimages-642093036-594x594-1-80x60.jpg 80w, https://cms.cnbcafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/gettyimages-642093036-594x594-1-570x420.jpg 570w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 594px) 100vw, 594px" /><figcaption>WASHINGTON, DC &#8211; FEBRUARY 16: U.S. President Donald Trump stands during a news conference announcing Alexander Acosta as the new Labor Secretary nominee in the East Room at the White House on February 16, 2017 in Washington, DC. The announcement comes a day after Andrew Puzder withdrew his nomination. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)</figcaption></figure>



HOW THE DIRECTOR-GENERAL IS CHOSEN



The candidates have been given two months to campaign until September 7. Normally this would involve trips to national capitals, but with the pandemic much of that is being done in a virtual format.



The next phase involves whittling down the field, initially to five then two, before a final decision is taken.



The WTO is a members-driven organisation with decisions reached by consensus among 164 countries. Three WTO ambassadors who chair leading committees will lead the process, seeking to establish which candidates have the widest support.



In so-called “confessionals”, members will tell this “troika” their preferences, without ranking them and without vetoes in a process expected to last two months. The first phase will be on Sept 7-16. Voting on the next director-general is seen only as a last resort if consensus cannot be reached.



The process does not always work smoothly. In 1999, former New Zealand prime minister Mike Moore and Thailand’s Supachai Panitchpakdi divided WTO members, with a compromise finally found to give each a term, shortened to three years from four.



Azevedo’s term will finish before his replacement takes office, but WTO members failed to agree on a temporary caretaker director-general, meaning the four deputies will stay on in their current roles.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">MORE SOFT THAN HARD POWER</h3>



The Marrakesh Agreement that established the WTO in 1995 does not give a detailed description of the director-general role. The responsibilities should be “exclusively international in character”.



The incoming chief would be expected to appoint four new deputies, present budget proposals, and chair the trade negotiations committee which oversees multilateral accords such as on fishing subsidies.



The director-general can also intervene in trade disputes, in very rare cases offering mediation, more often by appointing people to adjudicating panels when parties cannot agree.



Otherwise, the director-general does not forge global trade policy, but is meant to act as a neutral broker: part administrator, part peacemaker.

amina 2

Explainer: How the next WTO chief will be chosen and the task ahead

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) &#8211; When coronavirus patients started arriving at South Africa’s government-run Thelle Mogoerane Hospital, workers scrambled to set up isolation wards to treat them.



<figure><iframe allowfullscreen="" src="https://queso-c



They can’t keep up. Video filmed inside the hospital and seen by Reuters shows patients with COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, being treated in a general ward, separated from other patients only by curtains.



“There’s no space anywhere,” nurse Rich Sicina said outside the modernist, iron-roofed hospital in a southern Johannesburg township. “It’s a mess.”



Kwara Kekana, spokeswoman for the department of health in Gauteng, the province containing Johannesburg, said that at the beginning of the pandemic, Thelle Mogoerane Hospital had dedicated wards for patients under investigation.



“Once we had a first positive case, a ward was created for confirmed positive cases,” she said, adding that it strictly followed South Africa’s national infection prevention guidelines.



The struggle is what President Cyril Ramaphosa wanted to avoid when he imposed one of the world’s toughest lockdowns in late March &#8211; when the country had confirmed just 400 cases &#8211; to buy health workers time to prepare.



But the measures battered the economy of Africa’s most industrialised nation, which was in recession before the pandemic, and Ramaphosa lifted many of them long before infections peaked in order to save livelihoods.



Four months later, South Africa faces a runaway epidemic that has overwhelmed public&nbsp;hospitals in a country where roughly half the population lives below the poverty line, according to the latest government figures from 2015.



With the number of cases approaching 500,000 &#8211; more than half of Africa’s total and the world’s fifth-highest &#8211; the country’s harsh inequalities appear to have contributed to its undoing, government advisers and independent experts said.



The first cases were wealthy travellers who brought the virus in from Europe, Asia and beyond, they said.



“They could isolate in their mansions,” said Wolfgang Preiser, a virologist at Stellenbosch University. “The problem is that these places are maintained by a whole crowd of domestic workers. They were exposed, and they travelled home in (communal) taxis.”



