Environment news November 2007

 

 

 

 

Item 01: New Agreement Will Lay "Crucial Foundations" for Migratory Birds of Prey and Owls

(BirdLife, 11 October, 2007) International awareness of the plight of migratory birds of prey and owls across Africa and Eurasia is set to get a major boost this month. Countries from China to South Africa will gather in Scotland under the chairmanship of the UK and United Arab Emirates, aiming to draw up a new agreement for concerted international conservation action.

This is the first of two planned meetings, at which governments will work alongside key conservationists under the auspices of the international Convention on Migratory Species (CMS).

The process is driven by findings two years ago that 50% of migratory birds of prey in the African-Eurasian region have a poor conservation status and many are showing rapid or long-term population declines.

"This is the first international meeting to discuss a possible instrument to conserve these incredible birds – it’s a crucial foundation," said John O’Sullivan of the RSPB (BirdLife in the UK), who will address the meeting at Loch Lomond at the end of October.

"The decisions taken here will pave the way for coordinated efforts in nations along the flyways of these magnificent birds," he added. "And this has positive wider implications, since many of the actions needed to save raptors are the same as those needed to ensure the wellbeing of other species, up to and including ourselves."

A variety of human-induced threats are driving declines in migratory birds of prey and owls, such as habitat loss and degradation, collisions with aerial structures and electrocution by power lines. Climate change is a further concern.

Illegal shooting and poisoning are a key threat – a point highlighted in Cyprus earlier this month, when 52 Red-footed Falcon were shot by poachers.

Other delegates from BirdLife International will also be active at the meeting, on behalf of BirdLife Partners spread across the three regions.

"For us, key to a successful meeting will be an acceptance by delegates that coordination is essential and urgent," said Ali Stattersfield, BirdLife’s Head of Science. "We need to look at the species and geographical boundaries that should apply to a new treaty - based on good science and the latest understanding of the migration flyways concerned."

"Most importantly there needs to be a clear commitment to the proposed conservation measures to make this agreement work. This includes protecting all species from unsustainable exploitation and managing Important Bird Areas in breeding and non-breeding areas as well as those used on passage, notably in migration bottlenecks."

"This commitment must include adequate money to run the agreement itself and to ensure that vital actions are conducted." she added.

 

 

Item 02: Russia: Fishing Quotas to Dissolve

(Vladivostok News, 11 October, 2007) Starting next year Russia plans to stop handing over quotas for commercial fishing, though about 50 types of most valuable fishes will not leave the list of limitations, Andrei Krainy, head of the fisheries regulator agency, announced in Khabarovsk on Tuesday.

The quotas will still be assigned for valuable but resource-scarce kinds of fishes like sturgeon, crab, sea urchin, scallops and others, Krainy, head of the Federal Agency for Fisheries, said at a meeting in Russia's Far East.

According to Krainy, the abolishment of quotas for other fishes will not mean uncontrollable fishing. Regional headquarters would be organized to determine the fishing output, with limitations on duration, the number of fishing vessels and the methods of fishing.

"Quoting system does not solve the problem of regulation of catches and does not protect marine resources from poaching," Krainy said. "Factual catches exceed assigned quotas by two or three times and when it concerns crab catches – by seven times," Krainy revealed.

According to Krainy, the rights to catch fish will be granted only to the companies which possess their own fleet. Only 3,700 fishing enterprises out of registered 5,000 have their fishing vessels while the rest companies make their business by reselling quotas.

The new initiative is supposed to come into effect on January 1, 2008. "It is nothing new. The same system was applied to fishing in the Soviet times," Krainy stressed.

Krainy also pointed out the necessity for Russia to introduce a monopoly on fishing in its national waters which is a common practice in other countries with developed fishing industries.

"Commercial fishing is traditionally a strategic branch of the economy and foreigners should not be present there," Krainy said. "We are capable of developing resources in our economic zone ourselves. Foreign companies could pay attention to the fish processing plants, "he noted.

According to Krainiy, Russia's state-controlled Rosselkhozbank would start supporting domestic fishing companies by issuing 12%-interest loans from January 2008.

Russia's current annual commercial catch is about 3.2-3.3 million metric tons. The average per capita consumption of fish and seafood in Russia has decreased from 22.5 kilograms (50 lb) in 1986 to 12.6 kilograms (27 lb) in 2006, while the Health Ministry recommends average annual consumption at about 23.7 kilograms (52 lb).

In comparison, annual fish consumption in the U.S. is 22.6 kilograms (50 lb), in China - 25.7 kilograms (56 lb), in Norway - 47.4 kilograms (104 lb) and in Japan - 64.7 kilograms (142 lb).

 

 

Item 03: Russia: Crab Mafia Incurs Losses

(Vladivostok News, October 09, 2007) Investigators have launched a huge crackdown on crab poaching in the Russian Far East and seized documents from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky fishing port and Kamchatsky Center of Fishing Monitoring in connection with arrests of three businessmen in late September who are facing charges of illegal crab exports from Russia to the United States.

The law enforcers are checking the documentation of 15 ships belonging to the companies which were part of the holding ‘Eastern Fish Resources’ whose owners were arrested in Moscow on September 20.

Arkady Gontmakher, an American of Russian birth and head of the Seattle-based Global Trading (Fishing) company, and his two Russian associates Aziz Embarek and Alexander Suslov, are accused of illegal exports of crab and crab meat products to the United States. The investigators revealed that the contraband export reached 15,000 metric tons annually bringing the businessmen some $200 million in profits.

The investigators, performing searches in Moscow and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, suspect that fishing regulation officials could be part of the crab mafia chain.

 

 

Item 04: Korea: Gov’t and Journalists Locked in Debate Over Press Room Closures: Reporters refuse to vacate five ministries and take action in defiance of gov’t plan

(Hankyoreh, 11 October, 2007) The Government Information Agency announced that the existing press rooms of the ministries will close on October 11 and reporters covering the Office of the Prime Minister and the ministries of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Construction and Transportation, Information and Communication, and Maritime Affairs and Fisheries said on October 10 they will continue to work in the press rooms in defiance of the GIA’s plan.

Reporters covering five government agencies held a meeting on October 10 and agreed to continue to work in the press rooms without moving to a joint briefing center prepared by the government. In August, two other consolidated briefing rooms began operating in Seoul and Gwacheon. However, the new press briefing formula is not working well due to strong resistance from the reporters who have refused to attend the briefings.

The controversy over press room closures began earlier this year, when the government announced a new media policy. One of the main tenets of the policy involves consolidating the press rooms of about 20 government ministries into three central locations. The other, a policy barring reporters from meeting with government officials without prior approval, was shot down in the midst of the controversy. The government has continued to insist that the new policy will increase the efficiency of the media. Reporters claim that limits their ability to gather information, thereby restricting the freedom of the press.

In addition to deciding not to pack up their belongings as requested by the GIA, the reporters will take other actions against the press room closures. Reporters accredited by the Ministry of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries issued a statement opposing the transfer of the press room. They have decided to write related news stories, and will not attend briefings conducted at the new joint briefing center. Reporters covering the Foreign Ministry have also decided not to take part in briefings and reporters covering the Ministry of Construction and Transportation have formed a committee against the government’s suppression of the press. Those accredited to the Office of the Prime Minister will continue to report to the press room. If they are obstructed from entering the press room, they will gather to discuss countermeasures.

The GIA, however, reiterated its decision to close the press rooms on October 11 according to schedule, raising speculation on clashes between GIA officials and members of the press.

 

 

Item 05: "Alarm-Call" for China’s Rarest Bird

(BirdLife, 21 October, 2007) A study of Chinese Crested Tern highlights that the global population has fallen to less than fifty individuals, half what they were just three years ago.

The study believes that the main cause of this decline is an unregulated expansion in trade for seabird eggs, a local delicacy that has risen in demand alongside a thriving tourist economy.

Without urgent action conservationists have given the bird less than five years before disappearing completely from its two remaining breeding areas.

Chinese Crested Tern Sterna bernstein is China’s rarest bird, listed by BirdLife International as Critically Endangered – the most severe threat category.

First discovered in 1861 and rarely recorded since, Chinese Crested Tern was largely presumed extinct until 2000, when four adults and four chicks were found amongst a colony of other tern species on Matsu, an island off the coast of Fujian Province. In 2004, it was discovered breeding at another site: Jiushan Islands, on the coast of Zhejiang Province of eastern China. At present these are the only known breeding sites in the world.

"We all thought we had lost this species sixty years ago and were so happy to hear of its rediscovery in 2000," commented Simba Chan, Senior Conservation Manager at BirdLife’s Asia Division. "Its survival in Fujian and Zhejiang waters was probably due to the tension between Beijing and Taipei."

"It would be such an irony if the Chinese Crested Tern survived amid the hostility in the Taiwanese Strait, yet becomes extinct now the relationship between Beijing and Taipei gradually normalises," he added.

"Both sides of the Strait should work together to save this, the rarest bird in China - otherwise it will be sure to follow the Baiji [Yangtze River Dolpin] as another ecological tragedy of the early 21st century."

The recent survey, undertaken by a Chinese survey team, is the first time Chinese Crested Tern have been surveyed over successive breeding seasons.

"Compared with 2004, the population size has decreased by more than 50 percent," said Dr Chen Shuihua, who led the Chinese Crested Tern survey team. "Our investigation indicated that its survival is under very severe pressure and on the verge of extinction."

The study suggests that egg-collecting poses by far the most dramatic threat to Chinese Crested Tern, whereby seabird eggs are collected by local fishermen in the belief that wild eggs have more nutritious value than poultry eggs.

"With rapid economic development along the east coastal area in China, tourism and catering have also developed rapidly," explained Dr Chen. "As a result a large number of sidewalk snack booths have emerged in the coastal areas of Zhejiang and Fujian."

Seabird eggs have become a popular delicacy, yet there is little awareness that some of these eggs may come from threatened species.

The report indicates that the going rate for one seabird egg at Juexi (nearby the Jiushan Island breeding colony) was approximately 15 Chinese yuans ($2USD) in 2005. In two years this price has more than doubled: seabird eggs now sell for 35 Chinese yuans (about $4.5USD), encouraging more people into the egg-collecting trade.

In 2005 and 2006, the Chinese Crested Tern breeding colony disappeared altogether on Jiushan Island, most likely a sign of breeding failure caused by egg-collecting. Subsequent findings have reinforced this opinion: "We saw few newborn seabirds in our 2006 and 2007 breeding season surveys," added Dr Chen.

BirdLife International are among those putting together an action plan that will draw together measures needed to save Chinese Crested Tern. Among the actions needing urgent implementation are: enhancing protection of breeding habitats, stationing wardens, regular monitoring, and regulations for selling and collecting of seabird eggs in eastern China.

"China has a good record on taking action to save other bird species from extinction - this alarm-call to save Chinese Crested Tern has hopefully come just in time." said Simba.

 

 

Item 06: Japan Suspends Beef Imports from US Plant

(AFP, 17 October, 2007) TOKYO - Japan has suspended beef imports from a US meatpacking plant that violated a bilateral accord aimed at limiting the threat from mad cow disease, the government said Wednesday.

The farm ministry said part of a consignment of beef from a Cargill Inc. plant in Dodge City, Kansas, arrived at Kobe port on September 20 with blank safety certificates.

The shipment violates the accord because the products come from cattle of an unknown age.

Faced with threats of sanctions, Japan agreed last year to resume US beef imports on condition the cattle were not more than 20 months old at the time of slaughter, with brains, spinal cords and other risky parts removed.

Japan has so far rejected US calls to increase the age limit as it believes younger cattle are less likely to have accumulated infectious proteins that could cause bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as mad cow disease.

The meat delivered to Kobe did not include risky parts and was destined for elsewhere but was shipped to Japan by mistake, according to Japan Food Corp. of Tokyo, which imported it, the ministry said.

The ban will stay in place until the Tokyo government receives a "report on the result of a detailed investigation" on the matter, it added.

The same plant supplied beef without completed certificates to Japan last March, the ministry said.

Before it agreed to resume beef imports from the US, Japan, formerly the top overseas market for US beef, had halted imports twice since 2003 due to mad cow disease scares.

 

 

Item 07: Seoul Seeks Talks with Pyongyang on Proposed Joint Fishing Zone

(Yonhap, 15 October, 2007) South Korea seeks talks with North Korea in December on establishing a joint fishing zone near their disputed western sea border to follow up on their agreement at the second-ever inter-Korean summit earlier this month, Seoul officials said Monday.

The plan comes amid a renewed dispute over the Northern Limit Line (NLL), which was drawn unilaterally at the end of the three-year Korean War in 1953 by the U.S.-led U.N. command to prevent South Korean and U.N. naval forces from violating the line.

President Roh Moo-hyun last week claimed it is "misleading" to call the western NLL a border, sparking heated debates in the country.

Critics note the line has served as the de facto border and that Pyongyang has acknowledged it is a maritime border, though the North recently started to demand it be redrawn.

Conservatives have slammed Roh for his remarks, noting dozens of South Korean soldiers were killed in two bloody naval skirmishes in 1999 and 2002 while trying to block North Korean warships from breaching the NLL.

The decision for the follow-up talks was made at the first meeting of a government task force on implementing the agreements at the 2007 inter-Korean summit, a Unification Ministry official said Monday.

"The government plans to propose establishing a joint committee for establishment of the so-called 'special economic cooperation zone in the West Sea' at the upcoming talks between the prime ministers of the two Koreas" that could be held as early as next month, the official said, asking not to be identified.

After the prime ministerial meeting early next month, South Korea is seeking talks between the defense ministers of the two countries followed by a meeting of an already-established joint committee on economic cooperation before the end of next month.

"The government hopes to start getting some tangible results from as early as December," an official said.

 

 

Item 08: The Challenges of Chinese Organics

(Erica Barnett, WorldChanging, 15 October, 2007) The US market for organic foods is expanding into traditionally improbable markets like Middle America -- predictably raising concerns about the Wal-martization of organic food. The industry to fill that demand is booming as well -- but in a location that is somewhat unlikely, and yet in some senses altogether predictable: China. Chinese organic produce, milk, and even livestock are serving demand thousands of miles away. In 2003 alone, Chinese organics accounted for $142 million in exports to markets around the world; by 2004, that number had increased to $200 million. According to The New York Sun, imports of Chinese organics tripled globally between 2003 and 2005. In that year, the BBC reports, Chinese organic exports totaled about $350 million; the number of acres of organic farmland in China, meanwhile, totaled about 5.7 million, behind only Australia and Argentina.

(China does not export all its organics. Chinese urban dwellers, in particular, are increasingly interested in healthier, safer, more wholesome foods -- their interest fueled by food contamination scandals such as one in 2004, when transparent "glass" noodles were found to be bleached with a lead-based whitener. On the other hand, China's first organic supermarket recently closed because of lackluster sales -- consumers weren't prepared to pay the higher prices organic entailed.)

The trend of organics originating in China has been percolating for many years. As The Worldwatch Institute reports, China has had at least some organic farming since the 1990's, around the time the Agrilandia Italian Farm began producing handcrafted organic wines, cheeses and conserves on the Italian slow-food model in Baige Zhuang, a remote suburb of Beijing. Agrilandia subscribes to the Italian "multi-use" model of farming, in which farming, processing, food service, and agricultural tourism all take place at the farm.

China currently has 8.6 million acres of organic farmland, almost 90 percent of which was certified in 2004. That raises red flags among some proponents of organics, who say it would be virutlaly impossible to transition that much Chinese farmland -- which has traditionally been doused in chemicals -- in such a short period. Additionally, critics say, China's air, water, and are so polluted it's hard to imagine truly organic produce growing in Chinese soil. But as the US does not require actual testing of Chinese produce for pesticides and other contaminants, it's a big challenge to determine which Chinese farms really meet the standard specified by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) organic certification. Concern about the quality of this food is hardly unfounded; China's lax food-safety standards recently led to a massive recall of pet food contaminated with an inaccurately labeled industrial chemical earlier this year.

A 2003 study by the US Food and Drug Administration found that imported produce was three times as likely to violate limits for pesticide residue; however, it also found that foreign produce was more likely to be free of pesticides altogether, indicating that many foreign producers do not use pesticides at all.

The solution, obviously, isn't banning imports of organic products from China; the nation is too successful at growing and marketing organic produce, and the worldwide market for organics too large, to shut down the burgeoning Chinese organic industry. It's improving US organic standards, which set the standard for the world, to include mandated pesticide testing and other controls, so that producers will respond by improving their farming methods to meet those stricter standards.

The global market for organic produce and other products is only going to get larger in the coming years. In turn, that growing market should increase the incentive for Chinese farmers to convert their farmland from chemical-dependent farming techniques back to traditional, pesticide-free, sustainable farming methods.

 

 

Item 09: Why Your Electric Bill is So High: Don't be fooled. Appliances on 'sleep' mode still suck power

(Warren Swil, Christian Science Monitor, 16 October, 2007) Have you recently awoken in the dead of night to find a greenish blue haze swirling around your home, even though you turned off all the lights before going to bed?

Most likely it is the rapidly increasing plethora of tiny light-emitting diodes (LEDs) featured on modern electronic appliances, many of which indicate that a machine is in "standby" mode. In fact, it's probably been years since you really turned "off" your desktop computer or your television.

Most modern electronics come equipped with either standby or "sleep" functions to avoid time-consuming waits when machines start up. We've all spent dozens of hours cumulatively waiting after we push the start button as our computers read and load the programming code necessary to get ready. In the era of vacuum tubes, it took televisions several minutes before the picture became visible.

In standby, a machine is not really turned off. It goes into a state of reduced activity that requires only minimal power consumption. The downside is that even at vastly reduced power levels, millions of machines running all day, every day, adds up to huge amounts of wasted energy. With oil prices at record highs and the climate under threat from excessive consumption of fossil fuels, this is neither smart nor desirable.

It's not the tiny lights themselves that are at fault – they're a marvelous, energy-saving invention. Rather, it's what they indicate: a seemingly unstoppable proliferation of devices that siphon power even while not in use.

A new-model Braun razor features not one but three LEDs as part of its self-cleaning system. "Keep it plugged in," the instructions say.

It's the same for office equipment. Count the little lights on your desk at home. A new DSL modem has six green LEDs, five of which are always on when the machine is plugged in. A copier/fax/printer (which must always be on to receive faxes day or night) has two green ones. The computer monitor might have a blue one. There's a green LED on every computer speaker, a red one on the radio dial. And that's not counting the green clocks on the microwave and coffeemaker.

Not surprisingly, some people are becoming concerned by this trend.

In June 2005, British Environment Minister Elliot Morley reported that electrical equipment in sleep mode used enough energy per year to emit about 800,000 tons of carbon. That's just for the 60 million or so Britons; multiply by five for the United States. The US Department of Energy has estimated that by 2010, the portion of each utility customer's bill consumed by appliances in standby mode will reach 20 percent.

Do an inventory in your home and you will be shocked.

A 10 percent reduction in California's 254 annual megawatt hours would save roughly as much energy as is consumed by South Dakota, Vermont, Alaska, and Rhode Island combined, according to the Department of Energy.

In January 2006, California mandated maximum levels of standby power consumption for some – not all – household electronics. But the big step will come when consumers become convinced that it's worth trading convenience for conservation.

So next time you awake in the middle of the night, check around to see if you are bathed in an eerie, greenish-blue hue. And remember, those innocent-looking, sometimes blinking, little monsters are sucking the money out of your wallet as you sleep.

Sweet dreams.

 

 

Item 10: Oil leak Occurs in Khabarovsk Region: Unsanctioned tapping causes the incident

(PrimaMedia, October 17, 2007) Tuesday's 50-ton oil leak in Khabarovsk Region is unfortunately a sign of things to come for many other oil pipelines in Russia, including the Siberia-Pacific, Altai, and Sakhalin II pipelines. The practice of illegally tapping pipelines to siphon off oil for private use or sale is not uncommon in Russia, and is enabled by shoddy construction, lack of oversight, and inadequate spill prevention and response measures. All of these factors make oil spills such as this one a question of when, not if.

Translated by Lauren Allan-Vail

VLADIVOSTOK, On Tuesday in Khabarovsk Region the leakage of an alleged 50 tons of oil occurred as a result of an accident on an oil pipeline. PrimaMedia was informed about the event by the press-service of the Ministry of the Russian Federation for Civil Defense, Emergency Management and Natural Disasters Response (MCHS) of Khabarovsk Region.

"The cause of the accident was an unsanctioned tapping on the 481st kilometer of the main Okha-Komsomolsk-na-Amur oil pipeline," said the press-service. An inspector of the Tsmermanovskova workshop for the transportation of oil and gas uncovered the incident on Tuesday morning. The tap was removed by mid-day and the oil leakage was stopped.

According to one source, work to remedy the impact of the emergency using heavy equipment is already taking place on site. On Wednesday the regional prosecutor, representatives of the Directorate of Internal Affairs, forensic experts, and the head of the Department of Civil Defense and Emergency of Komsomolsky Region left for the region of the oil pipeline accident.

The forensic experts will determine whether the tap was the problem, or whether there was a safety technology or maintenance failure. A decision about the filing of a criminal complaint will depend on the elements of the crime.

 

 

Item 11: In USA, (a few) Coastal Planners Ready for Sea-Level Rise

(Peter B. Lord, Providence Journal, RI, 17 October, 2007) By the time today’s babies become elderly, scientists predict that climate change will cause local ocean waters to be at least 3 to 5 feet higher than they are now.

If that happens, South County’s popular barrier beaches will be rolled up against the northern shores of the salt ponds. The sidewalks in Providence’s Waterplace Park will be under water. And coastal salt marshes will be inundated.

This fall, the state agency that regulates coastal development in Rhode Island plans to become one of the first local regulatory agencies in the country to officially recognize the likelihood of sea-level rise and write policies and regulations to prepare for higher water.

The rising waters will require that new buildings in flood zones be constructed at higher elevations, says Grover Fugate, executive director of the Coastal Resources Management Council. He says there should also be changes in the state building code for coastal development and different rules for septic systems. Sewer outfalls and bridges may be affected.

"Climate change will have tremendous implications for us [in Rhode Island]," says Fugate. "Water temperature changes already are affecting the ecosystem. Last year, the shoreline erosion rate doubled to four feet in certain places."

A CRMC subcommittee recently authorized Fugate to seek public comment on a new draft policy that recognizes the problems posed by sea-level rise and creates the framework for CRMC to prepare regulatory responses.

CRMC chairman Michael Tikoian said the local agency is striving to "create the country’s first regulations to address sea-level rise."

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that provides funds and guidance to CRMC, confirms that Rhode Island is out front on the sea-level rise issue. Oregon, Alaska and California are addressing global warming issues, according to NOAA spokesman Ben Sherman. "But Rhode Island is probably the first to have a sea-level policy not rolled in with other flooding issues."

Fugate said sea-level rise became an issue during the last year as CRMC began revising its management plan for what it calls the Metrobay region that includes Providence, East Providence and Pawtucket, where intense waterfront development is expected to take place in the next few years.

CRMC, working with the Sea Grant program and the Coastal Resources Center at the University of Rhode Island’s Bay Campus, began taking a longer look, he said. It also recruited a panel of scientists for advice.

Last week, one of those scientists, John King, an oceanographer at URI’s Graduate School of Oceanography, gave a primer on sea-level rise to the full council. Some of his conclusions were surprising.

