The Mauritian Election of 2005: An Unprecedented Increase of Women in Parliament

Before the 2005 election, women’s legislative representation in Mauritius had always been one of the lowest in the African continent, and the lowest in the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Although the number of women in the Mauritian legislature has fluctuated over time, the latest election on July 3, 2005 brought an unprecedented increase in the number of women from 4 (5.7 per cent) to 12 (17.1 per cent) in its 70-member legislature. Before this increase, the number of female members of parliament (MPs) had never exceeded six. If so, what contributed to such a sharp increase? This study addresses this question by examining the factors that helped bring about this unprecedented increase. Specifically, we discuss the political experience and name recognition of certain female candidates, efforts of women’s NGOs, effective matching of female candidates to the profiles of constituencies, contagion of nominating women, and women’s effective election campaigns as the major factors. These factors were also present in the previous election years to some extent, but they were more visible and better orchestrated in 2005

Cités horticoles en sursis ? L'agriculture urbaine dans les grandes Niayes au Sénégal. Sous la direction de Safiétou Touré Fall et Abdou Salam Fall, CRDI, 2001, ISBN 0‑88936‑936‑4, 120 p.

The urbanisation process in Africa has in recent years attracted an increasing amount of attention amongst scholars both outside and in Africa ‑ with the only difference that the latter continue to remain largely "invisible" in the literature. Urbanisation is a subject which has been tackled by scholars from various disciplines ‑ geography, demography, anthropology, sociology, history and development economics to mention just a few. However, development economics has only recently recognised ..

Fishing or fish farming:the conflict between a Crown grant of salmon fishings in the sea and other Crown rights in the sea in Scotland

There is a rising concern over the impact of aquaculture, particularly salmon farming, on the aquatic environment. Two Scottish parliamentary investigations have revealed concerns over the environmental impacts of the industry, particularly with regard to the potential hazard to wild salmonids. Many have pointed to regulatory complexity being a cause of the poor regulation. Representatives of the Crown Estate Scotland stated: ‘We have the right bits and pieces, but they have not been put together in the right order’. Yet it is the Crown which grants the leases of fish farms to their operators and therefore the Crown is where the ultimate responsibility for their impact sits. If changes to public controls are required, we must first fully understand the roles of the public agencies involved. Part one of this article examines the legal parameters of private rights of salmon fishing, considering the definition of ‘salmon’, the usual terms on which salmon fishing rights are granted in the sea and the legal extent of that right. Part two then examines how such rights operate in competition with other public and private rights in the sea or seabed and foreshore derived from the Crown. Part three finishes with a consideration of how to reconcile the competition of rights identified in part two

Increase of niche filling with increase of host richness for plant-infecting mastreviruses

Now that it has been realized that viruses are ubiquitous, questions have been raised on factors influencing their diversity and distribution. For phytoviruses, understanding the interplay between plant diversity and virus species richness and prevalence remains cardinal. As both the amplification and the dilution of viral species richness due to increasing host diversity have been theorized and observed, a deeper understanding of how plants and viruses interact in natural environments is needed to explore how host availability conditions viral diversity and distributions. From a unique dataset, this study explores interactions of Mastrevirus species (family Geminiviridae) with Poales order hosts across 10 sites from three contrasting ecosystems on La Réunion. Among 273 plant pools, representing 61 Poales species, 15 Mastrevirus species were characterized from 22 hosts. The analysis revealed a strong association of mastreviruses with hosts from agroecosystems, the rare presence of viruses in coastal grasslands, and the absence of mastreviruses in subalpine areas, areas dominated by native plants. This suggests that detected mastreviruses were introduced through anthropogenic activities, emphasizing the role of humans in shaping the global pathobiome. By reconstructing the realized host–virus infection network, besides revealing a pattern of increasing viral richness with increasing host richness, we observed increasing viral niche occupancies with increasing host species richness, implying that virus realized richness at any given site is conditioned on the global capacity of the plant populations to host diverse mastreviruses. Whether this tendency is driven by synergy between viruses or by an interplay between vector population and plant richness remains to be established