Once the virus reached South Africa’s poor, densely populated townships &#8211; a legacy of decades of oppressive white minority rule &#8211; it spread quickly, said Yunus Moosa, chief infectious disease specialist at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and a senior member of the government’s COVID-19 advisory panel.



It overwhelmed public hospitals “already on the brink of collapse”.



Police and soldiers battled to enforce the lockdown in areas where people live in close quarters and depend on daily earnings to eat. Bustling markets in Soweto, Johannesburg’s biggest township, were a stark contrast to nearly deserted streets in the city’s more affluent suburbs.



Mismanagement and looting of public funds, which have hollowed out public services for years, exacerbated shortages of protective clothing and other supplies at some hospitals, according to both the government and its critics.



Ramaphosa pledged a crackdown, saying on July 23 that authorities were investigating at least 36 corruption allegations in areas including COVID-19 procurement and relief programs.FILE PHOTO: People stand in a queue to receive food aid amid the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), at the Itireleng informal settlement, near Laudium suburb in Pretoria, South Africa, May 20, 2020. Picture taken May 20. 2020. REUTERS/Siphiwe Sibeko



Other factors were less foreseeable: some epidemiologists think the virus was circulating before it was first detected in the eastern KwaZulu-Natal province in early March, including across the country in the tourist hotspot of Western Cape.



Global shortages of testing materials undid an ambitious screening policy.



“I understand people might ask if things could have been done better, but honestly, what more could we have done?” Moosa said.



“If we had a magic wand we could wave and turn our healthcare system into a world-class one overnight, then we would have done it.”



The World Health Organization says South Africa is a “wake-up call” for other African nations, where confirmed infections are lower but climbing.



“South Africa may unfortunately be a precursor, &#8230; a warning for what will happen in the rest of Africa,” the WHO’s top emergencies expert Mike Ryan said.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">FROM RICHES TO RAGS</h3>



The first cases identified in Johannesburg, the country’s biggest city now at the outbreak’s epicentre, were concentrated in Sandton, a wealthy northern suburb.



Provincial officials declined to release case figures for specific suburbs and neighbourhoods that could better explain how the virus spread, but there are clues.



In the greater Soweto area, cases increased 252% this month compared with 200% for the rest of Johannesburg.



Drawing on experience tackling HIV and tuberculosis, the government began screening and testing in communities to catch new infections early.



But the virus spread too swiftly, and there weren’t enough personnel or reagents to process so many tests, researchers at two laboratories and Moosa told Reuters.



Data from the National Institute for Communicable Diseases show wait times at public hospitals, the worst hit by shortages, shot up from two days in mid-April to 12 by mid-June, before falling to between four and six days in July.



“That’s clearly far, far too long for it to be of any use in terms of preventing spread of infection. Two days is what you need,” said Richard Lessells, an infectious disease specialist at the KwaZulu-Natal Research and Innovation Sequencing Platform.



Officials at the department of health did not respond to phone calls and emails seeking comment.



Twenty-six years after apartheid ended in 1994, healthcare remains divided between a world class private system for those who can afford it, and an overburdened public one for the mostly Black citizens who cannot.



Just 17% of South Africans have medical insurance, the latest government figures from 2017 show. But healthcare provider Netcare estimates more than half of the country’s 6,000 critical care beds are in private hospitals.



When the first coronavirus cases came to Thelle Mogoerane, on the edge of the mostly black Vosloorus town, southeast of Johannesburg, “it was pure chaos,” Sicina said.Slideshow&nbsp;(4 Images)



A 30-bed isolation ward was set up in mid-April, but it filled so quickly that 18 critically ill patients were put in a regular casualty ward.



Five more COVID-19 wards have been added since then, but some patients are still spilling over into general wards, Sicina said. Until early May, nurses treated the patients protected only by a surgical mask and apron, he added.



Another nurse corroborated his account; she is not authorized to speak to media and declined to be named.



Kekana said PPE has been available at the hospital since the beginning of the pandemic.



At least eight patients admitted for other complaints caught COVID-19 there, they said, along with 240 staff. Last week, they held a memorial service for two nurses who died.