"We’re going to have a significant warming, no matter what we do," King said. "Models for the Northeast range from an increase of 6 degrees Fahrenheit to 12 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100."

Water temperatures in the region are also expected to go up by 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit, King said. The rising temperatures are caused by increases of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which traps the sun’s energy. Much of the carbon dioxide comes from combustion for transportation and energy generation.

King said there are several reasons why climate change will cause sea levels to rise in this region: Seawater expands as it warms. Melting glaciers and ice caps, already well under way, add more water to the oceans. And as it gets warmer, ice sheets flow faster into the oceans.

Sea levels are already rising, he said. And they are rising faster than the most pessimistic computer models predicted.

King said the report last February from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an assemblage of thousands of scientists and government officials from around the world, gave a worst-case scenario of about a half-meter of sea level rise by 2100.

"Unfortunately, those numbers don’t stand up to scientific scrutiny," King said. "No scientist I know accepts those numbers. The IPCC was a political/scientific exercise. These are rosy estimates."

King said some recent predictions by independent scientists put the possible range of sea level rise at 3 to 5 feet. And that could be just the beginning. The last time the world had as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as it does now was 130,000 years ago, and the seas were 20 feet higher, King said.

King cited data from Jonathan T. Overpeck and Jeremy Weiss at the University of Arizona. They plotted the consequences of sea-level rise on all of the country’s coastlines. (The researchers’ findings can be found at www. geo.arizona.edu/dgesl/index.html).

Regulators should be planning for the 20-foot sea-level rise, rather than 3 to 5 feet, King said. A 20-foot sea-level rise would leave the South County coastline looking like the south shores of Block Island, with waves crashing at the foot of high bluffs. The bluffs would be along Route One.

A sea-level rise of 3 feet would force the barrier beaches to retreat back to the north shores of the ponds.

One problem with plotting the effects of sea-level rise is that scientists now work with data generated by the U.S. Geological Survey, which has a margin of error of 5 feet, plus or minus. King and Fugate say Rhode Island needs funding to use Light Detection and Ranging technology that fires lasers from aircraft to record topographical data with a precision of up to 6 inches.

CRMC has been meeting with the state’s congressional delegation to try to raise the roughly $1 million it would take to do the mapping.

W. Michael Sullivan, director of the state Department of Environmental Management and a council member, observed last week that King seemed to have a pessimistic view of the future.

"We have 20 to 30 years to ratchet down greenhouse gases. That would lead to the low-end scenario," King said. "The worst-case scenario is getting into a race with China to see who can burn the most coal. The Chinese have a lot of coal and they seem eager to burn it. We don’t seem too determined to do much about greenhouse gas emissions in this country either."

During the next few months, CRMC will issue a public notice of the new policy, host a public hearing, and place the rules before the full council for consideration.

To see Professor King’s presentation, go to www .crmc.ri.gov/, click on CRMC Coastal Education Series and Policy Agenda, and then Coastal Education Series Presentations. The proposed, new CRMC policy is also available on the Web site. Rhode Island Sea Grant is hosting a two-day symposium on urban waterfront development Friday and Saturday at URI’s Bay Campus, that will focus in part on sea-level rise. For more information, go to seagrant.gso.uri.edu/ccd/07symposium/index.html.

 

 

Item 12: Holy Cow! We're Crazy to Farm Livestock Like This: The green case for changing our eating habits

(Joanna Lumley, The Times (London) , 16 October, 2007) I prefer not to eat food that has a face. But many of my nearest and dearest love their meat, and who am I to ask them not to eat so much of it? Until now, that is.

Having just discovered the huge impact of livestock production on global warming, I need hesitate no longer. Reducing our meat consumption is no longer an option but an urgent necessity. Here's why.

Eighteen per cent of the greenhouse gas emissions that we produce come from the production of livestock - that's 4 per cent more than from transport. That's not all, as the amount of meat and dairy produce consumed globally is set roughly to double by 2050: so if there's a problem now, how big will it be by then?

You might wonder why official concern over climate change has focused so strongly on carbon offsetting, greening your home and cutting your transport and has all but neglected the huge role played by our consumption of meat and dairy products. Could it be fear of being seen as the nanny state? Has our dietary choice become a sacred cow?

Sadly it's cows themselves who are a big part of the problem, churning out massive amounts of methane in their burps and farts, and yet more from the decomposition of their liquid slurry. Carbon dioxide emissions are greatest from the massive deforestation carried out, mainly in Brazil, to raise beef cattle or to grow swaths of soya beans for turning into animal feed, a valuable export. Further noxious emissions, such as nitrous oxide, are released from manure and from the use of nitrogen fertiliser to grow feed crops for animals.

Livestock farming has many other adverse effects on the global environment, being the largest source of water pollution and degradation of coastal areas and coral reefs. In some parts of the world overgrazing is harming biodiversity and pasture lands; elsewhere it is turning more and more pastures to desert. In addition the livestock sector is responsible for more than 8 per cent of human water use. This doesn't sound huge, but is important at a time when water shortage is becoming a critical issue in many parts of the world.

Globally between a third and a half of the world's cereal harvest and most of the soya is fed to intensively farmed animals. Yet much of the nutritional value of the feed is lost in its "conversion" to meat. The predicted doubling in the numbers of animals will increase the likelihood of global pandemics, often associated with the intensification of livestock farming. And if we don't act to stop climate change, we know that it is the poor who will become the environmental refugees.

We can't ignore either the compelling argument of animal welfare. The thought of twice as many pigs confined in crowded concrete pens, billions more meat chickens limping painfully through their short lives in their ammonia-ridden sheds and more dairy cows bred to produce yet more milk and struggling to cope with the physiological strains this level of production places on them: to me, this is a nightmare.

Studies in Europe, America and Japan have shown that the more meat in your diet, the greater the global warming potential and the lower its energy efficiency in your body. If you eat a portion of pasta with frozen broccoli and peas it will be roughly three times more energy-efficient than pasta with beef and twice as energy-efficient as pasta with pork. To put it another way, producing your average Sunday joint of roast beef results in greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to driving from London to Manchester.

We may not all want to be vegans - though the time to mock their plant-based diet is long gone - but we can all take steps to alter our own eating habits. We can all take the "Big Food Challenge".

Based on the best scientific evidence to date, in a report out today Compassion in World Farming calculates that to reduce our impact on climate change we need to reduce consumption of meat and dairy products in line with government carbon reduction targets, that is, by one third by 2020 and by 60 per cent by 2050. That could mean having a couple of meat-free days a week, reducing the amount of meat (for example, eating one lamb chop, not two) or, more likely, increasing the number of meat-free meals and maybe substituting dairy milk and cream with equivalents made from soya beans or oats at some meals.

As for the impact of this type of dietary change on your own health - why, only last month The Lancet published an article from public health experts in three countries, which said that cutting meat consumption in developed countries from the current 200-250g per person per day to 90g per day would help to reduce obesity and have several other health benefits, including a likely reduction in colorectal cancer.

Compassion in World Farming wants us to take the Big Food Challenge (more at http://www.ciwf.org/globalwarning/ ) and reduce our meat and dairy consumption. When we buy animal products it recommends paying a little more for the organic or free-range equivalent. We can all be adventurous too, and try foods such as tofu and tempeh and find out the best ways to cook them. If you eat a varied diet, you know you will not be missing out on vital nutrients.

So, to benefit the planet, the animals and your own health, why not join me and take the Big Food Challenge?

 

 

Item 13: N. Korea May Face Famine Acute as Mid-1990s Next Year, S. Korean researcher warns

(Yonhap, 18 October, 2007) North Korea is expected to suffer from an acute food shortage next year and could face widespread famine as severe as that it suffered in the mid-1990s in the wake of devastating floods this year, a South Korean state-run research institute warned Thursday. The floods are likely to cut North Korea's autumn agricultural output by as much as 500,000 tons, nearly a tenth of the country's "minimum demand" for grains, said Kwon Tae-jin, a senior researcher at the Korea Rural Economic Institute.

Overall food shortages in North Korea, which is still recovering from the famine in the mid-1990s, are believed to reach about 1.4 million tons, compared with the country's grain consumption of 5.2 million tons, the researcher said.

"If no special measures are taken, North Korea's food shortage will likely be at a similar level to that of the mid-1990s," Kwon said in a report published by Hyundai Economic Research Institute, a private economic think-tank.

Various estimates have shown that nearly two million people died from food shortages and related illness since 1994 in North Korea, which has suffered from a series of natural disasters along with economic mismanagement.

Last year, North Korea asked international aid groups to end food aid it received since the mid-1990s. However, this year's floods prompted North Korea to seek international food aid again, underscoring the seriousness of the flood-related damages.

In mid-July, the foods left at least 549 people dead and 295 missing, North Korea's state media reported. This year's floods are likely to cost North Korea a total of US$275 million in lost agricultural production and repair spending, Kwon said. Since the floods, the South Korean government and the World Food Program have supplied some 350,000 tons of food to North Korea, the researcher said.

South Korean officials said the United States and Japan were also considering offering food aid to North Korea, in a sign of easing tension as Pyongyang is taking steps to dismantle its nuclear weapons program.

North Korea shut down its Yongbyon reactor in July, under a February accord in international talks aimed at diplomatically persuading Pyongyang to give up its nuclear ambition. Early this month, North Korea reiterated its commitment to disable the reactor and other nuclear facilities by the end of this year.

With the nuclear issue showing clear signs of progress, South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun and North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, in their Oct. 2-4 summit meetings, agreed to work together to pursue a peace treaty on the Korean peninsula.

The two Koreas are still technically at war because their 1950-53 Korean War ended with a cease-fire.

 

 

Item 14: East China Welcomes Red-crowned Cranes

(Xinhua News Agency October 21, 2007) Conservation workers at a nature reserve area in east China's Jiangsu Province are making preparations for the arrival of red-crowned cranes. The birds migrate here annually to spend the winter.

Staff at the Jiangsu Yancheng national reserve for rare birds have spread 10,000 kilograms of corn pellets, and distributed buckets of fish and small shrimps to help the cranes regain strength after their long flight.

Before migrating to the reserve from the end of October to early November, the birds nestled at the Zhalong State Nature Reserve for Red-Crowned Cranes, China's largest artificial breeding center specifically for cranes. The center is located in Qiqihar, in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province.

About 300 to 1,000 red-crowned cranes fly to the Yancheng Reserve annually to pass the winter.

The use of fertilizers, pesticides and other chemicals has also been banned in about 6,000 hectares of farmland surrounding the reserve.

The reserve, extending over 453,300 hectares along the coastline, provides shelter to red-crowned cranes and millions of other wild birds. It is the second largest shelter for the red-crowned cranes in China. The red-crowned crane, or Grus japonensis, is listed as a first-grade protected species in China. They are usually found in the northeast, east and far north regions of China.

 

 

Item 15: Turkey: Satellite Tag Finds Bird Flock: Largest flock for 100 years: Sociable Lapwing lives up to its name

(BirdLife, 19 October, 2007) Thanks to a single satellite tag, a 3,000-strong flock of Sociable Lapwing has been discovered in Turkey – the largest seen for more than 100 years.

"By tracking a single bird from its Kazakh breeding grounds, we have found the location of most of the world population of these birds in Turkey," announced Guven Eken, Executive Director of Doga Dernegi (BirdLife in Turkey).

The finding represents another significant rise in fortune for the Critically Endangered bird: almost five years ago, as few as 400 Sociable Lapwing Vanellus gregarius were thought to exist globally.

The birds were found in the Ceylanpinar district of south-eastern Turkey after a satellite tag was fitted to one of the birds migrating from breeding grounds in Kazakhstan earlier this year.

The tagged bird covered 2,000 miles, flying north of the Caspian Sea, then down through the Caucasus and south into Turkey, where it effectively stopped. On investigation last Friday, conservationists from Doga Dernegi found that the tagged bird was part of a flock of 1,800 other lapwing.

The following day a staggering 3,200 Sociable Lapwing were observed at the site.

Conservationists from a number of nations (nearly all BirdLife Partners) have been working to conserve Sociable Lapwing in recent years, by coordinating their actions on the ground; focusing their efforts to conserve wintering sites, stopover sites and breeding sites along the species’ flyways.

This coordinated action has included research and protection of breeding sites in Kazakhstan (by ACBK); actions to protect wintering and stopover sites in Turkey and Syria (being undertaken by Doga Dernegi, SPNL and BirdLife’s Middle East Division); all assisted by research coordinated by the RSPB (BirdLife in the UK).

"Understanding the migration from breeding sites in Kazakhstan is essential for the future protection of this species, so the news of such a large flock is a great cause for celebration," commented Maxim Koshkin of Association for the Conservation of Biodiversity in Kazakhstan (ACBK).

"This discovery is something we didn’t dare dream of," said the RSPB’s Dr Rob Sheldon, responsible for tagging the bird in Kazakhstan. "The Sociable Lapwing is one of the rarest birds on earth and suddenly it’s been found in these large numbers."

"It shows just how important both Kazakhstan and Turkey have become for the survival of this species. The next step is to protect the bird, both on its breeding grounds and at all the key sites on its migration route."

Where the birds go next is unclear: "They could still move on to Iraq or East Africa but if they stay in Turkey, it will be much easier to make them safe. We can keep an eye on them here, raise awareness amongst local people and work with the Turkish government to protect the areas they are using," said Özge Balkiz, a scientist from Doga Dernegi.

The tagging project is partly paid for by the UK government’s Darwin Initiative and conservationists from Britain and Kazakhstan hope to win new funds to tag more birds next summer.

 

 

Item 16: S. Korea's State Mining Firm Eyeing Copper Mine in Bolivia

(Yonhap, 23 October, 2007) South Korea's state mining company said Tuesday it plans to develop a copper mine in Bolivia together with the Bolivian government.

Korea Resources Corp. (KORES) said that it recently inked a memorandum of understanding with the Bolivian government to develop a copper mine in Corocoro in the midwestern part of the South American nation.

The project is a 50-50 venture between KORES and the Bolivian government

KORES, which estimates there are 800,000 tons of reserves in the mine's area, plans to commence development in 2010 after two years of exploration.

 

 

Item 17: China: Carbon Output Rising Faster than Forecast, Says Study: Global warming 'will come sooner and be stronger' • Chinese growth and loss of natural 'sinks' highlighted

(David Adam, The Guardian, 23 October, 2007) Scientists warned last night that global warming will be "stronger than expected and sooner than expected", after a new analysis showed carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere much faster than predicted.

Experts said that the rise was down to soaring economic development in China, and a reduction in the amount of carbon pollution soaked up by the world's land and oceans. It also means human emissions will have to be cut more sharply than predicted to avoid the likely effects.

Corinne Le Quere, a climate expert at the University of East Anglia and British Antarctic Survey, who helped conduct the study, said: "It's bad news because the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide has accelerated since 2000 in a way we did not expect. My biggest worry is people are discouraged by this and do nothing. I hope political leaders will act on this, because we need to do something fast."

The study worsens even the gloomy predictions of this year's report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC, which shared the Nobel peace prize this month with Al Gore, said there were only eight years left to prevent the worst effects of global warming, by acting to curb emissions.

Dr Le Quere said: "We are emitting far more than anticipated when the IPCC scenarios were drawn up in the late 1990s." Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel burning has risen by an average 2.9% each year since 2000. During the 1990s the annual rise was 0.7%.

The new study explains abnormally high carbon dioxide measurements highlighted by the Guardian in January. At the time, scientists were puzzled why dozens of measuring stations across the world were showing a CO2 spike for 2006, the fourth year in the last five to show a sharp increase in the greenhouse gas.

Carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is measured in parts per million (ppm); from 1970 to 2000, the concentration rose by about 1.5ppm each year; since 2000 the annual rise has leapt to an average 1.9ppm.

The new study, published in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), says three processes have contributed to this increase: growth in the world economy, heavy use of coal in China, and a weakening of natural "sinks" - forests, seas and soils that absorb carbon.

Pep Canadell, executive director of the Global Carbon Project, which carried out the research, said: "In addition to the growth of global population and wealth, we now know that significant contributions to the growth of atmospheric CO2 arise from the slowdown of natural sinks and the halt to improvements in the carbon intensity of wealth production."

The overall growth of the economy is the only one of the three factors accounted for in scientists' forecasts of climate change, which means the growth in atmospheric CO2 is about 35% larger than they expected. About half of this is down to the Chinese reliance on coal, which has forced up the carbon intensity of the overall world economy since 2000, reversing a trend of increasing energy efficiency since the 1970s. The rest of the rise is explained by the weakening of the natural carbon sinks.

Scientists assume about half of human carbon emissions are reabsorbed into the environment, but computer models predictincreased temperatures will reduce this effect. The PNAS report is the most convincing evidence so far that the global sinks have weakened over the last 50 years, though the large natural variations in carbon exchange between the earth and the atmosphere mean the team can be only 89% certain they have found an effect, short of the usual 95% confidence required to publish scientific findings.

 

 

Item 18: Chaebol: The Republic of Samsung

(Kim Byung-su, Editorial page editor, Hankyoreh, 02 Nov.2,2007) Samsung has two faces. It is the place young people seeking their first jobs most want to be. The Samsung brand is a name recognized worldwide and makes you proud. Take a step back, however, and there is another Samsung. It is a power group and a massive castle. With a powerful amount of money and intelligence and personal connections it exerts its influence everywhere - at the National Assembly, in government agencies, in the country’s judicial system and with the economy. The term "Republic of Samsung" is at this point a household term.

Government policies have been abandoned because of Samsung on more than a few occasions. For example, it is because of Samsung that the wrangling over the "financial industry law" (geum san beop), which would limit voting rights on stakes in financial subsidiaries, has gone on for years without going anywhere. It is only Samsung that would actually be affected by a change in the law, since it maintains control over its subsidiaries through its financial services companies. The reason the issue of listing life insurance companies on the stock market has remained unresolved for close to two decades has been because of Samsung Life. The official at the Financial Supervisory Service responsible for oversight in such matters got so frustrated that he resigned. Lee Dong-geol, head of the Korea Institute of Finance, was at one point the Financial Supervisory Commissions’ deputy. "The excessive influence of a certain massive chaebol group (conglomerate) is upsetting the principles and law and order of the financial industry," he once said in 2005. "The concern is that this is an obstacle to making Korea a country with an advanced financial system." The chaebol he was referring to was Samsung.

The so-called "Samsung Report," actually titled, "Samsung: Unchecked Power," that was issued by the civic group People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (or Chamyeo Yeondae in Korean), gives you an example of how Samsung maintains its old boys’ network. As of 2005 there were around 100 government bureaucrats who were turned into "Samsung Men" by being company executives or on its various corporate boards. Some 87 members of the academic community, 59 individuals in the judicial system and 27 members of the media, whether currently or formerly in those fields, have one foot in the door at Samsung. Once they leave their positions for spots within Samsung, they maintain their old boys’ network connections from their former jobs. "Samsung does more than try to influence our society’s decision-making processes," PSPD wrote in its report. "It is trying to dominate." That diagnosis may be excessive, but the report appears correct inasmuch as Samsung is using the network it maintains to regularly influence policy and defend itself against repercussions for its illegal and less-than-legal activities.

The power of Samsung is regarded as the power of the tycoon family, but at this point there seems to be even more to it. The key movers at Samsung and its inner management looks like a power group unto its own. Some of the secret doings within that castle have become known to the outside world. Samsung Group’s former top lawyer Kim Yong-cheol has come out and said that Samsung money was kept in bank accounts that had his name on them. That is a major revelation, as it could lead to the discovery of the truth behind how Samsung maintains its slush funds. Kim also says the group regularly passes out "rice cake money" to keep high-ranking members of the prosecution on the take.

Is Samsung about to be stripped naked? No. It has received a minor abrasion that will soon be stitched up. The prosecution and the National Assembly are going to go through the motions, but it would be hard to expect the revelations to become a boomerang that comes back at Samsung for some real digging at the facts.

What about the media? Kim disclosed what he knows through a press conference held by the Catholic Priests’ Association for Justice. Let’s look at how the event was covered in the press. The Kyunghyang Daily News gave the story what it deserved, with four columns on page 2 alone. Others spent about as much space as the palm of your hand. The Chosun Ilbo put the story on page 12, giving it three columns. The Donga Ilbo gave it two columns on page 12, while the Hanguk Ilbo gave it three columns on page 7. These other papers put the story where it could barely be seen or suggested that someone was suggesting something. Sure, each newspaper gets to decide how much value to place on each story, but this was hard to understand. Samsung is said to be pleased with itself for pretty much blocking the story everywhere but at The Hankyoreh. It succeeded at making The Hankyoreh the odd one out for starting with the story on the front page and with additional coverage on additional pages. What will this end up doing for Samsung? Power that is not kept in check goes bad. Both Samsung and the rest of us need to give some serious thought to what would best help both the country and Samsung in the future.

 

 

Item 19: Korea: Ex-Ambassador Fights Yellow Dust

(Kang Shin-who, The Korea Times, 31 October, 2007) A former Korean ambassador to China has been fighting the yellow dust phenomenon for 10 years. Kwon Byong-hyon, 69, chairman of Korea-China Culture & Youth Association (Future Forest), said desertification is certainly man-made and everybody should take responsibility for it in an interview with The Korea Times, Monday.

As part of his efforts, Kwon has been sending Korean college students to China on tree-planting projects and environmental seminars since 2002 along with the establishment of Future Forest, an environmental organization. The organization has annually invited Chinese students highly recognized by the Communist Youth League of China, a renowned group of top students in the country, to Korea.

"Korean and Chinese youngsters should take the lead in protecting our environment against rapid desertification. I believe future leaders should be concerned about problems in the environment. This is why I launched exchange programs for elite students from both countries,’’ Kwon said.

When Kwon arrived Beijing as the new ambassador to China in 1998, he immediately experienced a terrible yellow dust day and realized the threat desertification posed in China and the Korean Peninsula as well. In the wake of the environmental problems, he proposed the Chinese government cooperate with Korea on combating the yellow dust phenomenon and the two countries agreed on a tree-planting project.

At the same time, the former ambassador suggested the Communist Youth League of China exchange 500 students every year to boost the relationship between the two countries. However, large-scale student exchange programs were impossible due to a shortage of funds from the government.

"Back in Korea, I found the government was only able to send 40 students and decided to set up the civil organization run by private funds. This is how Future Forest was established,’’ Kwon said.

Now Future Forest organizes the exchange of 100 students and holds environmental seminars and events for a week. This year the organization sent Korean students on a green environment project in spring and invited Chinese students last week to the first Korea-China elite forum from Oct. 26 - Nov. 1.

As a result of Kwon’s ambitious efforts on the yellow dust problem, a "Green Great Wall’’ consisting of trees in the northern part of China has been established. Kwon plans to develop the zone into a "Green Ecological Park’’ for which he hopes to reach an agreement with the Chinese government soon.

Kwon joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1962 and was acting head of the Korean negotiation delegation for normalization of relations with China in 1992. He served as ambassador to China between 1998 and 2000 and headed the Overseas Koreans Foundation until 2003.

 

 

Item 20: Korea: Internet is Silent as Police Crack Down on Political Writing: Alleged election law violations spur authorties to issue summonses to netizens

(Hankyoreh, 31 October, 2007) Ahead of the presidential election, the Internet in South Korea is silent, despite its usually robust flurry of activity. Summonses have been issued by the police against netizens who have posted articles and videos in relation to the election on the Internet. The excessive police crackdown on the views expressed through the Internet is being criticized by netizens and the academic community as a threat to freedom of expression on the net.

