<i>Country for sale!</i>

Liberia is selling itself slice by slice nine years after a terrible civil conflict finally came to an end, offering valuable resources to the highest bidder even though that could kindle tension among a population that often feels it is being sold out.
The chairman of the Liberia Land Commission, Othello Brandy, says that 57.5 percent of the nation's territory has been alloted via concessions, for a total of 5.6 million hectares (13.8 million acres), of which a little more than one million hectares represented agricultural land.
Alfred Brownell, a lawyer who founded the non-governmental organisation Green Advocates estimates that at least 120 foreign companies have signed concessions contracts in Liberia, a country the size of Portugal that was colonised by freed black slaves from the United States.
"Over the last six years it has been an avalanche," Brownell said, before explaining that Liberia, a western Africa country that suffered 15 years of war from 1989 to 2003, lacked the expertise to develop by itself.
"There is no capacity of absorption in Liberia, no skills, no trained people," Brownell noted, "we will depend on foreign experts."
The lawyer defends Liberian communities that are affected by palm oil plantations and warns: "If we get back to war, it will be on land."
The United Nations warned in early December of the potential for land conflicts.
But Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011, annulled many controversial deals but has also signed new ones covering agricultural, forestry, mineral and offshore oil resources.
An early example of a Liberian concession was one signed in 1926 with US tyre maker Firestone which acquired the rights to a half million hectares near Monrovia, but ended up producing "not even a rubber band," according to Brownell.
In southern Liberia, 220,000 hectares have been ceded for 93 years to the Indonesian group Golden Veroleum Liberia (GVL) to produce palm oil, and on which around 200 families now live.