Kekana said she was not aware of the figure of 240 staff infected, but confirmed a memorial service for one nurse.



The hospital now has the masks, gowns and visors it needs, the nurses said. But shortages persist at other facilities, said Sibongiseni Delihlazo, spokesman for the main nurses’ union, the Democratic Nursing Organisation of South Africa.



A nurse at Bisho Hospital, in the more rural Eastern Cape province, said patients were getting just 30 minutes of oxygen at a time because there weren’t enough access points.



Nurses sometimes filled balloons with oxygen for the sickest patients, she said, on condition of anonymity.



The hospital and provincial health department did not respond to requests for comment.



The government has recruited health workers and is building field hospitals with partners to accommodate the overflow. It has also negotiated with private providers to take public patients if needed.



Private hospitals, though under strain, have fared better, said Charl van Loggerenberg, head of emergency medicine at private provider Life Healthcare, by putting in “big orders for PPE” and training extra nurses.



But he added, “it isn’t the world class super centres that are dealing with the public health pandemic. It’s the places in the trenches.”

south-african-flag-1486137288VYk

How inequality and poverty undermined South Africa’s COVID response

(Reuters) &#8211; President Donald Trump on Thursday raised the possibility of delaying the Nov. 3 U.S. presidential election, but the Constitution bestows that power on Congress, not the president.



Below are some facts around what changing the date of the election would entail:



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">CONGRESSIONAL POWER</h3>



Article II of the Constituti<a href="https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript#toc-section-1--2">here</a>&nbsp;gives Congress the power to set the date of the presidential election. (archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript#toc-section-1&#8211;2)



Since 1845, that day has been every four years on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, which in 2020 is Nov. 3.



Even if Trump declared a state of emergency due to the coronavirus, he would not be permitted to change the day, legal experts said.



“President Trump has absolutely no legal authority to delay the election,” said Joshua Douglas, a professor at the University of Kentucky and an election law expert.



Douglas noted that every presidential election since 1845 has gone forward as scheduled, even in the midst of wars and pandemics.



Congress could technically extend the ability to postpone an election to the executive, according to a 2004 Congressional Research Service report&nbsp;<a href="https://fas.org/sgp/crs/RL32471.pdf.">fas.org/sgp/crs/RL32471.pdf.</a>&nbsp;(fas.org/sgp/crs/RL32471.pdf)



However, given that Democrats currently control the House of Representatives, it is virtually certain that Congress would not entertain any sort of postponement.



Any delay in the election could also require Congress to postpone other deadlines, including Dec. 14, when the Electoral College &#8211; the electors from each state whose votes technically determine the presidential winner &#8211; must submit its ballots. By law, Congress must also gather on Jan. 6 at 1 p.m. to count the electoral votes and formally declare a winner.



Those dates are set out in the U.S. Code, a compilation of federal law.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">DELAY COULD ONLY BE TEMPORARY</h3>



Even if Congress decided to delay the election, Trump&#8217;s presidential term would still end at noon on Jan. 20, 2021, a date that is set in the Constitution&#8217;s 20th Amendment&nbsp;<a href="https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/amendments-11-27#toc-amendment-xx.">here</a>&nbsp;(archives.gov/founding-docs/amendments-11-27#toc-amendment-xx&nbsp;<a href="https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/amendments-11-27#toc-amendment-xx">here</a>)



Only another amendment, which requires a supermajority of two-thirds approval in both chambers of Congress as well as ratification by at least 38 U.S. states, can alter that date.



If there were no winner of the presidential election by Jan. 20, the Constitution dictates that the Speaker of the House &#8211; currently Democrat Nancy Pelosi &#8211; would become acting president until a successor was confirmed.

gettyimages-642093036-594×594

What would it take to postpone the U.S. presidential election?

COVID-19 will come and go, yet other global problems, such as climate change and extreme poverty, will persist in its wake.



The African Development Institute (ADI), was founded by the African Development Bank to be a focal point for capacity building in order to tackle such challenges. Prof. Kevin Chika Urama is its senior director.



Under the auspices of its Global Community of Practice (G-CoP) platform, the ADI brings together global experts to develop evidence that can inform policy, strategies and technical assistance for African countries to arrest the COVID-19 pandemic and cushion their economies against its impacts.