A citizen of Ulsan, 51, who asked to remain anonymous, received a summons from the Yeongdeungpo Police Station in Seoul on October 16. According to the police, the user-created content posted on his personal Internet site violates election law. The citizen said, "I just posted one video clip that had been floating on the Internet. I have been operating a blog for six years but this is the first time that I have received a summons."

User-created content under the title, "Is President Lee Myung-bak okay?" was produced by a student of a Seoul-based university identified only by his surname Kim. He posted news stories, photos and criticism in connection with remarks made by Lee, such as, "When you get massage, it’s better to choose an ugly woman" and "To prevent a disabled baby from being born, abortion can be accepted."

Kim said, "As the conservative media hasn’t dealt with these matters at all, I want to let more netizens know about them." Kim has also received a summons.

An ordinary office worker received four summonses at once after posting comments on a political Web site earlier last month. Articles he wrote, with titles such as, "Chosun (Ilbo) and Dong-A (Ilbo) are accelerating Lee Myung-bak’s downfall" and "Reasons why I can’t support the Grand National Party," contain election forecasts, analyses of opinion polls and his personal views.

"The police said that all of my writing could cause problems. We cannot express both criticism and support regarding the presidential election," he stressed.

While the objections of netizens were loud and clear, opposition to government suppression of election-related user-created content also came from the academic community.

Professor Kang Won-taek, a professor of political science at Soongsil University said, "More voters are participating in election campaigns or political discussions via the Internet because it is free. It is time to reverse the ban preventing these kinds of activities."

Min Gyeong-bae, a professor at Kyung Hee Cyber University, urged the authorities not to silence these discussions and to allow netizens to participate in what could become a lively political debate.

Park Rae-gun from the Sarangbang Group for Human Rights said, "There is no freedom of expression for politics on the Internet. The election laws have turned the Internet into a sea of silence."

Meanwhile, netizens worry that the excessive crackdown by the police will reverse the democratic nature of the Internet. They maintain that the authorities have damaged the freedom of speech and expression guaranteed by the South Korean Constitution in the name of the election law.

Some netizens have begun to stage demonstrations against these measures. A political portal named Surprise and netizens posting articles on this site have rejected requests by the National Election Commission to delete their articles. Instead, tens of thousands of articles protesting against the commission’s measures have been posted on its Internet bulletin board.

These measures have been taken following an election law banning people from posting or screening content that could influence the election, which either supports or opposes a particular candidate, and is effective 180 days ahead of the election.

According to the election commission, though its efforts have been in vain, it has called on the National Assembly to rewrite the existing election law due to the objections of the GNP, which has a negative perspective on campaign-related Internet activity. Part of the GNP’s sense of adversity may be due to unpleasant memories of the previous presidential election, in which its candidate Lee Hoi-chang lost the race.

 

 

Item 21: Korea: More Companies Participate in Carbon Market

(Asia Carbon Group, via The Korea Herald, 02 November, 2007) Climate change has become a top priority for most countries around the world. No country is immune to the often devastating consequences of natural disasters caused by climate change. As it poses increasingly serious challenges to the planet on which we live, The Korea Herald will offer a series of articles to highlight global efforts to cope with it. Following is the sixth installment. - Ed.

The groundwork for establishing a private sector enterprise that would assist in the creation of a socially responsible world through the mitigation of climate change came about as early as 2001, in Singapore. A group of individuals working towards the realization of this common interest then envisioned the catalyst role Asia would play in the then-nascent Kyoto Protocol carbon space. Asia Carbon was thus born with a clear vision to promote sustainable development by employing climate change mitigation measures in Asia and globally.

The company was officially established in 2003. As Singapore was yet to ratify the Kyoto Protocol during this period, the Asia Carbon Group strategically located its headquarters in the Netherlands to have the means to access the Annex 1 carbon markets. At the same time, it established a regional office in Singapore from where it reached out to non-Annex 1 (developing) countries, and expanded the Group's presence to several other countries over the next two years (Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, the Middle East, Australia, India, and China).

Ratification of Kyoto Protocol by the Singapore government in 2006 echoed the foresight of Asia Carbon's original vision.

The Asia Carbon Group of Companies is fully committed to mitigate global climate change and initiate sustainable development through the application of the Kyoto Protocol financial mechanisms, particularly the Clean Development Mechanism, Joint Implementation and Emissions Trading. It offers a one-stop shop for carbon solutions to the public and private sectors to optimize returns from clean energy projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions through a vertically-integrated menu of services from Carbon Advisory, Carbon Finance, Carbon Trading including Carbon Registry and Projects Monitoring Services, all of which are designed to assist clients in aligning their carbon strategies to take advantage of any opportunities in CDM. Worldwide, ACG is staffed with about 40 people, located in various countries Singapore, Malaysia, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Myanmar, Pakistan, the Netherlands and is positioned to supply a vast networking edge capable of producing timely and results-oriented work.

Asia Carbon's global headquarters is ideally located in Singapore, where it takes advantage of the country's strong political stability, transparent government policies and support to the private sector, trading and finance expertise, and excellent infrastructure and facilities. Singapore's strategic location in Asia in terms of access to various Asian countries means Asia Carbon Singapore can easily serve the fast-growing carbon markets of Asia, Europe, and the rest of the world.

The Asia Carbon philosophy

Asia Carbon Group has adopted a unique approach of building local expertise in carbon advisory in developing countries. This has resulted not only in low transaction costs in developing the carbon advisory documentation but also in retaining capacity and skills, locally. Upon building such expertise, developing countries need to help ensure climate change-related activities are met effectively. Translation of awareness in the field of climate change into environmental business not only makes economic sense, but also provides many opportunities in promoting sustainable development in terms of assisting in the implementation of climate-friendly clean technology projects.

Our teams in the Asia Carbon Group work constantly in the pursuit of these goals, applying their best efforts to achieve these objectives. They draw from the expertise and experience of its members, who are professionals and experts in the fields covering renewable energy, power, forestry, industrial energy efficiency, economics, finance, information technology, banking and trading. With these resources, ACG has successfully developed several CDM projects in Vietnam, India, Indonesia, Dubai, etc. using local expertise.

The Asia Carbon Exchange

Asia Carbon engaged primarily in carbon exchange-related activities and establishing carbon services in various countries in Asia and worldwide. Currently, the Group has a portfolio of over 100 CDM projects with a value of around 24 Mn CERs (certified emission reduction units). ACX-Change, the world's first CDM-focused carbon exchange platform, is operated from Singapore. To date, the ACX-Change has successfully facilitated a total of 3.4 million CERs, between European and Japanese buyers and CDM sellers from China, India, Vietnam, Brazil, and Sri Lanka, bringing liquidity to market in the amount of 28 million euros ($40 million).

ACX-Change continues to explore and develop new carbon financial products, and is working closely with regional exchanges towards true commoditization of CERs. It has recently expanded its trading platform to include the markets of Japan and Korea - both of which have huge CDM requirements - and added voluntary emission reduction credits to its inventory of traded products. ACX-Japan, an undertaking with Sojitz Corporation, was established to address the Japanese buyers. ACX-Korea, together with local South Korean partner Ecoeye, plans to offer carbon trading opportunities and registry development services to local companies.

The challenges of growth

Asian countries differ widely in terms of transaction of CERs. China largely practices bilateral trading whereas India follows the unilateral CDM approach and banks CERs. The private sectors in Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam seek project investments and upfront CDM finance from Annex I countries for developing CDM projects, thus following a risk free model.

The creation and sustenance of liquidity in the CER markets in Asia can be greatly enhanced by employing innovative financial structuring models: carbon funds targeting programmatic CDM, pooling of carbon credits from small scale CDM projects, techno-financial and info-exchange services (e.g REEEP Exchange, Singapore, CDM Bazaar etc.,). Besides these, exchange-based financially tradable instruments will also accelerate project development in the region.

There is a natural tendency that Asia-based exchanges and financial institutions can engage in offering carbon financial instruments subject to keen participation by Japan and Australia. Major challenges currently faced by Asian exchanges and financial institutions are the price transparency, delivery risks and non-standard specifications and contracts. However CERs futures and options contracts will enable better risk management from price fluctuations for CERs. This will benefit developers, buyers, traders and investors as they see the opportunities to hedge price risks even amidst the absence of a delivery mechanism. For exchange-based traded futures, however, Asian exchanges will be required to expand to clearinghouse and settlement functions. Establishment of a continuous trading system will result in a daily mark-to-market system that will reduce credit risk, and, with the transparency and liquidity that will result, help to create a strong price signal. All these are expected to ultimately contribute to lower transactions costs, more new tradable products and financing options, and the true commoditization of CERs influencing speculative trading among the traders community.

Asia Carbon and the future

The carbon market is here to stay and the roles of the public and private sectors is key. Asia Carbon will continue to involve itself in participating and facilitating climate change mitigation policies. It will not only address projects-based emission reductions but will ensure deployment of sustainable development goals in the projects it is involved in. Asia Carbon will offer its experience to the United States and Australian carbon markets which will be a tough challenge. Nevertheless, ACG strongly believes in partnership in countries where it expands and thus leverages on the services offered to the carbon market participants.

At the same time, with global voluntary carbon market growing exponentially, Asia Carbon looks at offering new areas for structuring and online trading based transactions. As VER volumes grow exponentially, concerns on its credibility, transparent transactions and consistency in verification of real time emissions reductions are emerging as well. VERs registry services similar to the UNFCCC CDM Registry are being launched in Asia and Europe to provide authenticity. Such registries, besides standardizing the nature of the VERs, will also need to be independent, skilful, and consistent in handling the VERs' related transactions and enable to provide conflict-free efficient services. In an initiative to address these market challenges and further value-add to and complete its current complement of services, Asia Carbon recently launched its own Registry Service a few months ago.

With all these opportunities, ACG looks forward to the future with a menu of innovative services designed to facilitate transparency and price determination:

- It will operationalize its Asia Carbon Registry for transparent VERs (voluntary emission reductions) services and online Projects Monitoring Services for the benefit of the global carbon market.

- ACX-Change will be launching carbon financial products for trading in the exchange in partnership with regional financial institutions and exchanges.

- ACG will establish its presence in Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia, Australia, United States, Latin America and a few European Countries including United Kingdom for further enhancing the carbon projects portfolio that will enable carbon trading.

- ACG will initiate pooling of small-scale CDM projects in Singapore, including ESCOs, for energy efficiency projects and develop successful CDM projects portfolio.

The growth in the number of companies covering the entire spectrum of the carbon market life cycle will always spur ACG to differentiate itself in terms of the products it offers. The space itself is not without detractors - those who are dismayed by the sheer number of carbon companies who are out to cash in on the lucrative CERs market without actually effecting the requisite actual reduction in carbon emissions. This being the case, ACG will also take the effort to ensure that it delivers on its promises. Hence, it is ACG's objective to stand out in its provision of a complete array of carbon services to its clients.

 

 

Item 22: Buying Complacency: The trade in "carbon offsets" is based on bogus accounting

(George Monbiot, The Guardian, 17th January 2006) Sometimes I envy the self-belief of the Daily Mail’s columnist Melanie Phillips. When Andrew Wakefield, a researcher at the Royal Free Hospital, suggested that there might be a link between autism and the MMR injection, she decided he was right. Despite the failure of further studies to find any evidence, despite the fact that Wakefield’s co-researchers have dissociated themselves from his allegation, though the medical profession, almost without exception, is persuaded that his claim has no merit, she persists. The epidemiologists are guilty of "category confusion"; the scientific reviewers are throwing up "clouds of obfuscation"(1); her critics are peddlers of "ignorance, misrepresentation and smear."(2)

She’s just as sure of her position on climate change. Last year she told listeners to the Moral Maze that manmade climate change "is a massive scam based on flawed computer modelling, bad science and an anti-western ideology … a pack of lies and propaganda."(3) Soon afterwards, the Royal Society published a "guide to facts and fictions about climate change", whose purpose was to address the arguments made by people like her (4). It destroyed all the claims she had been making. A few months later, the deniers’ last argument fell away, as three studies showed that satellite data suggesting the atmosphere had cooled were faulty. New Scientist reported that "as nails in the coffin go, they don’t get much bigger"(5).

But nothing can stop her. Last week she resumed the attack. Man-made climate change is "one of the greatest scientific scams of the modern age", an artefact of "ideology, irrationality and pseudoscientific sloppiness."(6) "The rate of warming over the past century," she claimed, "is nothing out of the historical ordinary." We also learnt that "most of [the atmosphere] consists of water vapour": the climatologists must have been lying about that too.

As usual, the scientists have the science wrong, and only Melanie Phillips, autodidact professor of epidemiology, gastroenterology, meteorology and atmospheric physics, can put them right. Where does she get it from? How do you acquire such confidence in your own rectitude that neither the evidence itself, nor the Royal Society, nor the combined weight of the major scientific journals can alter by a whisker the line you have taken? Are you born knowing you have prophetic powers: that everything you believe is and will forever be true? Or does it come with experience? If so, what might that experience be?

The occasion for her latest outburst was a study published last week in Nature, which showed, to everyone’s astonishment, that plants produce methane, a greenhouse gas(7). Phillips used the findings to suggest that the entire science of global warming has been disproved, and that there is no need to worry about the biosphere. Nature came to the opposite conclusion: as methane emissions from plants rise with temperature, climate change will cause further climate change(8).

But while this study does nothing to threaten global warming theory, there is something it challenges. It should shake our confidence in one of our favourite means of tackling it: paying other people to clear up the mess we’ve made.

Both through the unofficial carbon market and by means of a provision of the Kyoto protocol called the "clean development mechanism", people, companies and states can claim to reduce their emissions by investing in carbon-friendly projects in poorer countries. Among other schemes, you can earn carbon credits by paying people to plant trees. As the trees grow, they are supposed to absorb the carbon we release by burning fossil fuels.

Despite the new findings, it still seems fair to say that forests are a net carbon sink, taking in more greenhouse gases than they release. If they are felled, the carbon in both the trees and the soil they grow on is likely to enter the atmosphere. So preserving them remains a good idea, for this and other reasons. But what the new study provides is yet more evidence that the accountancy behind many of the "carbon offset" schemes is flawed.

While they have a pretty good idea of how much carbon our factories and planes and cars are releasing, scientists are much less certain about the amount of carbon tree planting will absorb. When you drain or clear the soil to plant trees, for example, you are likely to release some carbon, but it is hard to tell how much. Planting trees in one place might stunt trees elsewhere, as they could dry up a river which was feeding a forest downstream. Or by protecting your forest against loggers, you might be driving them into another forest. As global temperatures rise, trees in many places will begin to die back, releasing the carbon they contain(9). Forest fires could wipe them out completely. The timing is also critical: emissions saved today are far more valuable, in terms of reducing climate change, than emissions saved in ten years’ time, yet the trees you plant start absorbing carbon long after your factories released it. All this made the figures speculative, but the new findings, with their massive uncertainty range (plants, the researchers say, produce somewhere between 10 and 30% of the planet’s methane) make an honest sum impossible.

In other words, you cannot reasonably claim to have swapped the carbon stored in oil or coal for carbon absorbed by trees. Mineral carbon, while it remains in the ground, is stable and quantifiable. Biological carbon is labile and uncertain.

To add to the confusion, in order to show that you are really reducing atmospheric carbon by planting or protecting a forest, you must demonstrate that if you hadn’t done it something else would have happened. Not only is this very difficult, it is also an invitation for a country or a company to threaten an increase in emissions. It can then present the alternative (doing what it would have done anyway) as an improvement on its destructive plans, and claim the difference as a carbon reduction.(10)

There’s a good example in Brazil. A company in the state of Minas Gerais runs a big eucalyptus plantation, which it uses to produce charcoal for smelting pig iron. Many of the locals hate it, because it grabbed their land and it has replaced the diverse forest and savannah which sustained them with a monoculture. Now it claims that it should be paid by rich nations to maintain its plantations because otherwise the companies it supplies would switch to coal. The locals allege that the company had no intention of abandoning its trees until it saw the potential of the carbon market. They also complain that it will be rewarded for keeping the rightful owners off their land.(11)

But perhaps the most destructive effect of the carbon offset trade is that it allows us to believe we can carry on polluting. The government can keep building roads and airports and we can keep flying to Thailand for our holidays, as long as we purchase absolution by giving a few quid to a tree planting company. How do you quantify complacency? How do you know that the behaviour the trade induces does not cancel out the carbon it sequesters?

In other words I think it is fair to say that a scam is being perpetrated, but not of the kind Melanie Phillips alleges. We know that climate change will impoverish many people. We now know that it will make others very rich. But their money-making schemes will have precious little to do with saving the planet.

References:

1. Melanie Phillips, 31st October 2005. MMR: the unanswered questions. The Daily Mail.

2. Melanie Phillips, 8th November 2005. The case against me boils down to smear and evasion. The Guardian.

3. Melanie Phillips, 17th February 2005. The Moral Maze, BBC Radio 4.

4. The Royal Society, 25th April 2005. A guide to facts and fictions about climate change .

5. Zeeya Merali, 20th August 2005. Sceptics forced into climate climb-down. New Scientist.

6. Melanie Phillips, 13th January 2006. Does this prove that global warming’s all hot air? The Daily Mail.

7. Frank Keppler, John T. G. Hamilton, Marc Brass, and Thomas Röckmann, 12th January 2006. Methane emissions from terrestrial plants under aerobic conditions. Nature 439, 187-191.

8. Quirin Schiermeier, 12th January 2006. Methane finding baffles scientists. Nature 439, 128.

9. Peter M. Cox, Richard A. Betts, Chris D. Jones, Steven A. Spall and Ian J. Totterdell, 9th November 2000. Acceleration of global warming due to carbon-cycle feedbacks in a coupled climate model. Nature 408, 184-187.

10. See Larry Lohmann, 2005. Marketing and Making Carbon Dumps: Commodification, Calculation and Counterfactuals in Climate Change Mitigation. The Corner House, Dorset.

11. ibid.

 

 

Item 23: Hynix to Pioneer Carbon Trading

(Lee Sun-young , The Korea Herald, 02 November, 2007) Hynix Semiconductor Co. is set to become the first Korean firm in the fledgling market of carbon dioxide emissions trading amid a global race to cash in on the highly lucrative business of saving the planet.

The firm, which produces computer chips in factories in Icheon and Cheongju, said yesterday that it plans to cut greenhouse gas and sell the carbon credits in the market.

It has signed a contract with Ecoeye, a local environment consultancy, for the business, company officials said.

Hynix, the world's second-largest maker of computer memory chips, has recently been stepping up efforts in eco-friendly management.

Last month, it sealed an unusual pact with a leading environmental civic group, asking it to monitor the entire process of semiconductor production - from raw materials, manufacturing to post-production treatment - for environment friendliness.

The firm's plan for carbon reduction comes as Korea, the world's 10th-largest greenhouse gas producer, prepares to start a carbon credit exchange this year.

The carbon market is largely based on the Clean Development Mechanism and other measures of the Kyoto Protocol, which allows governments and companies to trade their rights to emit greenhouse gases.

Since the Kyoto Protocol obliges around 40 developed economies to scale down their total greenhouse gas emissions by 2012, their governments and companies are pushing strongly to secure more emission rights, known as carbon credits.

Korea plans to grow its carbon credit exchange into a 450 billion won ($495 million) market by 2012.

 

 

Item 24: Selling Indulgences: The trade in carbon offsets is an excuse for business as usual

(George Monbiot, The Guardian 19 October 2006) Rejoice! We have a way out. Our guilty consciences appeased, we can continue to fill up our SUVs and fly round the world without the least concern about our impact on the planet. How has this magic been arranged? By something called "carbon offsets". You buy yourself a clean conscience by paying someone else to undo the harm you are causing.

The Co-op’s holiday firm Travelcare has just started selling offsets to its customers. If they want to fly to Spain, they pay an extra £3. Then they can forget about their contribution to climate change. The money will be spent on projects in the developing world, such as building wind farms and more efficient cooking stoves. In August, BP launched its "targetneutral" scheme, enabling customers to "neutralise the CO2 emissions caused by their driving"(1). The consequences of an entire year’s motoring can be discharged for just £20. Again, your money will be invested in the developing world - "a biomass energy plant in Himachal Pradesh; a wind farm in Karnataka, India and an animal waste management and methane capture program in Mexico" - and you need have no further worries about what you and BP are doing to the atmosphere (or, for that matter, to the people of West Papua or the tundra in Alaska).

It sounds great. Without requiring any social or political change, and at a tiny cost to the consumer, the problem of climate change is solved. Having handed over a few quid, we can all sleep easy again.

This is not the first time that such schemes have been sold. In his book The Rise of the Dutch Republic, published in 1855, John Lothrop Motley describes the means by which the people of the Netherlands in the 15th and 16th centuries could redeem their sins. "The sale of absolutions was the source of large fortunes to the priests. … God’s pardon for crimes already committed, or about to be committed, was advertised according to a graduated tariff. Thus, poisoning, for example, was absolved for eleven ducats, six livres tournois. Absolution for incest was afforded at thirty-six livres, three ducats. Perjury came to seven livres and three carlines. Pardon for murder, if not by poison, was cheaper. Even a parricide could buy forgiveness at God’s tribunal at one ducat; four livres, eight carlines."(2)

Just as in the 15th and 16th centuries you could sleep with your sister and kill and lie without fear of eternal damnation, today you can live exactly as you please as long as you give your ducats to one of the companies selling indulgences. It is pernicious and destructive nonsense.

The problem is this. If runaway climate change is not to trigger the irreversible melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets and drive hundreds of millions of people from their homes, the global temperature rise must be confined to 2C above pre-industrial levels. As the figures I have published in Heat show, this requires a 60% cut in global climate emissions by 2030, which means a 90% cut in the rich world. Even if, through carbon offset schemes carried out in developing countries, every poor nation on the planet became carbon-free, we would still have to cut most of the carbon we produce at home. Buying and selling carbon offsets is like pushing the food around on your plate to create the impression that you have eaten it.

Any scheme that persuades us we can carry on polluting delays the point at which we grasp the nettle of climate change and accept that our lives have to change. But we cannot afford to delay. The big cuts have to be made right now, and the longer we leave it, the harder it will be to prevent runaway climate change from taking place. By selling us a clean conscience, the offset companies are undermining the necessary political battle to tackle climate change at home. They are telling us that we don’t need to be citizens; we need only be better consumers.

BP and Travelcare, like other companies, want to keep expanding their business. Offset schemes allow them to do so while pretending they have gone green. Yet aviation emissions, to give one example, are rising so fast in the UK that before 2020 they will account for the country’s entire sustainable carbon allocation(3). A couple of decades after that, global aircraft emissions will match the sustainable carbon level for all economic sectors, across the entire planet. Perhaps the carbon offset companies will then start schemes on Mars and Jupiter, as we will soon need several planets to absorb the carbon dioxide we release. Offsets, in other words, are being used as an excuse for the unsustainable growth of carbon-intensive activities.

But these are by no means the only problems. A tonne of carbon saved today is far more valuable in terms of preventing climate change than a tonne of carbon saved in three years’ time. Almost all the carbon offset schemes take time to recoup the emissions we release today. As far as I can discover, none of the companies which sell them uses discount rates for its carbon savings (which would reflect the difference in value between the present and the future). This means they could all be accused of unintentional but systemic false accounting.

