Greetings
Seven years have passed since SUPA started the poverty eradication activities in Guinea in 1998. It has been always your supports which enabled us continue the activities. We appreciate it from bottom of our hearts.
The aim of our activities is to eliminate poverty by recovering "the vanished tropical rain forests" , which is one of the causes of poverty of the area, and "the decreased income from the harvest" due to the deteriorated condition of the field.
Please feel free to ask us for more details, for this report is only the summary of our activities.
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The director general Yumi Takahashi
Secretary-general Shinji Nozawa
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● The general conditions of the Republic of Guinea
The republic of Guinea is located in West Africa. The northern part of the country is bounded by Sahel Strip, which extends to the southern part of Sahara desert. A portion of the southern part is faced to the western Atlantic Ocean. Also it is bounded by Guinea Bissau on the northern west, on the north by Senegal, the north east by Mali, on the south east by Cote d'Ivoire, and the south by Liberia as well as Sierra Leone.
Area :240,000 square kilometers, about same as mainland of Japan.
Population : About 8,000,000 80% of the population is Muslim, relatively high ratio in Africa.
Climate : The dry season and the rainy season halve a year. Precipitation of the rainy season (June to November) regionally reaches more than 3,000milimeters. So the area is called the "water bottle of West Africa." It used to be covered with dense tropical rain forest many years ago.
After World War II, African countries including Guinea started to reclaim liberty from their suzerain states. Guinea had achieved its independence from France in 1958 but politically it deepened the relationship with the countries of the Communist bloc. This caused severance in terms of political and economic ties with European countries of the West, especially France. In 1984, Guinea reconciled with the Western European countries including France, adapting a nonalignment/neutral position policy in an attempt to improve the relationships with these countries.
Its economy depends on the income from bauxite export, which occupies 60% of the reserves of the world, though the earning rate is low since it is the ore export, and the scarcity of the foreign currencies has been continuing to this day. The agricultural industry is not in a favorable state either. With financial shortage, the irrigation facilities which would enable them to utilize the abundant rainfall cannot be established, that the self-sufficiency in food production is not attained yet. Therefore it is necessary to be supported by the other countries with rice import of about 300,000 tons per year.
Guinea is a country of West Africa that is comprised of the world's most impoverished nations. Lives of the local residents are chronically threatened by poverty caused by decreased income from the agricultural products. This is due to the deteriorated condition of the field caused by the slash-and-burn agriculture, which leads to the disappearance of the tropical rain forests.
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