In this interview, Urama explains why G-CoP matters.



Can you give us a brief overview of the Global Community of Practice (G-CoP) initiative and main objectives?



The G-CoP was established to inform short, medium and long-term policy responses to global policy challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic.



This platform is a partnership between member institutions and government agencies that participate in and host webinars, and policy dialogues on subjects that are of interest to the Bank’s regional member countries.



All webinars are moderated in consultation with dedicated ADI staff members who manage the G-CoP platform and help to produce relevant knowledge products that respond to the unprecedented impact of the pandemic on global, regional and national health systems and economies. Our objective is to build more resilient African economies in the post COVID-19 world.



To date, the ADI has hosted three G-CoP policy webinars. The first focused on macro-economic policies; the second on food systems and agricultural value chains; and the third on inclusive health systems. In total, the webinars brought together more than 1,500 global experts, including current and former policy practitioners, academics, private sector leaders and civil society, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, African Economic Research Consortium, Murdoch University in Western Australia, the University of Oxford and University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, Harvard University in the United States, and many African universities and think tanks.



One of the platform’s most innovative features is an interactive virtual marketplace that enables policymakers to access technical advisory services in real time.



What are some of the key takeaways from your recently concluded G-CoP seminars?



Some key policy options and recommendations include:



· Implement social distancing and personal hygiene, including frequent hand washing and wearing face masks,



· Engage with local experts to garner context-relevant social protection policies and strategies to protect vulnerable households and small businesses from collapse.



· Scale up the capacity for community testing, contact tracing and isolation of COVID-patients to prevent community spread of the virus.



· Invest in inclusive health and food systems, water and sanitation facilities, especially for vulnerable households where lockdown policies are needed.



· Public and private debt restructuring, structured debt relief and targeted debt forgiveness. Short-term debt moratoriums are helpful. However, considering the pandemic’s massive impact on countries’ already constrained fiscal balances, debt forgiveness would be ideal.



· Scaling up investments in centres for disease control to strengthen their capacity for early warning systems and pandemic risk mitigation.



How different are the G-CoP’s deliberations from those of other forums?



Our deliberations take the form of African fireside discussions that cover matters of grave importance; key implementable decisions are collectively owned by the elders.



By bringing together global experts from around the world on the same platform, the G-CoP offers reality checks for each policy option proffered. Many of the policy questions that face humanity today, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, poverty alleviation, climate change, terrorism and global insecurity, are trans-disciplinary, trans-sectoral and transnational.



Most of these policy questions touch on problems around the so-called global commons. Policy options conceived by a single sector, discipline or even nation are often suboptimal and may lead to more systemic challenges. Global collaborative platforms, such as the ADI G-CoP, are required to address these challenges holistically.

Kevin Urama

OPINION: World experts gather for African ‘fireside chats’ to tackle humanity’s challenges

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LONDON/CHICAGO (Reuters) &#8211; It’s dog eat dog in the world of COVID-19 vaccines.



<



That’s the fear of global health agencies planning a scheme to bulk-buy and equitably distribute vaccines around the world. They are watching with dismay as some wealthier countries have decided to go it alone, striking deals with drugmakers to secure millions of doses of promising candidates for their citizens.



The deals &#8211; including those agreed by the United States, Britain and the European Union with the likes of Pfizer (<a href="https://www.reuters.com/companies/PFE.N">PFE.N</a>), BioNtech (<a href="https://www.reuters.com/companies/22UAy.F">22UAy.F</a>), AstraZeneca (<a href="https://www.reuters.com/companies/AZN.L">AZN.L</a>) and Moderna (<a href="https://www.reuters.com/companies/MRNA.O">MRNA.O</a>) &#8211; are undermining the global drive, experts say.



“Everybody doing bilateral deals is not a way to optimize the situation,” said Seth Berkley, chief executive of the GAVI alliance which co-leads the scheme called COVAX designed to secure rapid and fair global access to COVID-19 vaccines.



Pfizer said this week it was in concurrent talks with the EU and several of its member states on supplying them with its potential vaccine.