And while the carbon we release by flying or driving is certain and verifiable, the carbon absorbed by offset projects is less attestable. Many will succeed, and continue to function over the necessary period. Others will fail, especially the disastrous forays into tree-planting that some companies have made. To claim a carbon saving, you also need to demonstrate that these projects would not have happened without you -that Mexico would not have decided to capture the methane from its pig farms, or that people in India would not have bought new stoves of their own accord. In other words, you must look into a counterfactual future. I have yet to meet someone from a carbon offset company who possesses supernatural powers.

At the offices of Travelcare and the forecourts owned by BP, you can now buy complacency, political apathy and self-satisfaction. But you cannot buy the survival of the planet.

 

 

Item 25: A Killing in Siberia Injures Russia's Green Movement Environmentalist's Son Confesses Role in Attack; Preserving a Sacred Sea

(Alan Cullison, Wall Street Journal, 29 October, 2007) IRKUTSK, Russia -- Marina Rikhvanova is a mother of Russia's green movement. Last year, she led thousands of protesters into the streets of this Siberian city against an oil pipeline that would have skirted the pristine waters of Lake Baikal. Afterwards, President Vladimir Putin scrubbed the plan.

This spring Ms. Rikhvanova put together new rallies against Kremlin plans to turn the Irkutsk region into a center for processing nuclear fuel. She helped protesters plan a tent bivouac near the fuel plant, and printed leaflets for campers to hand out to locals, warning of the dangers of radioactive leakage.

One morning in late July she got a phone call telling her the campers had been attacked in their sleep by masked men armed with metal pipes and wooden clubs. One camper was beaten to death.

What happened afterwards has shaken the environmental community and Ms. Rikhvanova's role as its leader. Authorities arrested her 19-year-old son, who confessed to a role in the attack.

Ms. Rikhvanova's defenders say she was set up by Russia's security services, who they say lured her son, a sometime security guard who had recently fallen in with nationalist skinheads, into the attack on the campers. Authorities dismiss that charge as absurd, and say the 46-year-old Ms. Rikhvanova should have spent more time with her family.

In any case, the incident has diminished the stature of one of Russia's most influential environmental leaders. Until now, Ms. Rikhvanova's group in Siberia was able to pull together scientists, ecologists and common folk into a populist groundswell that forced the government to pay attention. Her agenda of unspoiled air and water was seen as transcending politics. In the increasingly authoritarian era of President Putin, she and other environmentalists have comprised one of the few respected alternative voices to the Kremlin on public policy.

Now, some erstwhile allies are keeping their distance. "The attack and the arrest afterwards have been a tremendous blow to the environmental movement, and divided it like never before," said Mikhail Kulekhov, a local journalist who had worked with Ms. Rikhvanova previously but now has backed off. "We all now have to think closely about whom we work with."

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia's green movement had a strong footing in Irkutsk because of Lake Baikal, a 25-million-year-old Russian national treasure.

Known to locals as the Sacred Sea, the lake is 400 miles long and more than a mile deep, and holds nearly a quarter of the world's unfrozen fresh water and an abundance of unique animal life.

Ms. Rikhvanova studied biology in Irkutsk under the Soviet system, she said, "because I didn't have to lie in the sciences." She married a fellow biologist, and wrote a thesis on the effects of effluent being dumped into the lake by a Soviet-built pulp and paper plant.

The group she co-founded, Baikal Ecological Wave, started as a kind of tea society, but quickly gathered strength and members. In the early 1990s, Baikal Wave began collecting grants from the likes of the U.S. Agency for International Development and Germany's Green Party, bought its own headquarters and started a newsletter.

Soon the group was locking horns with the federal government and Moscow's newly minted energy barons. Ms. Rikhvanova probed the work of a nuclear fuel enrichment plant in the nearby city of Angarsk, and lined up experts to testify against plans of state and newly privatized oil companies to build pipelines skirting the lake.

In 2002, federal agents raided Baikal Wave's offices, seized its computers and accused the group of acquiring secret maps of the nuclear enrichment plant in Angarsk.

AFTER THE ATTACK

Read Marina Rikhvanova's statement2, and the response of the ecological protest camp, translated from the original Russian by The Wall Street Journal.

But the group's persistence paid off. When the Kremlin tried to push through a plan to build one pipeline through a seismically active area within about 900 yards of the lake, Baikal Wave helped organize street protests. One rally in central Irkutsk in March last year drew 5,000 people in freezing temperatures. Baikal Wave also organized "flash mobs" that deposited bottles of blackened water in front of administrative buildings that they labeled "Baikal Water".

The Kremlin made an about-face the next month. At a news conference on national television, Mr. Putin ordered the pipeline moved 25 miles away from the lake.

The pipeline victory made Ms. Rikhvanova "a messiah," said Igor Ogorodnikov, an organizer in a leftist youth group, Autonomous Action. The American magazine Condé Nast Traveler flew her to New York and feted her at an annual awards dinner.

Born in 1988, just as his mother's career as an activist began to take off, her son Pavel had trouble, as did millions of young Russian men, navigating the penury of post-Soviet Russia.

He wanted to study business at a private institute, but his parents had little money to help him. Ms. Rikhvanova and her husband made no more than $1,000 a month between them, and still lived in the same two-room apartment with Pavel and his sister that they had inherited in Soviet times. While selling books to pay for business school, Pavel was hit over the head by a mugger who stole the books and money he was carrying. Then he got out of the hospital only to be hit in October of 2005 by a car while crossing the street, shattering his knee.

For most of last year he lay on the family couch recovering from an operation that put pins in his leg. When he was able to walk again, he reveled in his freedom by going to soccer matches. "I didn't think there was anything wrong with it -- I was happy that he was happy," said his father, Yevgeny Rikhvanov.

But in Russia, racist gangs have often congealed around soccer fan clubs. Pavel began coming home from games drunk, his father said, and "speaking in racist ways that I had never heard before."

In April of this year, Pavel told his parents that a new friend, named Stepan, had found him a job as a security guard working for a local businessman. His parents were alarmed -- security firms are often closely tied to law enforcement in Russia. Ms. Rikhvanova thought it strange that Pavel, sickly and asthmatic from childhood, would be offered a job usually reserved for burly toughs.

She said she asked her son not to take the job, fearing it would draw him into trouble. But the salary -- about $400 a month -- seemed enormous to him.

The family had to worry in part about pressure from the government because Ms. Rikhvanova had just announced plans to oppose the nuclear fuel plant in Angarsk, a top-secret complex in Soviet times that lately had figured in Kremlin plans to make Russia a key player in the world energy market. At a meeting of the G-8 in St. Petersburg in 2006, Mr. Putin announced Russia would create an international center for processing nuclear fuel, so that countries such as Iran could develop civilian nuclear power without having the technology to make nuclear weapons.

Ms. Rikhvanova said an official advising the local government told her that she risked her reputation by opposing the plant. Some of Ms. Rikhvanova's former allies shied away from opposing expansion plans that were backed by the Kremlin and would have been a big source of new jobs in the region. One group that was willing to help fight the plant was Autonomous Action, a loose coalition of mostly youths who call themselves anarchists and radical ecologists.

Mr. Kulekhov, the journalist, calls its members troublemakers because many dub themselves "antifa" -- radical antifascists who have a history of clashing with racist skinheads at soccer matches.

Ms. Rikhvanova defends her work with Autonomous Action, which she said was vital to demonstrations against the pipeline last year. Each year the group has set up a tent camp somewhere in Russia that has doubled as a sort of discussion forum on ecological issues. When members said they wanted to set up the camp this year near the Angarsk nuclear facility, Ms. Rikhvanova agreed to help.

Yuri Mishutkin, injured in the July attack, was released from the hospital in September.

They chose a campsite at the edge of Angarsk, in a public forest of mixed pines and birch trees about three miles from the nuclear plant. Tensions simmered from the start: Police officers confiscated some notebooks and music discs from early arrivals. Police also blamed them for spraying antinuclear graffiti on the buildings of the city administration, and the pro-Putin political party, United Russia.

After visiting the camp, a local journalist wrote a scathing article suggesting the campers were living off foreign grant money, and hinted they could be "ecological spies" trying to collect information about secret nuclear installations in the area.

The campers held pickets in town, and handed out thousands of leaflets that Ms. Rikhvanova helped them print warning of the dangers of the plant. She arranged for a physicist to visit the camp and explain the technical side of nuclear enrichment.

On July 20 some officers walked into the camp and told the activists to hand over any cans of spray paint that might have linked them to the graffiti. Police also demanded to see the passports of people staying in the camp. Several campers who refused to surrender their passports were taken to the police station. Ms. Rikhvanova said she went to the police station to help them, and headed home after they were released.

That evening campers gathered around the fire. They were tired from a day of picketing, but worried about a report from a local youth who said he received a text message on his mobile phone, inviting him to take part in an attack on the camp that night, Mr. Ogorodnikov said.

The group decided that three volunteers should stay awake and stand guard. One was Ilya Borodayenko, 26, a lanky typesetter who had arrived that afternoon by train from the far east port city of Nakhodka. Mr. Borodayenko was an experienced fighter.

Alexei Sutyuga also volunteered to stay up that night, and sat by the fire with the others, drinking tea and talking to keep one another awake. At about 5 a.m., he said, young men with scarves covering their faces ran into the firelight. Mr. Sutyuga said he rose to meet them but someone hit him over the head from behind with a bottle. He said several men beat Mr. Borodayenko with metal bars and he staggered away towards the woods. Mr. Ogorodnikov said he woke up to screams, and opened the flap of his tent to see more than a dozen young men rampaging through the camp. They slashed open tents with knives and beat those inside.

The attackers poured out the campers' drinking water on the ground and made a bonfire with their banners, leaflets and camping gear.

They left after about 10 minutes, he said. Campers found Mr. Borodayenko near the edge of the woods, unconscious and bleeding. Ambulances began to arrive 30 minutes later, and took him and eight others to the hospital with broken bones and bruises. He died of a cracked skull shortly after dawn. Ms. Rikhvanova learned of the attack hours later. Her son, who came home from Angarsk later in the day, seemed preoccupied, she said. He was arrested later that week while at work.

Police arrested 17 other men, but identified only one of them, Ms. Rikhvanova's son, by name. Ms. Rikhvanova says her son was assigned with the task of tearing down the anarchist flag that was flying over the encampment.

Police said the attack stemmed from hurt feelings over a fight at a soccer game two weeks before. Mr. Sutyuga dismisses the claim, and said no one from the camp had been involved in any fights -- most had just arrived in Angarsk from different regions of Russia.

Allies have closed ranks around Ms. Rikhvanova, but they say the attack and Pavel's arrest have badly dented the image of Irkutsk's environmental movement.

"In Russia, there is a feeling that in an ordinary family, children support their parents," said Maksim Vorontsov, a member of the National Bolshevik Party, which has worked closely with Ms. Rikhvanova. "Now people are wondering why children might be attacking their parents. They are saying [ecologists] must be abnormal."

Ms. Rikhvanova set out her own views on the attack in a letter she wrote to erstwhile allies in the ecology movement. She said she later learned that the security company that hired her son, called Continent, was owned by a top official in the Union of Right Forces, a political party that was once headed by the man who now runs Russia's atomic-energy agency.

Today she says she suspects that Stepan and possibly her son's employer had some kind of link with the security services, and that her son was lured into the attack to help ruin Baikal Wave.

Igor Kokourov, the cigarette magnate who owns Continent, calls the accusation nonsense, saying he never met Pavel. "I have too many workers here to act like a parent," he says, adding that minding Pavel is "her job, not mine."

Ms. Rikhvanova said she communicates with her son today mainly by letters passed through his lawyer as he awaits trial in a local prison. "I am sorry for what has happened -- I should never have gone there," he wrote to her on a sheet of graph paper last month. "But I swear I never hurt anyone." He still has not explained to her how he got involved in the attack, she said.

 

 

Item 26: Ban Ki-Moon, The U.N. and Climate Change: The UN's quiet new boss is hoping that his eco-tour of the southern hemisphere will concentrate minds on the planet's travails

(The Economist, 01 November, 2007) BAN KI-MOON has hardly been a limelight-stealer during his 10 months as secretary-general of the United Nations. But over the coming days, expect to see the cautious, camera-shy South Korean at the centre of some spectacular snaps: watching the glaciers vanish at the bottom of Patagonia, flying to the finger of land that juts out of Antarctica and then heading for the vibrant heart of Brazil's forest.

Think of it as a circuitous, but carefully-planned journey to the Indonesian island of Bali, where the outlines of a grand global bargain on how to deal with climate change may or may not come into view at a meeting in December. By his own account a "harmoniser" rather than a tub-thumper, Mr Ban will be told some amazing and often contradictory things as he travels round some ecologically sensitive spots on the southern edge of the world.

Is the earth's climatic system about to spin out of all control, threatening the lives and livelihoods of billions of people, or is it a bit more robust (or at least fixable) than the gloomiest scientists think? In Chile, Antarctica and Brazil, he is likely to hear and observe evidence on both sides of that argument.

As he flies south to Punta Arenas, Mr Ban will see dozens of glorious glaciers, almost all of them (87% by one recent estimate) retreating and thinning. The nearer they are to the sea, the more vulnerable they are to rising temperatures. But not all recent alterations in the physical landscape reflect global warming. Earlier this year, Chilean scientists were amazed to find a deep hole where a glacial lake used to be. Rising temperatures were initially blamed for the lake's disappearance; but researchers later concluded that it simply tipped into an even bigger lake.

Around the Torres del Paine national park, near Punta Arenas, Mr Ban will be able to listen to the crashing and booming of glaciers as they "calve" into the sea: a natural process, but one that is accelerating. Here and in many other parts of Chile, the effects of warming are obvious. Some time in the coming decades, the shrinking of glaciers will cause a drop in the level of glacial runoff, reducing the supply of water to urban Chileans. A similar, and often more acute, challenge faces more than 1 billion city-dwellers in other parts of the world who rely on glacial runoff for their water.

Apart from global warming, Mr Ban will meet people affected by another environmental problem—the emergence of a hole in the ozone layer. In Punta Arenas, residents have to cope with radiation alerts when ozone depletion is so severe that it becomes highly dangerous to expose skin or eyes to the sun.

But for some environmentalists, the ozone story is on balance a tale of success. When the Montreal protocol, limiting ozone-depleting chemicals, marked its 20th anniversary in September, many people hailed it as an example that could inspire those who are trying to combat climate change. Once the scientific evidence became overwhelming (and frightening enough to generate political pressure), governments and industry worked together to reduce the ozone "hole": at least those were the claims made at the agreement's birthday party. In the case of climate change, the scale of the problem, and the adjustments needed, are far greater—but the principle (that the world can work together to mitigate environmental harm) sounds like a good one to follow.

What about Antarctica, which along with Greenland forms one of the principal stores of fresh water on earth? Most of the southern continent's icy mass, especially the eastern half which rests on some very solid rock, is so deep-frozen that so far at least, it has been impervious to climate change. Encircled by icy winds, the compacted snow of Antarctica's deep interior is actually growing in volume.

That is probably just as well, because if all the water locked up in Antarctica were to cascade into the ocean, global sea levels could rise by 60 metres (185 feet), leaving more than a third of the UN's New York headquarters under water. By comparison with the Arctic, where the North Pole could be swirling in ice-free seas in summer by 2040, the southern polar region seems a bit more stable—but that is no reason to be complacent, says Ted Scambos of the University of Colorado. Two bits of Antarctica are heating up rapidly. The peninsula that juts out of the continent is warming as fast as anywhere: three degrees Centigrade in the past 50 years. And in Pine Island Bay two giant glaciers are shrinking, and this process is accelerating. Of the global sea-level rise that is already taking place (about 3 millimetres per year since 1990, compared with an average of less than 2mm before 1990), about one sixth may be the result of melting from two smallish parts of Antarctica. So even a minor change in the Antarctic landscape has had global effects, and these are as grave as those of the (far more obvious) melting of Greenland's ice mass.

To put these numbers in some perspective, a UN study earlier this year said that by the end of the century the global sea level was likely to rise between 18 and 59 centimetres—a prediction made with the important rider that it did not include "processes related to ice flow", in other words, the possibly disastrous effects of chunks of Greenland and Antarctica sliding into the sea at a quickening pace.

The Antarctic landscape, no less than the icefields of Chile, can deliver surprises. In 2002 an ice shelf the size of Rhode Island, which had been stable for at least 10,000 years, collapsed in just three weeks. Some smaller changes are arguably more ominous, like a recent drop in the southern seas' ability to absorb carbon.

Part of Mr Ban's purpose in going to the deep, icy south is to highlight—ahead of the Bali meeting—the fact that there are problems facing humanity which are so grave that they should induce every country to restrain its self-interest. So he may be depressed to run into the beginnings of an old-fashioned territorial spat between jealous countries. Last month Britain said that—in what was just a routine piece of "legal book-keeping", or so diplomats said—it was preparing a claim to an economic zone off the coast of Antarctica stretching up to 350 nautical miles from the land mass that it already regards as British.

This would be one of five claims that Britain hopes, by the deadline of May 2009, to have lodged under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which allows countries to assert economic rights in waters stretching 200 miles from their coast or up to 350 miles if the area is an extension of a continental shelf. At least one of Britain's other claims could be even more contentious: it concerns the waters round the Falklands and South Georgia, the objects of a war with Argentina in 1982. All discussion about Antarctic claims, whether on land or sea, tends to be hedged with words like "hypothetical" and "potential" because of a treaty that bans all economic activity and proclaims the continent a zone of peaceful research. But since both Argentina and Chile contest Britain's Antarctic land claim (and therefore make corresponding claims to the adjacent seabed), the dim possibility exists of an active dispute if the treaty were to collapse.

One argument used to insist that "none of this really matters"—the fact that seabed-mining at such extreme depths is at present physically impossible—is feeble: many forms of deep-sea extraction take place now that would have been technically unthinkable a decade ago. Chile responded to news of the British claim by rather pointedly restating its own, and pledging to reinvigorate its Antarctic research. The subject is bound to come up, at least in small talk, with Mr Ban.

From floes to forests

When the South Korean trouble-shooter leaves Chile, he will head not for Brazil's political or financial centre, but to Santarém in the state of Pará, which includes both some superbly intact bits of rainforest and also areas that have been ravaged by illegal logging. Like all visitors to this enchanted region, he will hear a big variety of sounds, human and animal.

In one respect, every one of his Brazilian interlocutors will be singing the very same song: the Amazonian forest, by its existence, delivers great and desperately-needed benefits to the planet, not just by absorbing carbon and stimulating rainfall, but by maintaining biodiversity. So when negotiators in Bali sit down to dream up a broader and more effective climate-change regime to replace the Kyoto protocol that expires in 2012, they must include the preservation of forests in any new system of rules and financial incentives designed to keep carbon in the ground. Deforestation is estimated to account for between 18% and 25% of the carbon emissions heating the world.

A compelling song, indeed—but if he listens carefully, Mr Ban may detect some variations in the versions rendered by Brazil's central government, by Brazil's regions, and by independent Brazilian scientists and environmentalists, whom he also wants to meet. The authorities in Brasilia want to be rewarded for preserving the forest (and for the recent decline in the annual rate of deforestation) by government-to-government transfers. (That in itself marks a shift in official Brazilian thinking; only two years ago did it drop the idea that any incentive to avoid deforestation could infringe its sovereignty.)

But some regional politicians—especially in the state of Amazonas where the forest is impressively intact—and other local players, including representatives of the indigenous peoples, have endorsed the idea of "market-based" approaches to rewarding them for guarding the trees. They want carbon-trading systems, through which first-world polluters can encourage carbon-saving projects in poor countries, to embrace the rainforests.

Up to now, many non-government organisations, including Brazilian ones, have been wary of market systems for limiting carbon emissions, saying that they risk letting rich-world emitters off the hook. Both on political and ethical grounds, any solution to climate change must include big, visible sacrifices by the countries and economic players that are most responsible for creating the problem—or so their argument goes.

But that thinking may be changing. In the words of John Sauven of Greenpeace (a British campaigner who works closely with the movement's Brazilian branch), "we are all having to shed some ideological baggage" in the face of a galloping crisis. As he puts it, Greenpeace certainly won't drop its belief that rich people and countries should play their part in abating climate change; but it would be open to any practical solution that preserves the rainforest, and rewards anybody (from regional or local governments to indigenous folk) who helps with this preservation.

One of the problems is that market-based incentives for the "avoidance of deforestation" favour repentant sinners—in other words, those who were chopping down the forest and can prove they have stopped. This could short-change parts of Congo, where (because of chronic civil war, which proved quite healthy for some living things) not much deforestation has taken place recently. One idea, Mr Sauven says, is that rich-world emitters of carbon could be made to pay into an internationally supervised fund on which any government tending the forest might draw.

Independent Brazilian scientists will also clamour for Mr Ban's ear. Some will want to argue that the links between the shrinking rainforests of Brazil, the vanishing glaciers of Chile and the declining ability of the southern oceans to soak up carbon are even closer than the scholarly consensus has so far acknowledged.

A lot of noises, then, buzzing round the head of a Korean who is known as a good listener. And arguments about the eco-system of the southern hemisphere are only part of the backdrop to the bargain that has to be struck—between old carbon-emitters like America, and rising ones like China and India—if the risk of over-heating the planet, leaving it with too much salt water and too little of the fresh kind, is to be averted. The biggest unknown is how far America will overcome its aversion to arrangements that, as some argue, compromise its sovereignty. Advocates of a more internationalist foreign policy scored a victory this week when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 17-4 in favour of ratifying UNCLOS at last. But to gain the necessary 67 votes in the full Senate, they will still have to overcome the nay-sayers who (however unreasonably) see ratifying the convention as a slippery slope, leading to the far more horrifying prospect of an international regime on climate change.

 

 

Item 27: Asia’s (and America’s) Ocean Waste-basket: Pacific 'Rubbish Superhighway' Going Unnoticed

(Kim Landers , ABC News Australia, 01 November, 2007) A vast rubbish dump, which covers an area bigger than Australia, is floating in the Pacific Ocean and research shows it is growing bigger.

The rubbish collects in one area because of a clockwise trade wind that circulates around the Pacific rim.

In his Tasmanian-built research vessel, Captain Charles Moore has just returned from a trip through the plastic stew floating between Hawaii and San Francisco.

"Toothbrushes are quite common, plastic bags are quite common, soap bottles are quite common, we've been finding a good many umbrella handles, minus the umbrella," he said.

"We find toolboxes, and oddly enough an item that seems to be quite prevalent now is plastic hard hats. I found one upside down with fish living in the upturned helmet."

The rubbish patch is extremely remote - it takes a week to reach it in a boat.

Captain Moore, founder of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, says the eastern part of what is labelled the "Pacific Garbage Patch" is joined by a rubbish superhighway to a western collection of debris off Japan.

"We're talking about an area larger than the continent of Australia," he said.

Captain Moore says the marine debris between Hawaii and California contains 40 times more plastic than plankton.

"The currents make the identifiable plastic come mostly from Asia, because it arrives rather quickly, whereas the North American debris takes over five years in some cases to get to this garbage patch," he said.

"In that period of time it's broken into bits, and we can't see any writing on it, so we can't trace it back to the United States.

