Mayibouth / AFP In the remote wilderness of the Belinga mountains in northeast Gabon, men with shovels in hand dig from morning to night, filling wheelbarrows with soil laced with what they are looking for: gold. The clearing in the equatorial forest is covered with dozens of holes, some four metres (13 feet) deep. “We arrive around seven in the …

AlmerIa / AFP In a vast sea of plastic greenhouses in southeastern Spain, dubbed “Europe’s vegetable garden”, discontent is growing among farmers who complain large supermarket chains do not pay enough and farm workers live in poverty. Since the 1980s, one of the largest concentrations of greenhouses in the world has developed on a coastal plain near the city of …

When Chinese President Xi Jinping unveiled the blueprint for the enormous $46 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) project last year, Pakistan was understandably pleased. The Pakistani government considers the project a game changer for its fragile economic structure. This exhilaration partly stems from the country’s wobbly economic performance in recent years, which has seen it fall short of GDP and …