Ivory Coast 2014
Yearbook 2014
Ivory Coast. In March, the government decided that the former youth minister and leader of the Young Patriot militia group, Charles Blé Goudé, should be extradited to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. According to Countryaah.com, Côte d’Ivoire population in 2020 is estimated at 26,378,285. Blé Goudé was charged with crimes against humanity in connection with the violence that occurred after the October 2010 presidential election and lasted for over six months.
The same month, President Alassane Ouattara decided that the mandate of the Reconciliation Commission formed in 2011 should be extended by one year. The purpose of the Commission was to investigate the crimes committed in connection with the presidential election four years earlier. The human rights organization Human Rights Watch described the decision to extend the mandate as an important step in demanding responsibility for the violence.
In April, the UN Security Council announced that the previous ban on trade in Ivory Coast diamonds had been lifted as the Council amended the sanctions against the country that existed since 2004. The UN justified the change in the country’s need to build up its security forces, and the Union commended the Ivorian government for its work on restoring peace and stability. At the same time, the UN continued to express concerns about instability in parts of the country. The ban on dealing with Ivorian diamonds was adopted by the UN in 2005. According to Abbreviation Finder, IV stands for Ivory Coast in English. Click to see other meanings of this 2-letter acronym.
In June, the ICC announced that the court had collected sufficiently strong evidence against the country’s former president Laurent Gbagbo and that the trial against him could therefore commence. Gbagbo was extradited to The Hague as early as 2011 but the trial has since been suspended several times. The president’s wife, Simone Gbagbo, was also wanted by the court in The Hague, but the Ivorian government decided last year that her case would be tried by a national court. However, the planned trial against Simone Gbagbo was suspended during the autumn due to logistical problems and in December the ICC announced that the country risked sanctions unless Simone Gbagbo was extradited to The Hague.
According to topb2bwebsites, the spread of the deadly Ebola virus in western neighboring Guinea and Liberia during the year led to extensive measures to prevent the disease from spreading to the Ivory Coast as well. In addition to closing the borders against the two affected neighboring countries in the west, the Ivorian government decided, among other things, to ban flights between Ivory Coast and Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Economic conditions
For more than three decades after independence (1960), Ivory Coast went through a period of considerable political stability and extraordinary economic development, based above all on the export of plantation agricultural products. The system of government introduced by the first president, F. Houphouët-Boigny, founded on the complementarity between economic liberalism and political dirigism, went into crisis at the end of the 1980s, following the progressive collapse of cocoa and coffee prices. The end of the ‘Ivorian economic miracle’, as it was emphatically defined at the time, was followed by a decade of instability and growing economic hardship, concluded by a coup d’état in 1999 and the outbreak of the inter-ethnic war between the North and the South (2002) which plunged the country into chaos, leading to its division, as the northern part fell under the control of rebel forces in the central government. The economy has been all the more penalized since the international financial institutions (World Bank, International Monetary Fund) have imposed binding conditions and made the disbursement of loans conditional on the entry into force of peace agreements. Plantation products still represent the country’s greatest resource, divided into two large agricultural regions: forestry to the South, which evolves towards an area covered by secondary forests, arborescent fallows and perennial plantations: cocoa, coffee, palm oil, hevea, coconuts, bananas, pineapples; to the North the savannah area, home to the main subsistence crops: corn, rice, millet, sorghum, peanuts, cassava, but also cotton and sugar cane. Ivory Coast is the first world producer of cocoa (1.4 million tons in 2006): the plantations are concentrated in the southern and south-eastern half of the country, and are less affected by the conditions of insecurity than those of coffee, cotton and sugar cane. The cocoa supply chain provides almost 6 million people to live, but the liberalization of trade, which has deprived producers of the guarantee of profitable prices, and, at the same time, the appearance on the scene of multinationals, have led to a drastic lowering of prices for producers. The exploitation of huge forest resources (annually over 11 million m3 of common and precious woods) proceeds at a pace that appears decidedly unsustainable in the medium and long term. The extractive industries saw their activities progress significantly in the second half of the 1990s, thanks to the increase in oil production, linked to the start of the exploitation of new fields off the coast.