"It's certainly true that all the countries bordering the Pacific contribute to this garbage patch."

Global effort

He says the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was mounting a clean-up effort to rid the ocean of "extremely destructive" nets.

"It's like rolling a giant mesh bowling ball against the coral reef when they hit land, and the waves push them across and it rips out all the coral and tangles the endangered monk seal - the only tropical seal," he added.

Dr Holly Bamford is the director of the marine debris program at the NOAA.

She says the NOAA is considering flying unmanned aircraft over the oceanic rubbish dump to collect more data.

"What these vehicles can do is they can be launched from platforms of vessels, and they can skim pretty close to the surface of the water," she said.

"Once it detects an anomaly, which means if it detects something on the ocean surface, it would record that, and then that would come back to the vessel."

Because the floating landfill lies in international waters, there is not a lot of political will to attempt a massive clean-up.

 

 

Item 28: Foreign Birds Threaten Taiwan’s Native Species

(DPA, 02 November, 2007) TAIPEI - Some 75 kinds of foreign birds have settled down in Taiwan, threatening the island’s native species, the Council of Agriculture warned on Friday.

The council issued the warning after field research showed that 75 species of foreign birds have begun to reproduce in Taiwan.

The foreign birds come mostly from South-East Asian countries like the Philippines and also from China and India. They are almost half of Taiwan’s native bird species, which number 154.

‘Some people may think that more birds means our ecology has improved, but the invasion of foreign birds is dangerous because these smuggled birds were not quarantined. They could bring in diseases and eat up the foods needed by local species,’ council researcher Fan Meng-wen told a news conference.

Fan said the foreign birds were smuggled into Taiwan to sell as pets. After Taiwanese bought them at high prices, some abandoned the birds later on while others set the birds free in Buddhist rituals.

Chinese believe that releasing captured animals - usually birds and fish - makes merit for them and can bring good fortune.

The report said 24 per cent of Taiwan’s religious groups hold Fang Sheng (Release Life) rituals, and an estimated 200 million captured animals are released each year in Taiwan.

 

 

Item 29: Faint Praise: ‘Yangtze River Less Tainted Than Expected’

(Elaine Engeler, WTOP News. 02 November, 2007) GENEVA - Chinese and Swiss scientists said Friday the Yangtze River is less polluted than expected, but only because the vast amounts of water dilute farm and industrial waste that still pose a serious threat to animals and plants.

Environmentalists warned the findings should not be seen as a clean bill of health for the Yangtze, where water quality has continually deteriorated. Because of its large size, the 3,900-mile-long Yangtze cannot be compared to other rivers, they said.

Around 25 billion tons of waste is poured every year into the Yangtze, the world's third-largest river, said a joint Chinese-Swiss expedition that analyzed the river's water quality.

"While the pollution level is enormous, the concentration of pollutants remains comparable with that of other rivers, given the dilution effect caused by the enormous rate of water flow," said a statement by the Swiss Agency for Development, which supported the expedition.

The pollution stems mostly from the huge amounts of mineral fertilizers used in agriculture, the scientists said, adding that the nitrogen level in the river has doubled over the past 20 years.

Heavy metals in industrial waste also pollute the river, according to the scientists, who analyzed hundreds of water and sediment samples in laboratories in China, Switzerland and Australia.

Some 1.1 million cubic feet of water per second pours from the Yangtze into the East China Sea, the scientists said. Pollutants were especially concentrated in the delta, including large amounts of nitrogen and arsenic.

"The more nitrate enters the sea, the more the blue-green algae grow, mainly at lower sea levels, and the oxygen becomes scarce," said Beat Mueller, a geochemist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology.

Ger Bergkamp, head of the water program at the World Conservation Union, said the results were deceptive.

"We find it rather misleading to focus on 'it is less than expected,' but it is actually worse than any measurement before," Bergkamp said. "The situation is very severe, affecting people's health, the quality of water for the irrigation of crops, the water-intake to cities."

Dermot O'Gorman, country representative of WWF in China, said he had not read the expedition's conclusions, but pollution levels in the Yangtze are very bad and the fact that pollutants tend to be diluted in the massive volume of water "still does not mean the Yangtze River is not in a dangerous situation."

The expedition team said the extinction of freshwater baiji dolphins, declared in 2006, cannot be seen as a direct result of the poor water quality in the Yangtze. Industry, agriculture, increasing waterway traffic, underwater noise and fishing methods all degraded the baiji's natural habitat and led to their extinction, they said.

"The ecosystem of the Yangtze can be saved if China intensifies its activities in water protection now," said August Pfluger, director of the Zurich-based baiji.org Foundation, who organized the expedition.

"China needs to urgently adopt similar rehabilitation and development programs that were used to improve the quality of rivers in Europe only a short time ago," they said.

The expedition was set up together with the Institute of Hydrobiology in Wuhan and was carried out under the auspices of the Chinese Agricultural Ministry.

 

 

Item 30: Korea: Oil Refiners Enjoy Booming Business

(Kim Yoon-mi, Korea Herald, 03 November, 2007) Record high oil prices are placing a heavy burden on consumers, but local oil refiners are raking in hefty profits, according to industry data.

GS Caltex, the nation's second-largest oil refiner, saw its operating profit surging 89.3 percent to 274.5 billion won in the third quarter from a year earlier, the company said in a regulatory filing on Thursday. The figure is second highest since it recorded 280 billion won in the second quarter last year.

The company attributed the high profits to improved refining margins compared to a year ago, and high prices of gasoline.

SK Energy's operating profit also jumped 19.7 percent to 418.4 billion won in the third quarter from a year ago, with operating profit margin moving up by 0.9 percentage point to 6.3 percent.

The energy and petrochemical company's strong performance in oil business mainly drove its profits up, company officials said.

Some critics say that oil refiners are taking too much profit on high oil prices on a speculation that refiners take advantage of not revealing the ex-factory prices of gasoline and diesel.

In a recent National Assembly audit, Rep. Chin Soo-hee of the Grand National Party pointed out that local oil refiners pumped up ex-factory prices of gasoline in the first half, passing on high oil price burden to consumers.

However, oil refiners say their oil businesses contribute to the growth of Korea's exports, and therefore do not hurt consumers. SK Energy officials told local newspaper Seoul Shinmun on Thursday that half of their sales last year were made overseas, mostly in Asian countries.

The government remains neutral on the issue, as Finance Minister Kwon O-kyu said in a National Assembly audit on Thursday that the government "cannot force oil refiners to disclose ex-factory prices in a market economy system."

 

 

Item 31: Spectre of Global Warming Haunts Japanese Rice Farms

(Miho Yoshikawa, Reuters, 06 November, 2007) MINAMI-UONUMA, Japan - It produces the most prized rice in a country that prides itself on its rice.

But summer heat waves have sent temperatures soaring in Japan's Uonuma region, resulting in lower quality rice grains, and making farmers worried that global warming might have reached their rice fields in northwestern Japan.

"I'd be lying if I said I wasn't worried about the effect that global warming might have," said rice farmer Ryoichi Takamura as he inspected his fresh-cropped brown rice fields.

For 17 generations, Takamura's family has grown rice on a plateau between the low mountains that cradle Uonuma, creating a climate of extreme high and low temperatures that are crucial for the production of Koshihikari rice, Japan's premium rice.

But Takamura, 49, who was born and bred in the region, says these unique weather conditions have changed in recent years and the past few summers have been the hottest he can remember.

"I was totally dehydrated as I drove the harvester in the rice fields (this summer)," the slightly built Takamura remarked.

After watching his crop yields fall in recent years, Takamua said he succeeded at sustaining yields and quality this year by using plenty of water to protect rice from the scorching heat.

Japanese rice farmers and experts are growing more concerned about rising temperatures which is leading to poorer yields and the production of immature grains with a poor starch content that fetch a lower price even though they taste almost the same.

Japan's average annual temperature has been higher by 0.2 to 1.0 degrees centigrade for about the past decade, when compared to a base figure which is the average of temperatures taken between 1971-2000, data from the Japan Meteorological Agency shows.

These temperature rises coincide with a period when immature grains of rice, easily identified by their milky white exterior, were becoming conspicuous in freshly harvested crops.

"The 20 or so days after the ear of the rice has appeared is most crucial ... and high temperatures during that period leads to the production of immature grains," said rice expert Ikuo Ueno.

BOWLS OF RICE

Rice is believed to have been cultivated in Japan for the past 2,500 to 3,000 years. Bowls of rice are an integral part of meals, although consumption has dropped as a Western diet has become more prevalent especially among the young generation. Rice is also used to produce sake, an alcoholic beverage.

Per capita consumption of rice in Japan was 61 kg (135 pounds) last year, down 48 percent from its peak in 1962.

Rice is grown in almost every corner of Japan, including areas surrounding Tokyo, but global warming has had the most noticeable impact in the south, particularly on the island of Kyushu.

Ueno, head of the crop research department at the Kumamoto Prefectural Agricultural Research Center in Kyushu, said higher temperatures were to blame in part for poorer quality rice crops in recent years.

The heat, combined with fewer sunlight hours and damage from typhoons had contributed to several years of poor harvest in the prefecture, he said.

Research centres across Japan are studying ways to grow rice grains that can better cope with higher temperatures. They are also developing new grain varieties, although it may take as much as a decade for commercial harvesting of these grains to begin.

Some of these new grain types have started to be planted and have even begun to slowly enter the local markets, although Japanese consumers tend to have conservative palates which means it takes time for new varieties to gain a foothold.

About a decade ago, the National Agricultural Research Center for Kyushu Okinawa Region began to develop "Nikomaru", a rice with a strong tolerance to higher temperatures.

It was discovered by chance, according to Makoto Sakai, head of the centre's Rice Breeding Unit, who said the initial aim of the project was to create a new type of rice that would provide a higher yield and a fine grain appearance.

"However, there were hot years during the period we were conducting our research, and the result was that we developed a type of rice that is tolerant to high temperatures," Sakai said.

A few farmers in Nagasaki prefecture in Kyushu began to grow Nikomaru rice last year, but the new variety of rice so far only accounts for 3-4 percent of the total crops produced in the region and fetches a relatively low price.

As scientists experiment to find rice grains that can stand the heat, some Japanese chefs complain that even premium rice is not as tasty as it used to be.

"In the past, I could really savour the flavour of rice with just a sprinkling of salt," remarked Ushio Tachihara, a chef who runs a Japanese restaurant in Tokyo's upmarket Ginza district.

"This isn't a scientific point of view ... but for the past four or five years, it's become rare to have rice that I really find tasty".

 

 

Item 32: Glitnir: China leads world seafood output and consumption

(FishUpdate, 05 November, 2007) CHINA is the global leader of both seafood output and consumption, says Glitnir Bank, at its "Ocean of Opportunities" conference currently being held in Shanghai, China from November 4-5.

It is the fifth time the seafood bank hosts the international "think-tank" for the top global seafood companies. The latest edition of Glitnir's 2007 China Seafood Industry Report, which provides valuable insights and independent analytical thinking of the current state of the seafood industry, has been published at the conference. The report provides an analysis of the seafood sector and points out that China is the global leader of both seafood output and consumption.

"The recent strategic consulting agreement with Fu Ji Holdings and the setting up of Glitnir's representative office in Shanghai last year, demonstrates the bank's belief and confidence in the opportunities and high potential that China, as a market, has.

The annual seafood consumption in China is currently 26 kilos per capita and is expected to increase by 40 per cent over the next decade, to 36 kilos per capita.

"China by far is the largest exporter of seafood, outstripping the number two country more than fourfold. Currently, China represents some 35 percent of total global seafood production. It's fast growing farming competency and cost advantage continues to attract investors to the country," says Kristján Th. Davídsson, head of Glitnir's global seafood team, adding that the vast potential of China as a fast growing seafood market is another rapidly developing attraction.

The report further highlights the potential of shrimp as an increasingly important species. It states that last year, shrimp production in China rose by 14.7%. Given the easiness to raise and the ability to fetch a relatively quick profit thanks to the cost-effective production system, Glitnir predicts that the emphasis on the country's aquaculture industry might soon add shrimp as an important species in addition to tilapia and other species already being farmed.

The high growth in production and export of seafood products is said to be driven by demands from both the domestic and the overseas market, which is believed to bring unprecedented growth opportunities to investors.

 

 

Item 33: The Cost of China's Atkins Diet

(Andy Mukherje, International Herald Tribune, 26 April, 2007) The "tortilla crisis" that shook Mexico in January may not have been a flash in the pan. If Jing Ulrich, the Hong Kong-based chairwoman of China equities at JPMorgan Chase, is correct, everything from beer to steak might just become more expensive globally.

Ulrich's case is built around a statistic and an observation: It takes 7 kilograms, or 15 pounds, of grain to produce 1 kilogram of beef; and "Chinese people are eating more meat as consumer wealth increases," she says.

If China's export-driven growth is deflationary for the world, its hunger for a protein-rich diet combined with an inability to produce it at home may prove to be inflationary.

Worldwide meat consumption is forecast to increase by more than half from 1997 to 2020; most of the new demand will come from China. The implications for grain demand are staggering.

This conclusion itself is not new.

In 1995, Lester Brown, then president of the Worldwatch Institute in Washington, had seen the avalanche coming in his book "Who Will Feed China?"

Since then, China has done a good job feeding a fifth of the world's population with less than a tenth of global farmland.

What has changed in recent years is the sustained increase in oil prices and the consequent diversion of food crops globally to the production of ethanol.

Corn futures prices have risen 60 percent in the past year on the Chicago Board of Trade.

So China is going on an Atkins diet just when global food security is perceived to be facing a threat from ethanol.

The combination, as we saw in Mexico earlier this year, could be explosive.

The price of corn-made tortilla, a component of Mexico's core inflation, tripled to 15 pesos, or $1.40, a kilogram, in January before President Felipe Calderon brokered an agreement with retailers, forcing them to hold the price at 8.5 pesos.

This is just the beginning. Throw in livestock demand in China, and the prognosis for corn and soy may well be for a multiyear bull run.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reportyed that per-capita meat consumption in China grew to 50 kilograms a year in 2000, from 20 kilograms in 1985.

The trend may continue unabated even as China exhausts the ability to meet growing demand for meat and feedstock from internal resources.

China's import of soybeans has doubled in the past five years. "Strong demand for soybeans is attributed to rising use of soybean meal as a protein source for swine, poultry and aquaculture production," the U.S. Agriculture Department said in an August 2005 circular.

In India, the only other billion-person economy, growing affluence is translating into rising demand for oultry because religious preferences limit consumption of beef and pork.

Poultry production is three times more efficient in terms of grain usage than, say, beef. That explains why, at least for the next decade, India will meet most of its protein requirement domestically. Where India may have to allow more imports is in pulses, which are a cheap source of vegetable protein and a big part of the Indian dietary tradition.

That will not have much of an impact globally because world trade in lentils, peas and chickpeas, which are together referred to as pulses, is almost insignificant.

But what will be the consequences of the surge in China's meat consumption? With cities and towns encroaching upon what always was a short supply of farmland - not to mention a growing shortage of unpolluted water - China will increasingly depend on the rest of the world to feed its people and animals.

"The bull market for agricultural commodities will continue," Ulrich notes in her study. "Potential knock-on effects may include rising beer prices as barley has become more expensive. Steak prices have also increased as producers pass on the rising costs of feed to the end consumer."

Have we not heard this before?

After all, back in 1996, corn had risen to more than $5 a bushel only to crash to less than half that amount by mid-1998. The grain is now at about $3.70 a bushel. What is the guarantee that this dawn will also not be short-lived?

For one, some of the anticipated competition between food and fuel may never materialize. The venture capitalist and alternative-energy evangelist Vinod Khosla has invested in a New Zealand-based company that will create ethanol from carbon monoxide. Khosla's argument is that by the time ethanol is produced in large quantities, the key ingredient will not be corn, but residue like barley straw.

That may well turn out to be true 10 years from now, though at the moment, corn is integral to the ethanol frenzy.

Unless oil goes back to $30 a barrel and stays there, the current rally in farm produce may not peter out any time soon. The global inventory of food is at its lowest since 1972, said the investor Jim Rogers, who in 1999 correctly predicted the start of the commodities rally.

Even if you forget ethanol, world food production cannot rise at the pace at which China will demand more meat.

Tortilla trouble is already here. Brace now for beer brawls and steak strife.

 

 

Item 34: Sakhalin Energy PR Misrepresents Report Findings: Widespread non-compliance revealed in consultant report on Sakhalin II

(Pacific Environment, 07 November, 2007) An environmental consultant report to potential public lenders to the controversial Sakhalin II oil and gas project in eastern Russia[1] reveals a much higher level of non-compliance than represented by project sponsors, according to an independent critique by Pacific Environment and Sakhalin Environment Watch 2] At an October 8, 2007 Moscow press conference, the project operator, Sakhalin Energy Investment Company Ltd. (Sakhalin Energy), claimed that the AEA report gives Sakhalin II a "clean bill of health."[3] However, the report, issued to appease lenders’ concerns over Sakhalin II’s history of environmental degradation, documents regular violations of social and environmental standards.

"The AEA report reveals a much higher level of chronic non-compliance with the policies of the lenders than Sakhalin Energy claims," said David Gordon, Executive Director of Pacific Environment. "Sakhalin Energy simply misrepresented the findings of the AEA report."

The AEA report documents Sakhalin Energy’s repeated and widespread failure to adequately assess impacts and implement necessary mitigation measures before unacceptable and preventable negative environmental damage had already occurred, particularly with regard to endangered whales and wild salmon.

"The AEA report confirms what prior lender consultants and external NGOs have known for years—that Sakhalin II is characterized by a history of environmental violations and subversion of the environmental assessment process," said Dmitry Lisitsyn, Chairman of Sakhalin Environment Watch, the leading local environmental organization on Sakhalin Island.

Pacific Environment’s critique of the AEA report identifies several flaws in the quality and approach of the AEA report, including the fact that the report was paid for by Sakhalin Energy itself. Pacific Environment also identified stark incongruity between some unfounded phrases in its Executive Summary and the findings contained deep in the 300+ page report.

"Sakhalin Energy points to throw-away phrases in the Executive Summary that are unsubstantiated in the report’s subsequent analysis. The devil is in the detail of the 300- page report," said Doug Norlen, Policy Director of Pacific Environment.

The AEA report also reveals Sakhalin Energy’s continued undermining of environmental initiatives, including the company’s unwillingness to provide required timely information to external experts, such as the Western Gray Whale Advisory Panel (WGWAP). WGWAP conducts reviews required by potential lenders. Along with Sakhalin Energy’s unwillingness to follow all reasonable recommendations of the WGWAP and other experts, this represents irreversible violations of contractual conditions set by potential lenders.

Based on their review of the AEA Report, Pacific Environment and Sakhalin Environment Watch renewed their calls that public and private lenders considering financing for the project.[4] must decline financing for Sakhalin II.

"The AEA report demonstrates once and for all that financing the Sakhalin-II project would mean that these banks would immediately breach their environmental and social policies," said David Gordon, Executive Director of Pacific Environment.

Notes:

1. Sakhalin II includes offshore oil and gas platforms, subsea pipelines, 800 kilometers of on-shore pipelines, one of the world’s largest liquid natural gas plants, and oil and gas tanker export terminals. Over 90% constructed, at cost of over $20 billion, Sakhalin has been said by project sponsors to be the largest integrated oil and gas project in the world.

2. Pacific Environment’s critique, entitled, Material Breach: A Review of AEA’s Independent Environmental Consultant Final Report to Agency Lenders Regarding Sakhalin II Phase 2, is available at Material Breach - Review of AEA Report(7)(b).pdf

3. AEA Technology is a UK-based environmental consulting firm. Its report, entitled, AEA Technology plc, Independent Environmental Consultant Final Report – Agency Lenders, Sakhalin II Phase 2 Project Health, Safety, Environmental and Social Review (2007), is available at iec_ddr2007.pdf

4. Public lenders considering financing for the Sakhalin-II project include Japan Bank for International Cooperation, Export Credit Guarantee Department (U.K.), and Export-Import Bank of the United States. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which previously had led the environmental review for the public lenders, has withdrawn its consideration of the Sakhalin-II project.

 

 

Item 35: Global Carbon Market Pins Hopes on Upcoming Bali Gathering

(Urip Hudiono, Jakarta Post, 10 November, 2007) The global carbon trading market is pinning its hopes on the upcoming conference on climate change in Bali to lay out the kind of post-Kyoto emissions reduction framework that is needed for the further expansion of the market, which is estimated to have doubled in size this year to US$60 billion.

Among the specific issues that carbon market players will be watching out for during next month's conference are signs of greater commitment to extending the Kyoto treaty -- which will expire in 2012 -- and a greater variety of projects eligible for carbon trading.

"The market is looking for positive signals in emissions reduction," United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) executive secretary Yvo de Boer said at a carbon trading forum Tuesday.

"The market already has carbon projects for beyond 2012, making it actually ahead of policy-makers in expecting emission reduction efforts to continue."

Speaking at the Carbon Forum Asia 2007, de Boer said the international community must agree with the market so as to avoid a lapse in emission reduction efforts after the Kyoto Protocol. This was essential not just for commercial reasons, but, more importantly, as a result of the imminent dangers from climate change if these efforts were not sustained.

"The heart of the issue is post-2012," he said, while alluding to the differences between developed nations and developing countries regarding the responsibility for emission reductions, which have always served to undermine the Kyoto agreement.

"We expect Bali to further the downward pressure against emissions, and also to seek ways as to how developing countries can still grow their economies and provide welfare for their peoples."

As regards the interests of the carbon market, de Boer said there was a possibility of extending the Kyoto Protocol's clean development mechanism (CDM) to a greater variety of projects aimed at reducing carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions.

These could include forest conservation and deforestation prevention programs, which developing countries have been proposing. The Kyoto Protocol only acknowledges reforestation programs at present.

The carbon trading market is essentially built on the CDM, which came into effect along with the Kyoto Protocol in 2005, and allows developed nations to buy or invest in certain projects in developing countries whose Certified Emission Reduction (CER) value has been verified by the UN. This is then set off against the developed nations' requirement to reduce their emissions by some 5 percent compared to their 1990 levels, which might not be feasible if carried out through projects in the developed nations alone.

The UN has so far registered 825 CDM projects, mostly coming from Asian countries such as India and China, to meet the demand from Europe, resulting in an increase in the carbon market's trade volume to some $30 billion last year from $11 billion in 2005.

One CER value for a CDM project, equal to one metric ton of CO2 reduction, can fetch up to $10 on the carbon market.

Andrei Marcu, who heads the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA), agreed that consistent emission reduction efforts would result in the global carbon market growing to between $60 and $70 billion in volume this year, and higher still further on.

More "flexible" approaches regarding CDM standards could be the answer to the challenges of financing faced by many projects that are actually eligible for carbon trading, Marcu said, acknowledging that many small projects could not afford the some $50,000 in fees needed to process their certification as CDM projects.

"Such smaller projects should go as voluntary emission reduction (VER) projects (which are still tradable), and there should be schemes later to consider VER projects as certified CDM ones," he told The Jakarta Post.

The carbon trading community, meanwhile, should for its part also constantly remember its primary environmental objective, Marcu added, in response to critics who allege that carbon trading merely commoditizes emission reduction efforts and lacks accountable enforcement afterwards.