And in the latest swoop, Britain announced a deal on Wednesday to secure advanced supplies of potential COVID-19 vaccines from GlaxoSmithKline (<a href="https://www.reuters.com/companies/GSK.L">GSK.L</a>) and Sanofi (<a href="https://www.reuters.com/companies/SASY.PA">SASY.PA</a>).



This, according to global health charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), will further fuel “the global scramble to hoard vaccines by rich countries” and feed “a dangerous trend of vaccine nationalism”.



The concern is that vaccine supply and allocation in this pandemic will echo the last &#8211; caused by the H1N1 flu virus in 2009/2010 &#8211; when rich nations bought up the available supply of vaccines, initially leaving poor countries with none.FILE PHOTO: A scientist prepares samples during the research and development of a vaccine against the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) at a laboratory of BIOCAD biotechnology company in Saint Petersburg, Russia June 11, 2020. REUTERS/Anton Vaganov/File Photo



In that instance, since H1N1 turned out to be a milder disease and the pandemic ultimately petered out, the impact on infections and deaths from vaccine imbalances was limited.



However COVID-19 is a far greater threat, and leaving swathes of the world’s people vulnerable will not only harm them, but also extend the pandemic and the damage it can cause, health experts say.



“There is a risk that some countries are doing exactly what we feared &#8211; which is every man for himself,” said Gayle Smith, former head of the U.S. Agency for International Development and CEO of the One Campaign, a non-profit aimed at ending poverty and preventable disease.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">‘I AM WORRIED’</h3>



More than 75 wealthier countries including Britain have expressed interest in the COVAX financing scheme, which is also co-led by the World Health Organization and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, or CEPI, joining 90 poorer ones who would be supported through donations.



But the United States, China and Russia are not among countries expressing interest in COVAX, according to GAVI.



And an EU source said last week that the European Commission, which is the bloc’s executive arm and leads EU talks with drugmakers, has advised EU countries not to buy COVID-19 vaccines via COVAX.



“I am worried,” said Thomas Bollyky, director of the global health program at the Council on Foreign Relations. “What is happening with the handful of nations that are locking up supply of vaccine competes with the multilateral supply deals.



“At the end of the day, vaccine manufacturing is a finite resource. You can expand it, but only so much.”



Experts estimate the world can reasonably hope to have around 2 billion doses of effective COVID-19 vaccines by the end of next year, if several of the leading candidates prove effective in expedited late-stage trials currently underway. COVAX’s aim is to distribute doses for at least 20% of its signed-up countries’ populations.Slideshow&nbsp;(3 Images)



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">ANOTHER TWO YEARS?</h3>



Berkley of GAVI said, however, that if self-interested countries or regions snapped those up to cover their entire populations &#8211; instead of sharing them across nations and protecting the most at-risk people first &#8211; the pandemic could not be controlled.



“If you were to try to vaccinate the entire U.S., (and) the entire EU, for example, with two doses of vaccine &#8211; then you’d get to about 1.7 billion doses. And if that is the number of doses that’s available, there’s not a lot left for others.”



If a handful, or even 30 or 40 countries have vaccines, but more than 150 others don’t, “then the epidemic will rage there” Berkley said.



“This virus &#8230; moves around like lightning. So you’ll end up in a situation where you will not be able to go back to normal. You won’t be able to have commerce, tourism, travel, trade, unless you can get the whole pandemic to be slowed down.”



He and Smith and other health experts said ending the pandemic meant ending it globally.



“It’s the difference from a pandemic (for) another two years as opposed to one year,” Smith added. “The economics and health consequences of that are enormous.”

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SEATTLE (Reuters) &#8211; Boeing Co (<a href="https://www.reuters.com/companies/BA.N">BA.N</a>) is winding down production of the 747 jumbo jet, which democratized global air travel in the 1970s but fell behind modern twin-engine aircraft.







Here are some key facts and milestones regarding Boeing’s “Queen of the Skies,”



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"></h3>



The 747 had its maiden flight on Feb. 9, 1969, and entered service with Pan American World Airways in January 1970. It allowed more affordable air travel due to its size and range.



Dubbed “the Incredibles”, some 50,000 mechanics and engineers built what was then the world’s largest civilian airplane in roughly 16 months.