Gender, Employment and Welfare Provisioning: The Mauritian Experience

No Abstract

Mise en œuvre d’un crible génétique en vue de l’identification de résistance aux virus de la jaunisse modérée de la betterave sucrière

Depuis l'interdiction des néonicotinoïdes dans l'Union Européenne, la production de betteraves sucrières est fortement menacée par des épidémies de jaunisses virales. Ces maladies sont causées par un complexe de plusieurs virus transmis par les pucerons. Parmi eux, les polérovirus, responsables de jaunisses modérées, tels que le beet mild yellowing virus (BMYV) et le beet chlorosis virus (BChV), sont particulièrement répandus. Afin d’améliorer le criblage des variétés de betteraves sucrières résistantes ou tolérantes aux jaunisses virales, nous avons mis au point un virus recombinant provoquant des symptômes visibles permettant de distinguer facilement et sans autre technologie les plantes infectées des plantes saines. Il s’agit d’un clone de BMYV capable d'induire l'extinction d'un gène endogène via le phénomène de virus induced gene silencing (VIGS) dont l’infection se manifeste par l'apparition accélérée de jaunisses au niveau des nervures des feuilles des betteraves, dès dix jours après l'agroinoculation. Les analyses moléculaires ont révélé que le virus recombinant présente un pouvoir infectieux comparable à celui du virus sauvage, et que l'insertion génétique est stable dans la descendance virale pendant au moins cinq mois après infiltration. Nos résultats ont également montré que le pourcentage de plantes présentant des symptômes de VIGS est représentatif du taux d'infection pour chaque lignée de betteraves testée. L'utilisation de cet outil nous a permis d'identifier visuellement au sein de quarante-deux lignées de betteraves sucrières, une lignée potentiellement résistante au BMYV ainsi que trois lignées partiellement résistantes. De telles lignées représentent des candidats potentiels intéressants pour les programmes de sélection. Ainsi, ce travail valide l'utilisation d'un polérovirus comme vecteur de VIGS, adapté à la betterave sucrière, permettant des criblages visuels et robustes à grande échelle pour l'identification de gènes de résistance ou pour des études fonctionnelles.Since the ban on neonicotinoids in the European Union, sugar beet production has been severely threatened by virus yellows (VY) epidemics. VY are caused by a complex of several aphid-transmitted viruses, among which the poleroviruses beet mild yellowing virus (BMYV) and beet chlorosis virus (BChV) are highly represented. In order to improve the screening of sugar beet varieties resistant or tolerant to viral yellows, we produced a recombinant virus, allowing easy and rapid visual discrimination between infected and healthy plants, without the need of additional equipment. It is a clone of BMYV capable of inducing the silencing of an endogenous gene via the phenomenon of virus induced gene silencing (VIGS), with infection manifesting as accelerated vein clearing of leaves, starting as early as ten days after agroinoculation. Molecular analyses revealed that the recombinant virus displays the same infectivity as the wild-type virus and that the insert is stable within the viral progeny, till at least five months post-infiltration. Our results also indicated that the percentage of VIGS-symptomatic plants is representative of the infection rate for each evaluated line. The use of this tool allowed us to visually identify one BMYV resistant and three partial resistant lines from forty-two sugar beet lines. Such lines represent interesting potential candidates for breeding programs. Thus, this work validates the use of a polerovirus as a VIGS vector, adapted to sugar beet, allowing large-scale, robust visual screenings for the identification of resistance genes or for functional studies

The Gendered Face of the Mauritian Legislature

This article aims to provide an overview of the state of gender representivity in Mauritian politics. The author argues that the Mauritian legislature is plagued with issues of sociocultural bias, at the expense of women's limited participation in the nation's political arena. Transformation of the legislature is required in order to meet the needs and interests of Mauritian women, but despite the increased involvement of women in Mauritian politics during the 2005 elections, the political arena continues to be dominated by ethnicity and caste. Moreover, the recent increase in the number of women in the Mauritian legislature does not guarantee the irreversibility of gains made. The article concludes by stating that gender-friendly electoral reforms are a necessary but not suffi cient condition for gender equitable power-sharing. African Insight Vol. 36 (3&4) 2006: pp. 160-17