Meanwhile, Indonesian State Minister for the Environment, Rachmat Witoelar, who also spoke at the forum, said developing countries faced difficulties regarding the technologies that could be used for emission reduction projects, as well as bankability problems and a lack of awareness about the potential of such projects.

"Developing countries also need transfers of technology to actually implement carbon projects, and not just the expertise to procure them," he said.

Indonesia has the potential to account for up to 2 percent of the global carbon market, or 125 million tons of CO2 reductions, with some of the main opportunities being in the forestry arena. However, the country has so far lagged behind other nations, and has thus far only approved 24 carbon projects, with nine of these waiting for CDM certification by the UN.

The two-day Carbon Forum Asia 2007 is the region's second after one held in Beijing last year, and forms part of the international Carbon Expo in Cologne, Germany, where carbon project developers and brokers can meet to share their ideas and experiences in developing the market.

The Bali international conference on climate change will run from Dec. 3 to 14, and will kick off talks to draft a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. It will be followed by further negotiations at similar conferences in Warsaw next year and Copenhagen in 2009.

 

 

Item 36: China Environment Woes Blamed on Lack of Planning

(Ben Blanchard, Reuters, 09 November, 2007) BEIJING - Lack of central planning, ministerial infighting and a pervasive get-rich-quick attitude mean China's environmental problems are not going away any time soon, a state newspaper on Thursday quoted an official as saying.

Many Chinese cities are enveloped in choking smog, including 2008 Olympic host Beijing, while rivers run black and green areas are denuded as the country's economy continues to boom.

Pan Yue, deputy head of the State Environmental Protection Administration, said the group could only do so much to help given its limited powers and urged local governments be more responsible, according to the official People's Daily.

Pan said the environmental assessment process that industry must pass to build new factories or mines was "blocked at the front, and harried by troops at the rear".

That's to say it faced an impossible task -- unable to better the process without improved laws, and constantly being pushed by companies and governments to approve their projects.

"There are many reasons for China's environmental problems, but the most serious is a lack of a planning structure, which has brought enormous, hidden environmental safety worries," he said.

Pan said that while his administration did indeed have to sign off on projects, it did not have the power to ensure cities or provinces did not cram a whole series of polluting factories into one area.

"It's not rational to squeeze them in all in together," Pan said, being quoted in a newspaper which is an important Communist Party mouthpiece.

"Whether or not an area's ecology can stand such projects, needs an overall environmental assessment," he added.

Localities were normally more interested in short term economic gains than the longer health or environmental impact, Pan said.

"This has meant that in the last two years, regions and departments have no supporting planning work and have come up with many reasons to avoid their planning responsibility," he said.

Rules supposed to tackle this issue were meant to have come out in August or September but have been pushed back due to "many differences in view from certain departments", Pan added.

"I want to stress again, these rules are not about expanding the power of the environmental protection agency," he said.

"They are a concept, a scientific development concept," Pan added, refering to a policy of President Hu Jintao's now enshrined in the Communist Party's constitution that espouses gentler, more environmentally friendly growth.

(Editing by Nick Macfie and Alex Richardson)

 

 

Item 37: UN's Ban Ki-Moon Flies From Antarctic to Amazon to Push Climate Agenda

(Bill Faries, Bloomberg, 09 November, 2007) -- United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon will see melting glaciers and endangered forests as travels from Antarctica to the Amazon to show nations that they must take stronger actions to slow climate change.

Ban, 63, flies to the southern Chilean city of Punta Arenas today on his way to a research base in Antarctica, where he'll meet Chilean and Korean scientists. Ban, the eighth secretary- general, will be the first to visit the ice-encrusted continent at the bottom of the world. Four days later, he'll learn about Brazil's efforts to slow deforestation in the Amazon following a visit to the city of Santarem.

Ban is stepping up pressure on countries to negotiate a treaty that would place stricter limits on greenhouse gas emissions, including carbon dioxide. Emissions reductions in an existing agreement, known as the Kyoto Protocol, are set to expire in 2012. Negotiators will meet on the island of Bali, Indonesia, next month to start hashing out a new accord.

"The secretary-general is trying to make sure there is a strong mandate coming out of Bali," said Richard Moss, the director of climate change programs at the World Wildlife Fund in Washington. "This is a process that has to have some clear milestones."

A failure to agree on tougher targets, UN scientists say, could lead to more powerful and frequent storms, flooding of low- lying nations, and millions of environmental refugees. During a Sept. 24 summit in New York to discuss climate change, Ban said there needs to be a "real breakthrough" at the Bali meeting.

"Galvanizing international action on global warming is one of my main priorities as secretary-general," Ban said during a speech at the UN offices in Santiago yesterday.

`Important Challenge'

Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, who invited Ban to visit the country's Eduardo Frei Montalva station in Antarctica, said at the same event that climate change is "one of the most important challenges facing mankind."

Countries should aim for emissions cuts that would help keep the planet's temperature from rising less than 2 degrees centigrade by 2100, Moss, who works on the UN panel that shared this year's Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, said in a telephone interview.

That goal will be harder, he said, if countries boost reliance on coal, which emits more greenhouse gases per unit of energy than alternative sources like natural gas.

The International Energy Agency issued a report Nov. 7 saying that economic growth in China and India will help raise demand for coal by 73 percent between 2005 and 2030. More than 1,000 coal-fed power plants will be built in the next five years, mostly in the two countries, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

"Coal development at this pace and scale is bad," said Moss. "Even if we cut emissions now, we'll see changes because of the path we've already committed ourselves to."

 

 

Item 38: China: The Gathering Sandstorm: Encroaching desert, missingwater

(Clifford Coonan, The Independent, 09 November 2007) China is losing a million acres a year to desertification. In Dunhuang, a former Silk Road oasis in the Gobi, the resulting water shortage has become critical.

Jiang Zhenzhong is watching, helpless, as his farm at the edge of the Gobi desert runs out of water. His cotton fields are close to the dwindling Crescent Moon lake in north-eastern China. The lake is famous throughout China, attracting a million visitors a year, but now it looks more like a village pond, encircled by railings and fading fast as the desert sucks up more and more water. In the 1960s, the lake used to be 10 metres deep – now it is barely one metre.

Jiang's farm is in Mingshan village, at the foothills of 500-metre sand dunes near Dunhuang, a key staging point on the ancient Silk Road that linked East and West for hundreds of years. The desert threatens to engulf the village, and the ancient town itself, which has seen its population soar from less than 40,000 people in the 1950s to nearly 200,000 today.

The disappearing lake at this point of the Silk Road is the most powerful symbol of an emerging water crisis. The fields around the village are brown and desolate, and it is hard to imagine how anything could grow here. Two years ago the farmers were ordered to stop digging thousands of wells to irrigate their cotton fields because the water simply was not there any more. Many of Jiang's friends have already left for the city, joining the ranks of millions of migrant workers leaving poor provinces like Gansu, but Jiang is defiant, saying he's planning to stay until the last drop of water is gone.

However, the pressure to find the money to send his nine-year-old daughter to high school is making life hard.

"The water is less and less every year, and without water we can't grow the crops," said Jiang, who wears a baseball cap at a jaunty angle and smokes copious cigarettes as he sits on a stool surrounded by drying cotton. The family's annual income is around 7,000 yuan (£450) once fertiliser and other costs have been paid. By his reckoning, it would cost 5,000 yuan a year to send his daughter to high school, so she may have to join her 15-year-old sister working on the farm. But he is staying positive. The family earns enough for him to be able to afford a motorbike and a television. "We have a 21-inch set – big TVs are bad for your eyes. I use the bike to bring the kids to school. Kids have it good these days, don't they? We had to walk to school in our day," he said, smiling.

The lot of the average farmer is improving, but costs are rising because there is less water to go around. "It's only rained three times this year, and the harvest is down," he said. The house has running water and a solar panel on the roof heats water during the freezing winters. Life is better than 10 years ago, and there are more jobs around, but you have to travel to get work. "Life is not easy for farmers, you have to be ready to do jobs other than farming," said Jiang.

The government in Beijing acknowledges desertification as the biggest environmental challenge holding back sustainable development, and has pledged to control the country's spreading deserts, which already cover a fifth of its land.

The question is what can be done. China's environmental watchdog, Sepa, says the desert's march is claiming a million acres of land every year, and soon 40 per cent of China could be lost to the creeping sands brought in by worsening sandstorms. Millions of tons of sand from the Gobi desert are dumped on Beijing by sandstorms every spring, and Chinese dust makes its way into the skies above cities as far away as Los Angeles. China suffers from a shortage of 30 billion cubic metres of water for irrigation every year. And while China has more than 20 per cent of the world's population, it has only 7 per cent of its arable land, precious farmland that the desert is slowly but surely eating its way into. This could result in higher food prices throughout China, a potential disaster given 750 million people live on less than £1 a day and can ill afford more expensive rice and other staples.

Elsewhere in Gansu, the desert has almost covered Minqin County where many dams were built, and is now moving at the rate of eight to 10 metres a year along the chain of oases known as the Hexi Corridor. In the past few decades, Dunhuang's main rivers have been drying up, its lakes have been disappearing, its underground water supplies have shrunk and its oases have degenerated. The city has also had to withstand stronger and more frequent winds and sandstorms.

The narrow road through the dusty fields in this area is set against a towering backdrop of sand dunes, the highest of which is 1,715 metres above sea level. Everywhere there are billboards ordering farmers to conserve water, not to dig wells and reminding them that all water distribution in this area is the job of the local government. Water is distributed three or four times a month from a reservoir of the Dong river.

The desert also threatens to swallow up the Mogao grottos near Dunhuang, a centuries-old site known as the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, which house cave-temple murals and manuscripts dating back to ancient times. Up at the lake, Song Yun remembers happier days for the once-majestic lake. Born in the year of the Chinese revolution, 1949, Song harkens back to the 1950s when the lake was a place to swim and play. "You could just scoop the water out of the spring and drink it," he said.

Beside the lake stands a large pavilion, built in neo-classical Han Chinese style. It now dwarfs the lake below. Previously there was a Buddhist temple at the lake, but Red Guards destroyed that during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), locals say.

Song points to a mark where the water level used to reach. "The biggest shortage we have at Dunhuang is water. It's disappearing because the water table is falling and the spring is not producing as much as before. The trees won't grow, because there is not enough water. It was used up by farmers when irrigation started in the 1970s and the underground water started to diminish," said Song.

He has abandoned farming – there is not much work to be done on the farm now and his family can take care of it – and is wearing a baggy uniform and carrying a loudhailer in his new job as security officer at the lake.

"Beyond that sand dune over there is the desert," he said, pointing with the megaphone. The looming dune makes this an ominous prospect indeed. People are sliding down the sand dunes on trays, while groups of camels, their riders wearing luminous orange shoe coverings, traverse the desert beside the lake.

Shaking his head resignedly, Song interrupts our conversation to go and rescue an errant tourist who has gone walkabout in the dunes, before returning to the topic close to everyone's heart. "Our place just needs water. If we have water we can grow all kinds of things," he said.

Xu Anming, 41, is visiting the lake with a group of friends. "I come from Yangzhou, in Jiangsu province – it's [former supreme leader] Jiang Zemin's home town. There is less water here than before, we all read about it in the newspapers and saw it on TV. Everyone knows," he said. As he speaks, his friends are arranging complicated photographic tableaux behind him, aimed at getting as much of the dunes, the dwindling lake and the travelling companions into shot at once. "The water is less, but there are good policies from the local government," said Xu.

The Jiangsu visitors are expensively dressed and carrying state-of-the-art cameras and video recorders, in sharp counterpoint to the Gansu residents. The Gansu government has pledged to spend 1.93bn yuan improving the environment and has made numerous efforts to stop the level of the lake sinking.

The ground water level is dropping 40cm a year and the oasis is getting smaller, fast. Even Premier Wen Jiabao has mentioned the importance on several occasions of "healing Dunhuang". The Water Resources minister, Chen Lei, said recently that an annual water shortage of nearly 40 billion cubic metres in China can be blamed on global warming. "The changes have led to a combination of both frequent drought and flooding," he told the China Daily newspaper. However, rising consumption is also playing a part, as well as pollution. Rainfall in many parts of northern China is down 12 per cent. It is frustrating for people who have tilled the fields for many generations. In one cotton field, a farmer and his family scratch desperately at the dry earth. When one of the farmers sees the foreigners he waves his pitchfork at us, angry. His gesture raises only a cloud of dust.

In a neighbouring field, He Zicheng, 50, is clearing a field with his son Wei, loading the brush from the cotton fields on to a cart. His nine sheep nose around, seeking mouthfuls to nibble on. Slim pickings. "Without water the cotton doesn't grow well. Ten years ago we had more water, but there were too many wells and now we have this," he said. Behind him, the mighty dunes seem to be getting closer as he speaks.

 

 

Item 39: Free Trade in Rice Can Lead to More Hunger

( Jonathan Lynn, Reuters, 06 November, 2007) GENEVA - Free trade in rice has increased hunger and poverty among subsistence farmers in at least three developing countries, an anti-poverty advocacy group said on Thursday.

The Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance examined the local impacts of decisions to open national rice markets to foreign imports in Ghana, Honduras and Indonesia.

Its study supported what many advocacy groups have long suspected -- that free trade policies exacerbated hunger and poverty, rather than helping countries out of it.

"The causes we found were mainly due to liberalisation of markets and reductions of tariffs," Jean Blaylock, global trade campaign officer for the alliance, told Reuters.

The findings of the study run counter to the thinking behind the Doha round of trade talks at the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which aims to help poorer nations export their way out of poverty by freeing up global trade.

The study also reinforces the conclusion that aid to developing countries in the form of food can devastate the livelihoods of local farmers.

Rice is the staple food for half the world's population.

NO BENEFIT FOR CONSUMERS

Blaylock said the study showed that rice farmers, while not starving, were cutting back on their children's education, health care and at times food, and the beneficiaries of cheap rice imports were the importing companies rather than consumers.

"In all three countries, the influx of cheap imports has not even necessarily equated to lower costs for consumers because of the high concentration of the rice business," the group said.

"Thus both producers and consumers in the national economy can lose in the drive to liberalise markets to international trade," it said in a statement.

Rice growing and processing are the main source of income for around 2 billion people, it said. International trade in rice accounts for only 6.5 percent of global consumption.

The study showed that Ghanaian rice farmers in Dalun, Northern Region, had seen demand for their product drop 75 percent since 2000 as rice from the United States, Vietnam and Thailand flooded the local market.

Rice production in Honduras collapsed in the early 1990s when the government removed tariffs and producer support under International Monetary Fund and World Bank programmes, it said.

Huge amounts of rice dumped on the Honduran market as food aid from the United States after two natural disasters, Hurricane Mitch and Tropical Storm Michelle, eliminated demand for local rice at a fair price.

"Donations ... of milled rice came from abroad, and the municipalities were full of milled rice. They started giving this rice to everybody. So the market was saturated and rice producers didn't know what to do with their rice," the study quoted Honduran farmer Eduardo Benitez as saying.

Rice imports to Indonesia increased under liberalisation expanded after the 1997 Asia financial crisis, creating volatility in producer and consumer prices resulting in higher poverty, malnutrition and debt, it said.

 

 

Item 40: S Korean Workers Clash with Police Over Free Trade Deal with US

(AP, 11 November 2007) SEOUL, South Korea - Thousands of South Korean farmers and workers clashed with riot police Sunday at a massive rally against a free trade agreement with the United States.

The clash began when the protesters tried to break through a barricade blocking the road to the US Embassy. Police fired 12 water cannons and sprayed fire extinguishers to halt the protesters, a police official said on condition of anonymity, citing policy.

Some protesters swung sticks and threw stones at the riot police and tried to turn over police buses set up to block the protest in central Seoul.

Police said they arrested about 100 protesters and that more than 10 riot police were injured. Organizers said about 50 demonstrators were hurt, mostly with head injuries.

Organizers said 50,000 people took part in the protest, occupying a 16-lane road and chanting slogans against the free trade deal, while police estimated there were 20,000 demonstrators.

We will thwart (the passage) of the FTA as it would deepen the polarization of our society,’ said Woo Moon-sook, a spokeswoman for the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, one of organizers of the rally near Seoul City Hall.

Trade chiefs from the two countries signed the accord in June, concluding months of tough negotiations to lower or eliminate tariffs and other trade barriers on a wide range of products and services.

The agreement must be endorsed by the legislatures of both countries before it goes into effect. The South Korean government submitted the pact to the National Assembly in September for approval.

South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun said Sunday that his country could be left behind in the global economy without the free trade deal, saying it could give South Korea a chance to move forward.

South Korea needs the FTA’ with the U.S., Roh said in an interview with KTV, a government-run TV channel, according to his office.

The deal is the largest free trade agreement for the US since the North American Free Trade Agreement more than a decade ago, and the largest ever for South Korea.

Both sides said the accord will boost growth, but some groups, such as farmers in South Korea and labor groups in the U.S., have opposed it.

Although the deal excludes rice _ a key South Korean crop _ farmers are worried that other kinds of US agricultural produce will pour into the country, threatening their livelihoods.

Farmers would be the biggest victim of the free trade deal,’ said Lee Young-soo, a farmer who took part in the rally.

 

 

Item 41: A Society Afraid of the Truth: Column

(Jeong Seok-gu, Senior Economic Reporter, Hankyoreh, 07 November, 2007) There are some forces in our society composed of people who fear the truth being revealed. They create their own secret kingdom separate from the outside world. Within this castle they enjoy privileges enjoyed only by them, and are wholly distinguished from regular society. When an outsider tries to reveal the story about them, they have an allergic reaction and resist with desperation.

One of these forces is Samsung. Or, more precisely, the strategic planning office that oversees the whole Samsung group. The inner circle that runs this office tries to make the leaders of our society into "friendly forces" by using a massive amount of financial influence. This kingdom has grown strong enough to control a state agency, and it is building the foundation on which the next generation can assume the same control.

The group that cooperates or backs Samsung as it builds its sturdy kingdom is wide-ranging. It encompasses the whole leadership class in our society, from members of the National Assembly, the executive branch, the judicial branch, the media and more. Now that some of this secret kingdom has almost come to the surface, these forces friendly to Samsung are revealing themselves. They are desperately trying to close Pandora’s Box. A sitting member of cabinet has spoken up, and a political activist has come out and confessed that he, too, was once "maintained" by Samsung.

The source of Samsung’s ability to create and maintain these friendly forces is its illegally amassed slush fund (bijageum, or "secret fund"). This slush fund is maintained as cash or bonds, or is hidden away in the "borrowed name accounts" of current and former top executives. Samsung denies the existence of secret funds in borrowed name accounts, but it knows better about them than anyone else. There is testimony by former executives confirming the truth about these bank accounts that waits for attention.

The claims by the lawyer Kim Yong-cheol about Samsung’s irregularities, made through a "confession of conscience," are simple. Samsung is corrupting those in leadership in our society in order to maintain its kingdom for generations of posterity through illegal and less-than-legal activities, and the whole source of its ability to do this is its illegally amassed slush fund. He proposes to Korean society that we break the cycle of corruption by disclosing the truth about the money from whence the corruption originates.

Expected though it was, Samsung’s resistance is fierce. It is trying to play up what it sees as Kim’s personal immorality and label him a betrayer. It wholly denies the existence of a slush fund in borrowed name accounts. It is essentially treating the man who was once the head of its legal team like he has mental problems. Is it that scared of having the truth in the open?

Samsung is one thing, but the reaction of our society in general is also a problem. Many are cynical, wanting to know what he is so upset about since he lived quite well thanks to Samsung all those years. He gets accused of being how he is for being from a certain region. You might expect this much from the likes of those who at least got some of the crumbs from the "rice cakes" Samsung has been handing out. But when it comes from regular members of the public who have nothing to do with Samsung you get depressed as you wonder where to go looking for justice in our society.

Facing the truth can be a fearful prospect and it can make you uncomfortable. But when you continue to avoid the truth and rationalize the wrong, all that awaits you is the life of a servile slave. Samsung is creating and promoting lives of shame by throwing petty cash at the leadership circles of Korean society. Though there does exist a difference in terms of degree, the reality is that most of the leadership class in our society has fallen into that trap. The Kingdom of Samsung is a truth and reality.

It is time our society start a public discussion on the question of Samsung. Eradicating the structure of corruption of the Kingdom of Samsung, operating as it does on an illegal slush fund, would be the way to assure Samsung’s future as a corporation and a shortcut to making our society more honest. Don’t the leaders of our society want to use this opportunity to stop being "maintained" by Samsung and be free? Do they not then want to serve our society instead of Samsung?

 

 

Item 42: Korea: Massive Demonstration Causes confrontation with Police: Rally against FTA, irregular worker law, iraq troop extension brings out 20,000 protesters and 88,000 riot police

(Hankyoreh, 12 November, 2007) A massive rally against a free trade agreement with the United States and laws against irregular workers was held on November 11 with the participation of some 20,000 farmers and workers, according to police estimates.

Despite the government’s refusal to grant a permit for the demonstration, tens of thousands of farmers and workers began sealing off the main street between Seoul City Hall and Namdaemun at around 3:00 p.m. yesterday.

As riot police tried to block them, Lee Hyeong-jin, 45, attempted to set himself on fire, but riot police acted quickly and extinguished the flames. Lee is a farmer from Haman, South Jolla province.

Protesters called on the government to block the South Korea-U.S. free trade agreement, revise laws governing irregular workers, and tighten regulations against speculative foreign investors and public financial institutions. They also demanded that the government withdraw that Zaytun Unit from Iraq, stop the crack-down on street vendors and resolve unemployment issues for young jobseekers.

Kwon Young-gil, the presidential candidate of the Democratic Labor Party, said, "The neoliberal policy of President Roh Moo-hyun’s administration has taken the lives of farmers and street vendors. We have decided to gather here to announce a new fighting ground," Kwon said.

Organizers accused the administration of President Roh Moo-hyun of sealing off the demonstration, saying, "This is the first time since 1998 that the government has not approved a nationwide protest, except for two rallies during the administration of former President Roh Tae-woo. President Roh Moo-hyun’s administration has finally proven itself to be against laborers and farmers."

At around 2:30 p.m, protesters scuffled with riot police, hurling parts of road bricks or wielding sticks. After the demonstration, they attempted to march toward the U.S. embassy building in downtown Seoul. The government mobilized some 24,000 riot police officers in a plaza near Seoul City Hall, and some 64,000 riot police officers across the country in order to block the demonstrations.

Shin In-soo, a lawyer at the civic organization Lawyers for Democratic Society, said, "The government has clearly breached the constitutional right to demonstrate. It blocked the demonstration, though it had no clear grounds to do so."

 

 

Item 43: Fisheries: New EU Law Means that China Must Step Up Oversight

(Reuters, November 12, 2007) BEIJING - European Union efforts to crack down on illegal fishing mean that major fish processing countries such as China must strengthen certification to prove the sources of their products are legally caught, the EU said on Friday.

Cod and other protected fish have ended up in China and other countries for processing, hindering efforts to make fisheries more sustainable and creating unfair competition for legal fishing vessels, said Joe Borg, European Commissioner for Fisheries and Maritime Affairs.

"This is why we encourage our partners like China and all the countries from whom we import fish products, to see to it that they have the proper mechanism in place so that they would be able to certify that that fish has at its source fish which is legally caught," Borg told a news conference.