The current version is the 747-8, a 410-seater with a range of 8,000 nautical miles (14,815 km), launched in 2005.



The 1,500th 747 was delivered to Lufthansa (<a href="https://www.reuters.com/companies/LHAG.DE">LHAG.DE</a>) in 2014, becoming the first wide-body jet to reach that milestone.FILE PHOTO: An Evergreen 747 Supertanker makes a flame retardant drop in the Acton area in California August 31, 2009. REUTERS/Gene Blevins/File Photo







The 747 is the world’s most easily recognized jetliner with its humped fuselage and four engines.



The fuselage of the original 747 was 225 feet (68.5 meters) long, its tail as tall as a six-story building, and its wing area larger than a basketball court.



With an 8-foot-wide hinged nose able to swallow outsize cargo, the freighter version can carry more than 128 tonnes.



A British Airways (<a href="https://www.reuters.com/companies/ICAG.L">ICAG.L</a>) 747 boosted by strong tailwinds broke the subsonic speed record for a transatlantic crossing between New York and London in February, completing the trip in just under five hours, according to Flightradar24.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"></h3>



Passengers included John Paul II who staged the first visit to Ireland by a pope in 1979, arriving on an Aer Lingus 747, and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini who returned from exile to Iran on an Air France jumbo during the same year’s Islamic Revolution.



The 747 has known its share of tragedy in a career spanning the end of the Cold War and the rise of attacks on aviation.



In 1983, a Soviet fighter shot down a Korean Air Lines 747 that was off course and in 1988, Pan Am flight 103 was blown up by a bomb over the Scottish town of Lockerbie.



Modern twinjets are displacing older four-engined jets like the 747 and the soon-to-be-axed Airbus A380. Boeing had already told suppliers that the last 747-8 would roll off assembly lines in around two years.



Boeing said in 2016 it could end 747 production amid falling orders and pricing pressure, while major U.S. carriers like United Continental Holdings Inc (<a href="https://www.reuters.com/companies/UAL.O">UAL.O</a>) and Delta Air Lines Inc (<a href="https://www.reuters.com/companies/DAL.N">DAL.N</a>) have already said goodbye to their 747s.



The jet bounced back from near death to mark its 50-year flying anniversary in February 2019, propped up by a cargo market boom fueled by online shopping.Slideshow&nbsp;(10 Images)



But its extended lifespan was cut short by weak demand exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic and U.S.-China trade tensions.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"></h3>



The last order for a passenger version came in 2017, when the U.S. government asked Boeing to repurpose two 747-8 jetliners for use as the U.S. president’s Air Force One transport plane. After customisation and installation of classified systems, the two aircraft are due to be delivered by December 2024, painted red, white and blue.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"></h3>



NASA once used a modified 747 to carry the 68-tonne Space Shuttle piggyback style from landing sites back to the launch complex at the Kennedy Space Center.



Billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit uses a modified 747 nicknamed Cosmic Girl as the centerpiece of its high-altitude launch system for its satellite-carrying LauncherOne rocket.







Another modified variant is the Dreamlifter which transports sections of the 787 Dreamliner between factories in Everett, Washington and Charleston, South Carolina

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GENEVA/BRUSSELS (Reuters) &#8211; Eight candidates from Mexico to Moldova are bidding to become the next director-general of the World Trade Organization to replace Robert Azevedo, who steps down at the end of August.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">CHALLENGES</h3>



The next chief would broker international trade talks in the face of widening U.S.-China conflict, protectionism increased by the COVID-19 pandemic and pressure to reform trade rules.



U.S. President Donald Trump’s “America First” policies have upended the global trading order and presented an existential threat to the WTO, which the president has described as “broken” and “horrible”. Washington has blocked appointments to the WTO’s Appellate Body that settles trade disputes, which now no longer has the minimum number of judges to convene.



HOW THE DIRECTOR-GENERAL IS CHOSEN



The candidates have been given two months to campaign until September 7. Normally this would involve trips to national capitals, but with the COVID-19 pandemic much of that is being done in a virtual format.



The next phase involves whittling down the field, most likely first to five, then two before a final decision is taken.



