Canned dairy products are now for sale, along with fresh milk and live chickens and goats, at Maputo’s once solely traditional and ‘wet’ Xipamamime market, in Mozambique (photo credit: ILRI/Mann).

More good news on the development front. We previously reported here (Here be dragons, 2 January 2011) progress being made by Viet Nam and Ghana as described on the Development Progress website.

In the current Economist‘s ‘The World in 2011: 25-Year Special Edition’ (The emerging emerging markets, 24 November 2010), we read that:

‘The rich world will continue to suffer from anaemic growth for years to come. The emerging world, by contrast, will be a whirling hub of dynamism and creativity. Over the next decade it will account for more than 50% of global growth. It will see 700 million people enter the middle class. And it will also account for a disproportionate share of business innovations. . . . [The] “new” emerging markets . . . come in two varieties: “overlooked countries that can rival the BRICs [Brazil, Russia, India and China] in terms of prosperity; and “frontier” countries that are only just beginning to emerge from their chrysalises. The biggest concentration of overlooked markets is in Africa (which is in many ways an overlooked continent). . . .’

And in Time Magazine, we read in Was it really so bad? (24 November 2010) that:

‘Information technologies and ubiquitous access to the Internet have linked us as never before, creating the possibility of new ways of sharing insights and giving rise to what Clay Shirky of New York University calls a massive “cognitive surplus” whose wealth-creating potential can as yet only be guessed at. This sunny view of the decade, to be sure, is hard to discern through the gloom that pervades those many American industries that have been battered by creative destruction. But if you shift your frame of reference, the world looks quite different. In the past decade, nations that were once marginal, such as China and India, have become vital parts of the global economy. Brazil is becoming a breadbasket to half the world. Perhaps most dramatically—I mention this because it always gets overlooked—Africa has had its most successful decade since the end of colonialism. Fueled by buoyant demand for its commodities and new technologies like mobile telecommunications, it is growing at twice the speed it did in the 1980s and ’90s. The cumulative effect of all this is that hundreds of millions of individuals have been lifted out of poverty. Though the Great Recession hurt trade and commodity prices, the U.N. was able to report this year that the world was on track to reach the Millennium Development Goal of halving the proportion of people who live in dire poverty over the 25 years from 1990 to 2015. That’s nothing but good news—for everyone.’