According to ezinereligion, in 2007, Gabon had a population of around 1.5 million people and its economy was largely based on natural resources such as oil and minerals. It had strong foreign relations with many countries in Africa, as well as with other countries around the world. Politically, Gabon was a presidential republic and the government was led by President Omar Bongo who had been in power since 1967. The country was not part of any major international organization such as the European Union or NATO, but it did have a seat on the United Nations Security Council from 2003 to 2006.
Yearbook 2007
Gabon. A new airline, Gabon Airlines, replaced the bankrupt Air Gabon since Moroccan plans to enter a new airline were dropped. Gabon Airlines is owned by Christian Bongo, son of Gabon’s president.
According to CountryAAH, Libreville is the capital city of Gabon. One of Gabon’s best-known independent newspaper editors, Guy-Christian Mavioga, was sentenced to five months in prison and fined for criticizing President Omar Bongo in an editorial. His magazine L’Espoir had his publishing license revoked. Bongo has ruled Gabon since 1967 and is the African head of state that has been in power for the longest time.
- According to abbreviationfinder: GA is the 2-letter acronym for the country of Gabon.
A 2006 Chinese billion iron ore mining contract in eastern Gabon was criticized by environmental groups. Several organizations jointly demanded that the authorities disclose the conditions for the mining operations which are feared to entail extensive logging in the environmentally sensitive Congo basin.
Human and economic geography
Central-West African state. The results of the 2003 census (1,520,911 residents) Were judged by various international organizations to be unreliable, as the population growth would have been about 50 % in ten years (at the 1993 census they were 1,014,976 residents .). A 2005 estimate attributes 1,389,000 residents to the country. The spread of the AIDS epidemic has reduced life expectancy at birth and raised infant mortality (54 ‰ in 2005) and global mortality (11.7‰), also modifying the composition of the population by age and sex. Urban concentrations are increasing, even if there is a lack of centers with real characteristics of cities: the capital itself, Libreville, which has a limited demographic consistency (362,400 residents In 2003, 611,000 residents With the agglomeration).
Gabon is one of the Sub-Saharan African countries with the highest per capita income: its economy is based almost exclusively on oil, whose production, after reaching its maximum level in 1997 with 18.5 million t, it stabilized in the following years at around 12-13 million tonnes per year. This decline has had heavy repercussions on the state budget, since the seventies of the 20th century. hydrocarbons assure around 60% of revenue and account for about three quarters of exports. However, wells that were once considered unprofitable have been reopened and there is a good chance that new fields will be identified, especially off the coast. From the last years of the 20th century. a diversification of the economy was initiated, focusing in particular on agriculture (which for a long time represented a secondary sector, unable to satisfy internal demand), on the exploitation of manganese (strategic mineral for the manufacture of special steels, and of which Gabon is one of the major producers, with about 1.8 million tons per year at the beginning of the new century) and on the development of tourism. Tropical forests, which cover as many as 85% of the country’s surface, they supply valuable and construction timber, but at the cost of heavy environmental degradation.