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="228" height="221" src="https://www.cnbcafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Amina-Mohamed.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-376640"/></figure>



The WTO is a members-driven organisation with decisions reached by consensus among 164 countries. Three WTO ambassadors who chair leading committees will lead the process, seeking to establish which candidates have the widest support.



In so-called “confessionals”, members will tell this “troika” their preferences, without ranking them and without vetoes in a process expected to last two months. Voting on the next director-general is seen only as a last resort if consensus cannot be reached.



The process does not always work smoothly. In 1999, former New Zealand prime minister Mike Moore and Thailand’s Supachai Panitchpakdi divided WTO members, with a compromise finally found to give each a term, shortened to three years from four.



Because Azevedo’s term will finish before his replacement takes office, members must also agree on a temporary caretaker director-general from among four of his deputies.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">MORE SOFT THAN HARD POWER</h3>



The Marrakesh Agreement that established the WTO in 1995 does not give a detailed description of the director-general role. The responsibilities should be “exclusively international in character”.



The incoming chief would be expected to appoint four new deputies, present budget proposals, and chair the trade negotiations committee which oversees multilateral accords such as on fishing subsidies.



The director-general can also intervene in trade disputes, in very rare cases offering mediation, more often by appointing people to adjudicating panels when parties cannot agree.



Otherwise, the director-general does not forge global trade policy, but is meant to act as a neutral broker: part administrator, part peacemaker.

WTO.

By&nbsp; Zinathi Gquma



What is it about finance ministers and farming? It seems that when they are not racking their brains over the national budget they can find happiness down on the farm, amid the cows, crops and clucking of chickens in the barnyard.



That appears to be the case for South Africa’s current and previous finance ministers. Tito Mboweni, the current finance minister is never happier than when he is on his farm in Limpopo in the north of South Africa. Mboweni puts videos of chickens and plants on his Twitter feed. &nbsp;



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="296" height="343" src="https://www.cnbcafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/hqdefault-101-e1593178816521.jpg" alt="SA Finance Minister Tito Mboweni delivers his emergency budget" class="wp-image-374798" srcset="https://cms.cnbcafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/hqdefault-101-e1593178816521.jpg 296w, https://cms.cnbcafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/hqdefault-101-e1593178816521-259x300.jpg 259w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 296px) 100vw, 296px" /><figcaption>#SpecialBudget2020: Finance Minister Tito Mboweni delivers emergency budget (full speech)</figcaption></figure>



His predecessor, Nhlanlha Nene, who stepped down from office at the end of 2018, owns a 22- hectare farm in KwaZulu Natal. lt runs in his blood, Nene tells CNBC Africa in an exclusive interview, dressed more for the field than finance . Behind Nene, is a painting that proves his passion; a picture of Ringo, one of his prized bulls &#8211; a gift from a neighbour.



“Even when I was in office I would always retreat back to the farm, to gain some sanity…I love animals and I love nature, it is really therapeutic…nature gives you a sense of clarity,” he says.



“I grew up in a rural area, where my parents were subsistence farmers.”



Marrying his passion for finance and his joy of farming, Nene says that agriculture should be used by South Africans as a tool to lift individuals and communities out of poverty.



“COVID 19? This is a wake- up call that precious metals are no longer important, but agricultural products mean less imports, food security, employment and self- sustenance .We could lift ourselves out of poverty we will always be able to lift ourselves out of poverty and a lot of jobs could be created if we were to re-introduce that way of life (farming) to our people,” says Nene.

SOCIAL_PRM_NHLANHLA_28JULY

Why African finance ministers go farming.

There is no shortage of technological innovations designed to boost animal agriculture in Africa. These range from&nbsp;<a href="https://cgspace.cgiar.org/handle/10568/57322">GPS tracking systems</a>&nbsp;which identify and trace pastoralists’ herds to livestock vaccine&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cowtribe.com/">SMS services</a>&nbsp;that alert farmers to disease outbreaks.



But to unlock the economic potential of the sector as&nbsp;<a href="http://www.fao.org/3/a-i3706e.pdf">demand for meat and milk</a>&nbsp;swells threefold towards 2050, countries must invest in the critical areas that will improve quality across the whole value chain. That is increasing productivity and quality from the breeding of the animal throughout the production process to the end product. This includes safe storage, handling and sale.