Borg was speaking in Beijing, where he met with officials from the Agriculture Ministry, the State Oceanic Administration and the Foreign Ministry for talks aimed at strengthening cooperation on managing fisheries and fighting pirate fishing.

He said he also explained a new EU draft law that cracks down on illegal fishing in European waters with stiff fines and the blacklisting of boats and countries.

The law calls for a scheme in which the import of all fish and fisheries products into the EU would require certification to prove the catch has been legally caught. If vessels break the rules, they may find EU ports closed to them.

Worldwide, illegal fishing is estimated to be worth 10 billion euros (US$14.7 billion) a year.

"We need to work closely together in order to eliminate the pirate fishing that takes place in international waters," Borg said of the EU and China.

He is also to travel to the coastal city of Qingdao and then Shanghai, where he will visit port facilities and an aquaculture wholesale market. (Reporting by Lindsay Beck; Editing by Ken Wills)

 

 

Item 44: Shifting Desert Puts Silk Road Art at Risk

(Michael Sheridan, The Sunday Times, U.K., 11 November, 2007) THE shifting sands of China’s deserts – already blamed for dust clouds adding to global pollution – now threaten to bury the world’s outstanding collection of ancient Buddhist art in caves along the fabled Silk Road.

The frescoes and statues in the renowned Dunhuang caves are being damaged by grit blown from the Kumtag desert and could be buried by the dunes, according to Wang Jiru, director of the provincial desert control institute.

"The desert is growing because the River Shule, which runs through the oasis, has so many dams on it that its waters are shrinking," Wang told Xin-hua, the Chinese news agency.

The Dunhuang oasis is a treasure house of culture that contains the remains of a mysterious Buddhist civilisation that began 1,600 years ago and reached its peak in Tang dynasty China.

Many priceless paintings and manuscripts found in the caves were carried off to the British Museum 100 years ago by Aurel Stein, the archeologist, who paid monks just £130 for the lot.

A French rival later hauled off most of what was left on behalf of the Louvre.

The dry climate has preserved many of the wall paintings and statues in a mixture of oriental and Byzantine Greek styles, a testimony to the blend of races and religions that flourished along the desert trading route from China to the West.

Their potential fate is the most striking symbol yet of the ominous encroachment of desert, which is expanding by almost 1,000 square miles a year across a swathe of northern China’s plains. More than 4,000 villages have been swallowed up.

Experts have been sounding the alarm for at least a decade, citing the rapid expansion of heavily polluted Chinese cities and the enormous numbers of animals grazing on farmland to feed their millions of inhabitants.

The livestock have stripped away grasses, leaving a crust of soil that dries and turns to dust. Falling water levels, due to uncontrolled factory operations and wells sunk for city drinking supplies, increase the erosion.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned that global warming will make things worse as glaciers melt on the Tibetan plateau, reducing the reserves flowing to Chinese lakes and rivers.

The Gobi desert grew by more than 20,000 square miles in the 1990s and has crept to within 150 miles of Beijing.

The American embassy in the Chinese capital, which commissioned satellite surveillance, discovered that two deserts had merged to form one belt of sand across the provinces of Inner Mongolia and Gansu, site of the Dunhuang caves.

Another unified wasteland was coming into existence in the far west province of Xinjiang, where the Taklamakan and Kumtag deserts creep ever closer to one another.

The problem will be discussed at a global conference on climate change to be held on the Indonesian resort island of Bali next month. China will explain that in the past five years it has spent more than £4 billion to plant billions of trees and preserve grasslands.

Chinese leaders say that natural droughts are also to blame. In one sign of their desperation, officials have distributed vintage antiaircraft guns to farmers and trained them to fire shells containing silver iodide, a rain agent, into cloud formations.

Whatever the reasons, however, Chinese dust clouds have become an example of the global-isation of environmental risk. In 2002 a choking dust storm from China engulfed Seoul, the capital of South Korea, forcing the state to ground aircraft and close schools.

Satellite imagery has tracked brown miasma across Japan and chemical analysis has identified Chinese dust particles as far away as California.

Residents of Beijing itself have grown to dread the regular sand-storms from the Gobi desert, when the city disappears in a gritty haze and traffic crawls through a noontime gloom with headlights ablaze.

Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute was one of the first to warn of the grave social and economic consequences.

"In the deteriorating relationship between the global economy and the earth’s ecosystem, China is on the edge," he wrote in 2003.

China has 20% of the world’s population but only 7% of its arable land. A quarter of the country is officially classified as desert. Half a million farmers have been displaced by deserti-fication and officials have tried to enforce bans on uncontrolled grazing.

Now commodity traders and economists agree that Chinese demand for food, which is soaring while agricultural land is depleted, is going to force up world prices for grain and other basic foods.

Scientists and ecologists may be pinning their hopes for change on the fact that the man at the top of the Chinese political system has no excuse for ignorance about the problem. President Hu Jintao began his career as a water expert in the now-parched Gansu province.

 

 

Item 45: Japan's Sacred Bluefin, Loved Too Much

(Blaine Hardin, Washington Post, 11 November, 2007) TOKYO -- "Tuna cannot look like skinny Japanese women."

So says Tsunenori Iida, and he ought to know. His family has been buying and selling tuna for seven generations here at the world's largest fish market. Six mornings a week for 43 years, Iida has been casting his eyes and running his fingers over the torpedo-shaped carcasses of bluefin tuna, the most precious fish in the sea. They are brought here to Tokyo’s Tsukiji market, where a dawn auction sets the global price.

"I look for beauty and balanced plumpness," Iida said. "I am looking for a Catherine Zeta-Jones type of tuna."

Alas for Japan, which wolfs down a quarter of the global tuna catch, and for the rest of the world: An increasingly voracious appetite for sushi is driving the supply of plump pulchritude served raw perilously low.

Japan -- after years of overfishing a species that is as much sacrament as food -- is feeling the pinch more than any other country.

As of this year and for the next four years, the country's annual fishing quota has been slashed in half for southern bluefin tuna, found in the warm waters of the Southern Hemisphere. And its quota for Atlantic bluefin has been cut by almost a quarter.

Bluefin, which have been fished to the brink of extinction in some areas, are the largest tuna. They produce the most succulent sashimi-grade flesh, which is eaten raw either as sushi (together with a dollop of rice) or on its own, as sashimi.

Wholesale tuna prices, up about 20 percent in the past year, are so high that Japanese restaurant owners say they cannot pass on the full cost to customers.

Still, tuna remains on the menus because there is no real choice. Without a sizable slab of rich red flesh on prominent display, a sushi restaurant in this country loses face -- and customers.

"Tuna is the sushi in a sushi restaurant," said Izumi Niitsu, who manages Kihachi, a restaurant in Tokyo. He has been slicing and serving the stuff for 40 years. "If you have good tuna, you have a reputation of being a proper restaurant."

Niitsu now sells his highest grade of tuna (the higher the fat content, the higher the grade) at about $5 for a piece about the size of a matchbox. His wholesale cost for such a piece, he says, is often more than his customers pay.

"When customers order tuna after tuna, my heart sort of pounds," said Niitsu, who tries to cover his tuna losses by gently encouraging customers to enjoy species of raw fish that he sells at a profit.

 

 

Item 46: Japan Targets Migaloo?

(Sea Shepherd News, 12 November, 2007) Japan Fisheries Agency spokesman Hideki Moronuki has stated that Japan will not rule out harpooning Migaloo the beloved white whale that annually graces the Eastern coast of Australia during the winter migration. Two years ago when the Japanese Fisheries Agency spokesperson was asked if Migaloo would be included in the whale killing the answer was "he is a humpback, isn't he?"

Japanese whalers have refused to say if they will target white humpback whales such as Migaloo. As the Japanese whaling fleet prepares to leave port and head for the Antarctic, the Japan Fisheries Agency has given a firm "no comment" to questions about white whales.

The Japanese whaling fleet is preparing to depart from Japan on a criminal mission to target endangered humpback and fin whales in the Southern Whale Sanctuary. The ships have been given a quota of 50 humpbacks along with 50 fin whales and hundreds of the smaller minke whales this year.

Migaloo, whose Aboriginal name means White Fella, is believed to be the only completely white humpback whale in the world and is often spotted among the humpbacks which form the basis of Australia's whale-watching industry.

Australian Associated Press inquiries of Japan Fisheries Agency about the fate of Migaloo and other white whales were met with "no comment". Captain Paul Watson reacted to the report on the potential threat to Migaloo by accusing the Japanese of deliberately goading Australians.

"What Moronuki is saying is that Japan will do whatever it wishes, and to show contempt for Australians they have decided to target the beloved humpbacks. They will even kill Migaloo if they come across him. They are saying that Australians haven’t got the guts to oppose them because Japan is the economic master of Australia and Australians have to accept everything the Japanese want for fear of losing resource sales to Japan. Japan is an economic bully and will continue to bully Aussies and Kiwis until some politician with a modicum of backbone decides to defend AnZac honour by kicking their ruthless whale killing asses out of the Southern Oceans Whale Sanctuary."

The Japanese have also officially requested that Australia and New Zealand detain the Sea Shepherd ship and crew to prevent any interference with their criminal activities. Japan Fisheries Agency spokesman Hideki Moronuki says the fleet will step up security this season after heated clashes with anti-whaling protesters in the Antarctic last summer.

"I need a kind of support from those two countries in order to secure the safety of our crews and our ships," said Moronuki.

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society does not believe that the Australian government will interfere with Operation Migaloo.

"The Australian government is either with the whales and the people of Australia who love them, or they are with the whale killers of Japan and I don’t think they want to be seen in bed with those harpoon toting Yakusa thug," said Captain Watson.

This is the transcript of the Interview by AAP journalist Shane McLeod with Captain Paul Watson and Japan Fisheries Agency spokesman Hideki Moronuki:

TONY EASTLEY: Japan is worried that its whaling fleet is going to be targeted by protesters on the high seas during its annual Southern Ocean hunt and it wants Australia and New Zealand to provide some protection.

Japan says its ships have been subject to terrorist-like action and says it's stepping up its own security for its crews.

But environmentalists say it's Japan that's been provoking confrontation, especially with its plans to kill up to 50 humpback whales this season.

North Asia correspondent Shane McLeod reports.

SHANE MCLEOD: Japanese officials won't say exactly when the ocean-going whaling fleet is due to depart on its annual Southern Ocean hunt. But it's expected to be within days.

And with Japan anticipating more confrontation on the high seas between its ships and environmental group Sea Shepherd, Fisheries Agency spokesman Hideki Moronuki is calling on Australia and New Zealand to ensure the safety of the Japanese fleet.

HIDEKI MORONUKI: Those two countries maintain the same position as Japan does against the violent action of terrorists… terrorism. So everybody can imagine that Sea Shepherd may take very dangerous illegal actions again, so I need the kindest support of those two countries in order to secure the safety of our crews and the (inaudible).

SHANE MCLEOD: Sea Shepherd and the Japanese fleet clashed last summer, before Japan's ships headed home early after an unrelated fire crippled the main whale processing ship, killing one crew member.

Mr. Moronuki says Sea Shepherd is engaging in environmental terrorism. He says Japan is stepping up measures to deal with the threat.

HIDEKI MORONUKI: We cannot take illegal actions even though the Sea Shepherd would take illegal, very dangerous illegal actions. So we have to take another legal actions in order to escape from dangerous actions by Sea Shepherd. It's very difficult what we should do, something.

SHANE MCLEOD: Sea Shepherd's captain Paul Watson says his organisation is not responsible for collisions with the Japanese ships last season.

And he says he's not worried by Japan stepping up its security measures.

PAUL WATSON: I don't think it'll have any impact at all. I mean, what we have to understand here is Japanese whaling is illegal. They're targeting endangered species in a whale sanctuary in violation of a global moratorium on whaling.

We have the law on our side. We operate in accordance with the United Nations World Charter for Nature, which allows for non-government organisations to uphold international conservation law. If Japan acts… reacts violently to us, causes any injury at all to any of our people, that will backlash very severely upon Japan, because Japan is the criminal nation here. And last year, for instance, Japan accused us of ramming their vessels.

The Australian Federal Police did a forensic investigation and their evidence will back up our story on that: we were rammed by the Japanese. If I had have rammed the Japanese, I would probably have said so. But last year they hit us.

TONY EASTLEY: Paul Watson from Sea Shepherd, speaking there with Shane McLeod in Tokyo.

Transcript reprinted from: ABC Australia: AM radio: //www.abc.net.au/am/content/2007/s2087785.htm

 

 

Item 47: Escaping from Habitual Corruption: Column by Kim Geo-seong, Chairman, Transparency International, Korea

(Hankyoreh, 12 November, 2007) There are an endless number of scandals in the news right now, so many that you don’t know how to count them all, but to enumerate a few, the list would include: hiring and promoting people based on their academic background, accepting ‘payments’ from underlings, falsifying the work hours of subordinates and taking the extra pay that creates, using public money to go on vacations, falsifying expenses while traveling, wrongfully applying for medical expenses, embezzling money meant for disaster area recovery, fabricating the results of opinion surveys or academic research, doctoring your company’s account books and creating slush funds and illegal lobbying. What they all have in common is that the many good people who endeavor in their respective fields as well as the general public all suffer the consequences of the pursuit of selfish interest through wrongful behavior. The thing is, most of them are not novel, new techniques. Most are methods that have been around for ages.

Look back, and you’ll see that there are numerous instances where officials went as tourists to Iguazu or Niagra Falls on government money. And this most recent case, in which a sitting head of the National Tax Service has been arrested, is, if you look at it, part of the long-practiced custom of passing a large portion of the bribes you get up the chain of command. You also wonder if it was ever that terribly uncommon for someone to abuse his position as a high-ranking public servant in order to exercise influence on something illegally.

Furthermore, are the agency heads and local government leaders who’ve been arrested, along with their subordinates, the only ones who’ve accepted little envelopes full of money from those subordinates when promotion season came around, and who were at the top of the food chain of bribery? This very moment, there are numerous people who are trembling and nervous, wondering whether they are going to suffer if they don’t play the game that way and get noticed because of it.

Given how the problems are so widespread, those who’ve been caught this time around are angry at having been the only ones busted. However, just because these things were "customary," or because there was precedent, does not mean illegality, evading the law and methods of expediency are to be tolerated.

The financial crisis of 1997 was the splintering of Korean society’s corruption in its totality. In the decade since, our society has worked in a whole host of ways to increase transparency. In 2005 there was even a "Korean Pact on Anti-Corruptin and Transparancy(K-Pact)" adopted by the four major segments of society: the public sector, politicians, business leaders and civil society. Despite the continued work towards increasing anti-corruption activity and transparency, however, cases continue to erupt one after another. What are we to make of this? Does it mean the effort to increase transparency was all a waste?

It is of course sad to see these cases happening. But the authoritarian rule that kept that kind of activity hidden just below the surface, when it was rampant all the while, is even more dangerous and fatal. Was not the reason we were hit with that financial crisis in 1997 because the problems inherent and festering in society all exploded at once?

The very fact that these cases keep erupting one after another is itself a type of growing pain in the process of becoming more of an advanced, mature society. It is for this reason that everything about these cases needs to be brought to the surface, in order to put an end to those practices of the past once and for all. Corruption is not something that can be solved by catching people and prosecuting them, or by legislation alone. There needs to be a concerted effort to eradicate the illegal, legally evasive, or technically legal but nevertheless improper, ways of running things that have carried on as a matter of habit for so long within Korean organizations. Individuals, organizations, and society as a whole particularly need to do everything possible while working to increase integrity (sunjeonseong), based on the ethical foundations of a law-abiding spirit and responsibility. Otherwise Korea will remain unable to shed its classification as an ethically backwards nation for raking only 5 out of a possible 10 in Transparency International’s corruption perceptions index, just as it did in 2006 and 2007.

 

 

Item 48: Japan: Breeding Project Begins for Endangered 'Okinawa Rail'

(Japan for Sustainability, 28 October, 2007) Japan's Ministry of Environment has announced that it will undertake a breeding project for the Okinawa Rail, categorized as "critically endangered" (the most threatened species) on the Ministry's bird Red List. The Ministry has set a numeric target of two hundred for captive breeding by the end of FY2017.

The Okinawa Rail, called "Yambaru Kuina" in Japanese, was listed as a new species in 1981. Known as the only bird in Japan that cannot fly, the bird is endemic to the Yambaru area in the northern part of Okinawa Island. The estimated population of the bird was 1800 according to a survey conducted in 1985. However, the population has dramatically decreased in recent years due to the impact of invasive Java mongoose and habitat loss caused by land development.

For a breeding test this year, the Ministry will try to capture at least six breeding pairs out in the field, in addition to the four pairs under protection because of injury or sickness, and will expect to acquire ecological findings on the bird in captivity and develop breeding technology.

 

 

Item 49: Korea: Allies to Break Ground for US Military Base

(Jung Sung-ki, The Korea Times, 12 November, 2007) A ground-breaking ceremony for construction of a new U.S. consolidated base south of Seoul will be held in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province, today, amid controversy over the sharing of costs related to the $11-billion project.

About 1,200 government officials and local residents will attend the ceremony designed to demonstrate the determination of South Korea and the United States to implement the project in harmony with local residents, a spokesman for the Ministry of National Defense said.

High-profile guests will include Defense Minister Kim Jang-soo; Gen. B. B. Bell, commander of U.S. Forces Korea (USFK); U.S. Ambassador to Seoul Alexander Vershbow; and Pyeongtaek Mayor Song Myeong-ho, said Lee Jae-young at the ministry's USFK base relocation office.

Under a 2004 pact aimed at realigning U.S. forces abroad, the United States is to gradually return 170 square kilometers _ housing 42 military bases and related facilities _ across the country to South Korea by 2011.

In return, South Korea promised to offer 12 square kilometers of land to help triple the size of Camp Humphreys in Pyeongtaek to some 15 square kilometers housing 500 buildings.

The expanded Camp Humphreys, 70 kilometers south of Seoul, will accommodate more than 44,000 U.S. servicemen, their families, base workers and South Korean reinforcements, according to ministry officials.

The two governments earlier this year agreed on a master plan for the $11-billion program under which South Korea will pay about $5.9 billion. The plan indicates the base relocation project is to be completed by 2012.

The relocation program had been scheduled to be completed by the end of 2008. But the plan has been delayed as some Pyeongtaek farmers and organized protesters defied government orders to leave the site of the consolidated U.S. base.

Seoul and Washington have been in tough negotiations over how to share spending in certain areas such as the relocation of the U.S. digital command system, called C4I (command, control, communication, computer and intelligence), schools and hospitals, they said.

Last week, the ministry announced South Korea would shoulder 55 percent of the costs for land-elevation work for the base site.

Construction experts estimate that the cost for raising the land will range between $330 million and $440 million.

The two sides have failed to conclude negotiations over the expenses for relocating the C4I in the Yongsan Garrison to the Camp Humphreys, the ministry said in a press release.

Reports said South Korea is expected to bear 60 percent of the expenses required for moving the C4I infrastructure.

About 27,000 USFK personnel are stationed here as a deterrent against North Korea.

 

 

Item 50: Premiers of Koreas to Discuss Business Projects

(Jung Sung-ki, The Korea Times, 12 November, 2007) The inter-Korean prime ministerial talks to be held later this week are likely to focus on expanding cross-border business projects to live up to agreements made at last month's inter-Korean summit, Unification Ministry officials said Monday.

Main topics for the three-day talks from Wednesday through Friday include establishing a "peace and cooperation zone" near the West Sea area, building a joint industrial complex, repairing roads and railways in the North, facilitating the Gaeseong Industrial Complex, joint efforts to develop underground resources, cooperation on environmental protection and agricultural and health sectors, they said.

The ministry unveiled a list of the seven-member delegation to represent the South at the talks in Seoul, but military officials were excluded in the list.

Prime Minister Han Duck-soo will lead the delegation, while North Korean Premier Kim Yong-il will head the North's seven-member delegation.

South Korea had proposed that the vice defense chiefs from the two countries participate in the talks, citing most of cross-border business projects require guarantee from the two militaries, but North Korea rejected the offer, officials said.

"Whether it's a prime ministerial meeting or defense ministerial meeting, the main goal is to discuss ways of implementing agreements reached upon during the summit talks," Unification Minister Lee Jae-joung told reporters, saying defense affairs related to economic cooperation would be addressed during inter-Korean defense ministers' talks later this month.

"I expect both prime ministerial and defense ministerial talks will produce good results as the leaders of the two Koreas agreed on a set of measures to achieve peace on the Korean Peninsula," said Lee.

President Roh Moo-hyun and North Korean leader Kim Jong-il agreed to boost economic cooperation between the two Koreas as part of efforts to establish a common economic bloc on the peninsula and defuse military tensions across the border.

One main agreement was to develop North Korea's western Haeju port in connection with Seoul's efforts to build an economic and distribution hub there.

The idea, however, has hit resistance. Conservatives argue the plan could neutralize the Northern Limit Line (NLL) in the West Sea. The NLL, which was drawn by the U.S.-led United Nations Command at the end of the 1950-53 Korean War, has served as the de facto sea border between the two Koreas.

But the North insists the line be nullified and redrawn.

The issue is expected to dominate the meeting of defense chiefs from the two Koreas slated for Nov. 27-29 in Pyongyang.

Defense Minister Kim Jang-soo has made it clear that a redrawing of the NLL will not be on the agenda.

 

 

Item 51: China Blocks River to Build Second Largest Dam

(Guo Shipeng, Reuters, 12 November, 2007) BEIJING - China has blocked the flow of the country's longest river to build its second-largest hydropower project, state media reported on Friday.

The Xiluodu power station on the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, also known as the Jinsha River in that area, will be second only to the Three Gorges Dam downstream when it is finished in 2015 at a cost of more than 50 billion yuan (US$6.74 billion).

Water flow was stemmed on the river on Thursday as the last truckload of rocks was dumped into the river at the dam site -- a gorge on the border of the southwestern provinces Yunnan and Sichuan, the People's Daily said.

"It marks the end of the preparatory work and the project will from now on enter its main construction phase," the newspaper said, referring to the start of the building of the dam.

The Yangtze was last blocked in 1997 for the 18.2 GW Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest hydropower project, it added. The Xiluodu project will have an installed capacity of 12.6 GW.

A 6 GW power station, Xiangjiaba, is also under construction on the Jinsha and is expected to be finished in 2015.

China has encouraged development of hydropower stations, which account for about a quarter of China's installed capacity, as renewable, relatively clean alternatives to thermal plants.

The government also argues that hydropower stations help alleviate poverty and spur economic growth in the country's underdeveloped southwest, which is rich in water resources.

But some Chinese and international conservation groups have decried these projects, saying they damage the environment and cultural relics and bring few benefits to millions of residents who have been forced to relocate.

China's environmental watchdog ordered the state-owned Yangtze River Three Gorges Project Development Corp to halt the construction of the Xiluodu dam in early 2005 until it completed an environmental impact assessment for the project.

(editing by Ken Wills and Jerry Norton)

 

 

Item 52: Conflict Between Koreas Claims Another Casualty: the Otter

(Donald Kirk, The New York Sun, 12 November, 2007) HWACHEON: The conflict between North and South Korea has claimed hundreds of thousands of human casualties over more than half a century, but the latest group at risk is a different species entirely — the otter.

At first South Korean engineers feared the waters would cascade from North Korea, flooding towns and farms, rising above the banks of the mighty Han River as it bisects the capital of Seoul, 80 miles to the southwest.