My native Uganda offers some useful lessons from its use of smart investments in technology and farmer organisation. These have made it the only East African country that is&nbsp;<a href="http://pure.au.dk/portal/files/71178513/mwebaze_and_kjaer_article.pdf">self-sufficient in milk</a>.



In recent years, some private sector players in Uganda have invested in testing systems to detect aflatoxin in animal feeds. The goal is to prevent milk and meat contamination. Others have developed refrigeration units that are powered with&nbsp;<a href="https://energypedia.info/wiki/Biogas-Powered_Evaporative_Cooling_for_Uganda%E2%80%99s_Dairy_Industry">biogas</a>&nbsp;from manure. Both are among the innovations that improve the quality of the final product.



As highlighted by a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.mamopanel.org/resources/reports-and-briefings/meat-milk-more-policy-innovations-shepherd-inclusi/">new report</a>&nbsp;from the Malabo Montpellier Panel on which I sit, the same can be achieved elsewhere. It can also benefit other livestock commodities, to give Africa food sovereignty across animal-sourced foods and greater access to international markets.



The report makes 11 recommendations for Africa’s livestock sector. These range from technological innovations and supportive policies to addressing trade barriers and challenges specific to each commodity.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Priority areas</h2>



African nations must be strategic in prioritising the infrastructure that will make the most difference to quality and productivity. The first priority is to increase consumer awareness around food safety, nutrition and sustainability to kickstart demand for better quality products.



Partly as a response to European consumer expectations around quality and safety, for example, Morocco developed a new system for&nbsp;<a href="http://www.onssa.gov.ma/fr/sante-animale/identification-animale">animal identification and traceability</a>&nbsp;in 2015.



Livestock can be identified using electronic tags that communicate with the national database via mobile phone networks. This increases transparency and traceability. It also promotes Moroccan animal products on international markets such as the European Union.



The second priority is then to direct technology towards opportunities to open up market access.



To unlock trade means investing in improved animal health, processing operations, storage and distribution. Meeting regional and international standards for food safety and quality is a vital goal. Africa currently contributes 2.8% of the global meat market, which translates to 14 million tons. The continent produces just over 10% of the world’s milk.



There are a number of barriers to increasing this production and gaining greater market share. They include limited availability of quality animal feed, access to affordable energy needed in producing and processing livestock, and limited infrastructure, particularly in the last mile.



With meat and milk being perishable goods, innovation in the cold chain and sustainable energy supplies will help strengthen the sector.



For example, an East African&nbsp;<a href="https://www.heifer.org/our-work/flagship-projects/east-africa-dairy-development-project.html">initiative</a>&nbsp;which centralised milk quality testing and storage in chillers prior to sale increased yields sixfold within five years.



The volume of milk supplied to the 30km catchment area rose to three million litres a month. This increased income per smallholder household by more than 160% in Uganda, 120% in Kenya, and almost 65% in Rwanda.



The success of such projects in turn drives demand for continued innovation, such as solar-powered cold chains or interventions that protect other resources like water and grasslands.



Finally, countries also need to prioritise policies that support new technologies across the livestock sector.



To&nbsp;<a href="https://www.dda.or.ug/profile.html">transform</a>&nbsp;its milk production sector, Uganda privatised the state-owned processing company Dairy Corporation as well as creating a Dairy Development Authority.



The Dairy Industry Act of 1998 empowered the authority to enforce milk hygiene standards and quality controls. As a result, traders were licensed to meet public health and milk quality standards. This encouraged the modernisation of the sector through the expansion of pasteurisation plants and processing infrastructure as well as processing of high value products.



Certainly, the gains have trickled down to the farmers in better farm gate prices.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Conclusion</h2>



As the Malabo Montpellier Panel points out, many of the tools needed to tap into the potential of Africa’s livestock sector exist already. But with limited resources, they must be deployed smartly to improve the entire value chain.



Scaling up innovation at critical points will unlock new opportunities and help ensure animal agriculture keeps pace with a rising demand from a growing population.

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