By now, however, the waters have receded to a trickle as the north branch of the Han flows sadly across the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas. The worry is that species of plants and animals will die and life will never be quite the same in forested hills and valleys rising from the river. "In the past this region was under water," says Kang To Il, pointing from the roadway atop the Peace Dam, completed two years ago as fears rose that the Kumkang Dam, 15 miles to the north, above the Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas, would collapse, unleashing billions of gallons that energy-starved North Korea now pumps through a hydroelectric power station and then out to sea.

"Trees and grass down there started to grow after the Kumkang Dam was built in 1999," says Mr. Kang, an official of Hwacheon County, whose 25,000 residents make it one of South Korea's least populated districts. "Fish cannot come down," he goes on, and animals such as otters that rely on the fish for food are hardly seen, though footprints and droppings indicate their presence.

As Mr. Kang talks, he points to South Korean guard posts glimmering on a ridgeline six miles to the north. South Korean soldiers are up there defending the southern side of the Demilitarized Zone that stretches 155 miles across the Korean peninsula, dividing North from South Korea.

Another seven miles beyond the zone, in mountains stripped for firewood by impoverished North Koreans, lingers the dam whose construction began more than 20 years ago in a desperate attempt to revive the North's swiftly declining economy.

It was in response to the North Korean project, scrutinized by American spy satellites, that alarmed South Korean leaders in 1986 ordered construction of the Peace Dam. The dams are nearly the same size — the Kumkang Dam, named for the Kumkang or Diamond mountains surrounding it, is 121.5 meters, the Peace Dam 125 meters high.

"The dam was built higher to contain the water in case of collapse," explains Mr. Kang, but the river, with banks overgrown by grass and shrubbery once entirely covered by water, meanders far below.

It is a harsh fact of the North-South confrontation that no one from the South Korean side has ever been able to communicate with anyone from the North about the Kumkang dam and the dangers it poses of flooding in case of a break, as happened a few years ago in the midst of construction, or of robbery of much needed water.

Han Sung Yong, director of the Korea Otter Research Center, dedicated to saving the 100 or so otters that are believed to survive here, passed along a message in early October when South Korea's president, Roh Moo Hyun, met North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il, in Pyongyang.

While the leaders were holding their summit, a professor in Mr. Roh's entourage raised the topic of the Kumkang Dam with some North Koreans to see if the two sides could cooperate on conservation. So far, there's been no response.

"North Korea is a closed society," says Mr. Han. "North Korea doesn't want to discuss this issue."

A senior research fellow at the South Korean government's Korean Institute of National Unification, Son Gi Woong, sees the impasse in terms of North Korean desperation.

"For their national interests, they have no choice but to stop the water," he says, even as deforestation has exposed large swaths of the North Korean countryside to floods while stripping it of topsoil for crops.

"Because of lack of energy," Mr. Han goes on, "they have to cut the trees down," just as they had to build the Kumkang Dam.

In a park below the Peace Dam, authorities hope to get across a different message. Craftsmen are casting an enormous "peace bell" that will ring so loudly that North Korean soldiers will be able to hear it.

"The bell will ring out new life through shadowy valleys of war, death and destruction," says a government brochure.

"I'm not interested in politics, just in facts," says Mr. Han. "The situation will get worse and worse." He worries especially about the otters, bellwethers of deeper problems.

"The gap in the water level in non-dry and dry seasons is very big," he says. "The otters have been most affected. They cannot endure such differences."

 

 

Item 53: Chaebol Bribe Culture: ‘Top prosecutors must be investigated for accepting bribes’

(Hankyoreh, 13 November, 2007) Yesterday the Catholic Priest’s Association for Justice released some of the names of current and former prosecution officials whom former Samsung group’s legal consultant Kim Yong-cheol alleges Samsung regularly gave bribes to. The three names that appeared are Lim Chai-jin, the man designated to be the next public prosecutor general; Lee Jong-baek, head of the Korea Independent Commission Against Corruption; and Lee Kwi-nam, head of the main investigative unit within the national prosecutor’s office. This is just shocking. If Kim’s allegations are true, you worry about how you can trust the investigations the prosecution has done that related to Samsung, and about whether it can be entrusted with investigating Samsung in the future. This is clearly going to cause the country to grow much more distrustful of those in pubic service.

Each of the men named denies having taken any money. However, Kim’s formal claims are hard to ignore. He has named one name after another of the Samsung executives who have "maintained" prosecution officials. He is clearly going to face criminal punishment if what he is saying is not true, so it is all the more difficult to think that he released these names without basis. In the "X-File" that was made public in 2005 there was also material about Samsung giving money to prosecutors. The truth must be revealed and no suspicion left unanswered. There must not be a repeat of what happened in the "X-File" case, when, quite absurdly, only the man who named names was punished in any way.

The situation is all the more complicated for the fact that one of the men outed for being on the take is the person designated to be the country’s next top prosecutor. His confirmation hearing is set to begin at the National Assembly today, and the kind of verification needed on this individual is not going to be possible because neither the ruling nor opposition parties have called Kim as a witness. The Blue House, too, will not have an easy time checking the facts with immediacy. However, we believe that someone about which there are unresolved questions of bribery is not going to be given the post of the nation’s top prosecutor. The prosecution has a huge pile of important investigative work to do, and ahead of the presidential election at that, so the country needs to avoid leaving that position unfilled.

What Kim has gone public with, about suspicions that prosecutors were taking bribes from Samsung, only touches the surface. The key questions are whether Samsung has used bank accounts in the names of its top executives to form a huge slush fund and used that dirty money to interfere with the Everland investigation and subsequent court trial, rendering ineffective an arm of the state in the process. The prosecution has received the complaint that seeks to get to the heart of this, but has dragged its feet on the investigation, demanding that Kim first release the whole list of prosecutors who were receiving bribes. The fact that it gave the case to the Seoul Central District Prosecutor’s Office also makes you wonder how determined the national prosecution is about going through with an investigation. The prosecution needs to show the country that it is resolved enough to thoroughly dig into the truth to put together a special investigation team that does not go through a multi-level chain of command. That would be the way to restore the prosecution’s honor, which has fallen as low as it can go.

 

 

Item 54: Russia: Saker Falcon: 18 Smuggled Birds Returned to Wild

(Natalya Sokhareva Reuters, 14 November, 2007) KAZACHII, Russia - A bird of prey with coal-black eyes hangs briefly in the air then flaps it wings and soars into the Siberian sky as a cluster of conservationists on the ground breathe a collective sigh of relief.

A few weeks ago, this saker falcon -- one of an endangered species -- was being smuggled out of Russia. Stuffed inside a tiny bag with its wings bound, it was heading for the Middle East where it could have been sold for thousands of dollars.

But this bird, along with 17 others of the same species, was intercepted by Russian customs officers. All were released back into the wild in the Altai region of southern Siberia on Monday.

"All of these birds have had a tough time," said Sergei Ganusevich, director of the Moscow Centre for the Protection of Wild Animals, who flew to the Altai region to watch the falcons go free.

"All the falcons were caught illegally in (the Siberian region of) Khakassia and were being prepared for smuggling to Arab countries, where hunting with falcons is a favourite local pastime," he said.

He said five of the birds were intercepted in Moscow a month ago. A Syrian smuggler was try to ship them out in a sports bag.

"As a rule, the smugglers do not care about the state of their goods. They can starve them, and some of the birds just suffocate in cramped boxes," said Ganusevich.

Saker falcons -- which can have a wing span of up to 130 cm (more than four feet) -- are found in a wide arc from eastern Europe to western China. Numbers have been in decline because of a loss of habitat and poaching.

According to the World Conservation Union, a Switzerland-based group, the world population was estimated in 2003 at a maximum of 4,400 pairs.

The Altai region was chosen to release the birds because it is one of the species' natural habitats and poaching is less widespread there than in other parts of Russia.

The falcons were brought in special crates by air from Moscow, then driven into the forest about 70 km (44 miles) outside the regional capital, Barnaul. They were then set free one by one.

"The return of every bird into the wild is a unique process and for us it is also a great joy," said Viktor Plotnikov, director of the Barnaul falcon sanctuary.

"It's like launching a child on a new life after you've spent a long time raising them."

(Writing by Christian Lowe; Editing by Richard Balmforth)

 

 

Item 55: Shark Finning Around the World: Shark Population Sinking

(Lauren Sonis, Daytona Beach News, USA, 09 November, 2007) MARINELAND - They are older than dinosaurs with 375 known species.

At the top of the ocean's food chain, shark populations are in decline.

Dr. George Burgess, a shark expert, strives to bust shark myths and give the toothy creatures a better image, at his University of Florida office in Gainesville.

"The fact of the matter is that sharks are in some trouble," Burgess said Thursday night at the Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience in Marineland, which hosts a monthly lecture series.

Take the small-tooth sawfish, the first U.S. marine endangered species. A slide show tells that more than 200 years ago, people spotted the sawfish around the East Coast of the U.S., from New York to Texas.

Now, they mostly swim around Florida, and recovering the species could take 100 years, said Burgess, 57.

Partly to blame for low shark numbers is commercial long-line fishing, where anglers cast miles of fishing line with lots of hooks into the sea, often overnight, Burgess said.

The shark finning industry shares blame, Burgess said. Anglers slice off the fins, which need no cooling on ice as they are brought to shore. Shark fin soup is popular in Asia, a staple at weddings, Burgess said.

"People think if you eat shark fin soup, you'll be a better lover," he said. Burgess tried it, and "that soup is not anything special."

Still, the fins fetch $30 a pound off the boat, and by the time they hit the soup, customers pay $80-$125 a bowl, Burgess said.

Burgess coordinates museum operations at the Florida Museum of Natural History and is director of the Florida Program for Shark Research and International Shark Attack File.

Research scientists study sharks around the world, looking at migration patterns, distinguishing between species, studying DNA, and investigating reports of shark attacks.

But the program also focuses on teaching, including teachers and biologists. As Burgess clicked through his slides, he showed a training class for fisheries biologists in Senegal, in west Africa.

He said the research program focuses on bringing "Third World countries" often in northwest Africa up to speed on new technologies and new methods.

More than 100 people attended Thursday night's lecture in Flagler County, a county that has few shark attacks yet neighbors Volusia, the shark attack capital of the world.

Between 1882 and 2006, Flagler County had four confirmed total, while Volusia had 193.

The grand total of confirmed shark attacks for both counties may increase after reports of shark bites this year. As human populations and beach recreation increase, so do shark attacks, Burgess said. Most attacks are cases of mistaken identity, he said. Sharks see splashing and think it's fish or a sea turtle.

The number of shark-related human deaths averages about 4.5 a year, Burgess said. Meanwhile, 100 million elasmobranches (sharks, rays and skates) die yearly, he said.

"Wow," Seabreeze High School marine science teacher Pat Monaghan said from his seat in the audience.

Sharks help balance the food chain in the ocean, feeding on the sick and dying, fish, shellfish and mammals, and larger animals with few predators like whales and seals, according to the program's Web site.

After the lecture, Monaghan said he was struck by the impact a declining shark population could have.

"If you stamp out an apex predator (sharks top the ocean food chain), you start destroying other fisheries as well," he said.

 

 

Item 56: 38 Million Sharks Killed for Fins Annually, Experts Estimate

(Nicholas Bakalar, National Geographic News, 12 October, 2006) Clarification : After this story was published, the editors were made aware of additional methods the study authors used to determine the number of sharks killed for their fins, as well as the inability to genetically trace shark meat to the animals' home waters. This information was added on October 25, 2006.

Some chicken stock, a few mushrooms, chicken breast, scallions, a little sherry, oil, spices—shark fin soup is fairly easy to prepare. But to make soup for six, you'll also need about a pound (half a kilogram) of shark fin meat.

Demand for that crucial ingredient has led to the killing of a median of about 38 million sharks a year, according to a new study that offers what may be the first reliable estimates of the number of sharks killed for their fins.

The United Nations has estimated that only about ten million sharks are harvested each year. Some conservationists, however, put the number at closer to a hundred million.

But until now estimates of the shark harvest were little more than guesses, because the numbers depended on shark fishers to report their catches.

The shark-fin industry, concentrated in a few Asian trading centers, is secretive and wary of any attempts to regulate, or even investigate, its practices.

To make matters murkier, most fisheries-management groups give little attention to sharks, because they are often considered bycatch—fish caught by accident—given their low value per pound.

"Apart from implementing various restrictions on the finning of sharks at sea in some countries—e.g., the U.S. and the EU—investment in setting up fisheries-management systems for sharks has been nonexistent for most shark fisheries," said study co-author Murdoch McAllister of the United Kingdom's Imperial College London.

How It Works

Murdoch and his colleagues' new, mathematical estimating method uses trade records from commercial markets and genetic techniques to identify species.

In their effort to accurately estimate the number of fins harvested—and therefore the number of sharks killed—the scientists conducted interviews with traders, studied thousands of auction records, observed auctions and shops for 18 months, and analyzed hundreds of fin samples.

In the end the researchers concluded that from 1996 to 2000 26 to 73 million sharks were traded yearly. The annual median for the period was 38 million—nearly four times the UN estimates but considerably lower than those of many conservationists.

The new report appears in this month's issue of the journal Ecology Letters

Growing Demand

"The global demand for shark fins has increased dramatically in the last few decades, and this has created incentives for fishermen to go after sharks and retain shark fins," McAllister said.

According to Peter Knights, executive director of the conservation nonprofit WildAid, demand for shark-fin meat is the biggest problem facing the fishes.

That demand, Knights says, is especially strong among China's growing middle class. Newly flush Chinese may be buying shark-fin meat simply to prove they can, he adds, since the delicacy has little nutritional value and hardly any flavor.

Even so, the meat isn't limited to Asian menus.

A cup of shark-fin soup at the China Max seafood restaurant in San Diego, California, for example, can be had for $18. Braised whole shark fin runs $40.

"We make it all the time," said a man who answered the phone at the restaurant.

Casting Doubt

Russell H. Hudson is a spokesperson for the Seafood Coalition, an umbrella group of fishing-industry organizations. He agrees that the world trade in sharks is huge, but he says that the new report doesn't tell a complete and accurate story.

"More samples are needed to be collected at all life and marketing stages for this analysis to keep going forward," Hudson said.

"Maybe they should work with some fishing interests to help verify their conversions. The same species in different oceans tend to grow and mature at different lengths"—a contention that lead study author Shelley Clarke says has no scientific basis.

Knights, of WildAid, agrees that the new findings are imperfect.

The new data is "useful," he said. "But to be really useful it should be done by species and by individual areas," Knights said.

"[Shark data is] not recorded anywhere in that way. That's the biggest problem in getting sharks listed as endangered."

Lead study author Clarke adds that there is currently no way to trace fins at market to their home waters, at least not through genetic testing.

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species now lists only three shark species—basking, whale, and great white—as endangered. (See great white shark photos, facts, wallpapers, and more.)

Knights says studies of fishing rates may be more helpful, and these have indicated precipitous declines in shark populations.

"Sharks are the tigers and lions and cheetahs and leopards of the sea. And if we lose them—these top predators—there will be long-term damage," he said.

"They're slow reproducing, late to mature, more like mammals than fish in their biology—and we're completely trashing them.

"There's virtually no management of shark fisheries around the world. We're playing with fire," Knights said.

Study co-author McAllister is hopeful that it's not too late.

"Some progress is being made," he said. "In at least a few instances decision-makers at high levels are taking the results of recent studies like ours seriously and taking more stringent and immediate actions to address current threats to shark populations.

"For example," McAllister said, "based partly on our study, just last week the European Parliament voted to reduce the tolerance level for the maximum permissible percentage of shark landings that can be made up of fins from 5 percent down to 2 percent."

 

 

Item 57: Thailand Saves Pangolins Bound for China Restaurants

(AFP, 10 November, 2007) BANGKOK - Thai Customs officers said Saturday they have rescued more than 100 pangolins and arrested three men attempting to smuggle the endangered animals to China, where they were destined for the cooking pot.

Customs officers Friday intercepted three pick-up trucks of pangolins, or scaly anteaters, which were to be smuggled across Laos to southwest China.

The pangolins, worth an estimated one million baht (29,400 dollars), were trapped in the Indonesian jungle and smuggled via Malaysia and southern Thailand.

"We investigated and found out that those pangolins are from Indonesia," Rakop Srisupaat, director of southern region Customs, told AFP by telephone.

All trade in Asian pangolins has been illegal since 2000. Their meat is regarded as a delicacy in China and their scales are believed to cure a wide range of ailments.

Rakop said the three suspects had declined to give details of who owned the pangolins but admitted they were hired to transport the scaly mammals.

They were charged with two counts of possessing and smuggling endangered wildlife, which carry a maximum 10 years in prison.

"I have instructed my legal officials to seriously prosecute them as their action is against the morals of Thai people," he said.

"The meat is for the cooking pot for restaurants and the scales are crushed for use in traditional Chinese medicine," he explained.

The pangolins, which were all alive despite being hidden under layers of coconuts, would be handed over to the Royal Forest Department to be nursed back to health before being released into an appropriate habitat in Thailand, he said.

 

 

Item 58: Legal Query Over Japan's Whale Kill

(Andrew Darby, Hobart, 15 November, 2007) PRESSURE is increasing on Australia to back stronger action against Japan over its Antarctic whaling, with a legal panel advising that a Japanese plan to kill humpback whales breaches international wildlife trade law.

The advice comes as time runs out to halt the Japanese whaling fleet, which could be harpooning the animals in the Southern Ocean in a month.

The London Panel, assembled by the International Fund for Animal Welfare, pins its hopes on the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, which protects humpbacks from any trade.

In this case, the panel says, "trade" includes Japanese whaling boats catching and landing whales in international waters.

Even though Japan claims its planned 1035-whale kill is for scientific research, the panel says its thinly disguised commercial nature means the Japanese Government could not exempt itself under CITES regulations. Action against it could either be taken in CITES, or in an international court.

"Japan's repeated assertion that its whaling activities are legal is incorrect and misleading," said the panel co-ordinator, professor Alberto Szekely.

The major Australian parties have conflicting positions on how to halt the humpback kill.

Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull said the Government shared the frustration of all Australians in wanting to see the end of Japanese whaling.

"We believe that it can only be solved through strong and sustained international effort," he said. "We have examined options for international legal action but have judged it to date as likely to be counter-productive to our cause."

Labor's environment spokesman Peter Garrett has been extensively briefed on legal opinions to take on the whalers, offered over the past year by three different international panels. He said recently that Labor wanted "serious commitments to a range of legal options, pulling out all stops in international courts to end the slaughter of whales".

Greens leader Bob Brown backed legal action, as well as Labor plans to monitor the fleet using Australian ships or aircraft. The Greens also wanted the suspension of free trade talks with Japan.

In Tokyo, Fisheries Agency officials have repeatedly dismissed the threat of legal action. "Japan's position in the International Whaling Commission is fully consistent with international law and science," said a recent briefing note by Joji Morishita, leader of the Japanese IWC delegation.

The whaling fleet's departure from Japan is imminent, perhaps later today, environmental sources said.

The factory ship Nisshin Maru, repaired after a fire in the Ross Sea killed one crewman last season, will be joined on the four-week voyage south by another newly-launched chaser boat — evidence of Japanese commitment to a return to full-scale commercial whaling.

Greenpeace and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society are expected to mount separate pursuits of the Japanese fleet over the summer.

 

 

Item 59: Japan Might Kill World's Only White Whale

(Nick Squires, The Telegraph, 12 November, 2007) Australians fear that the world's only known white humpback whale could be slaughtered as Japan's whaling fleet prepares to embark on its annual hunt in the Southern Ocean.

The unique male whale, named Migaloo - an Aboriginal word for "white fella" - has become a celebrity in Australia since being spotted for the first time in 1991.

Each year Migaloo - along with thousands of other humpbacks - migrates from the icy seas of Antarctica to the warm shallows of the South Pacific and the Great Barrier Reef.

A few months later the whales, the females leading their newly-born calves, return to Antarctica.

The arrival of 45ft-long Migaloo - believed to be the only completely white humpback in the world - is keenly anticipated by whale watchers along Australia's east coast.

He has been hailed as modern day Moby Dick, even though the creature in Herman Melville's 1851 classic was a sperm whale.

Conservationists fear that Migaloo is so accustomed to whale watching and fishing boats, that he will be easy pickings for Japanese hunters.

With the southern hemisphere summer approaching, the Japanese whaling fleet is preparing to leave port within days. It refuses to say exactly when.

It has declared that for the first time it will kill 50 humpbacks, as well as 50 fin whales and hundreds of minke whales.

The Japanese argue that after decades of hunting fin and humpback whales have recovered to sufficient levels that they can now withstand being harpooned again.

The Fisheries Agency in Tokyo refused to rule out killing Migaloo today, with officials offering a blunt "no comment" to media inquiries.

Instead the agency called on Australia and New Zealand to ensure that the Japanese fleet would be protected from anti-whaling ships operated by a militant environmental group, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

Last year Sea Shepherd threatened to ram the Japanese fleet with a ship fitted with a bulldozer-type blade. The group has been branded environmental terrorists by Tokyo.

"Those two countries maintain the same position as Japan does against the violent action of terrorists," spokesman Hideki Moronuki told ABC Radio.

"[We] need support from those two countries in order to secure the safety of our crews and (our ships)."

But the captain of Sea Shepherd's two vessels, Paul Watson, said he had the law on his side because whale hunting was illegal.

"They're targeting endangered species in a whale sanctuary in violation of a global moratorium on whaling.

"If Japan reacts violently to us, causes any injury at all to any of our people, that will backlash very severely on Japan because Japan is the criminal nation here," he said.

Japan uses a loophole in International Whaling Commission laws to hunt around 1,000 whales each year in the Southern Hemisphere, ostensibly for the purposes of scientific research.

People who have encountered Migaloo on his epic journey of migration describe the sight as a once in a lifetime experience.

"He turned the blue water around him jade-green for two or three metres," one awe-struck Australian whale-watch operator said of a sighting two years ago.

Scientists are uncertain whether Migaloo is a true albino, or simply has white pigmentation.

In a sign of how healthy the population of humpbacks has become, a female and her calf paid a short visit to Sydney Harbour today.

The pair was noticed entering the harbour from the sea by passengers on a passing ferry and spent about three hours in sheltered waters before continuing their journey south.

 

 

Item 60: Australia: We'd Deploy Military (sort of..) to Stop Japan Whaling'

(Nick Squires, The Telegraph, U.K., 15 November, 2007) Military aircraft would be deployed to monitor and eventually halt Japanese ships killing whales in Antarctic waters under a new government, Australia's opposition party has said

The Labour Party, which is tipped to win Australia's general election a week on Saturday, promised to adopt a more aggressive stance towards Japan's internationally-condemned annual whale hunt.

The pledge came as the Japanese whaling fleet prepares to leave port and head towards the Antarctic in pursuit of 935 minke whales.

The Japanese have also said that for the first time they will harpoon 50 fin whales and 50 humpbacks.

Australians are gravely concerned that in their sights could be a rare all-white humpback which has been given the name Migaloo - an Aboriginal word for "white fella".

Labour's foreign affairs spokesman, Robert McClelland, said that under a Labour government Australian military aircraft would range across Antarctica, collecting data on the activities of the Japanese fleet.

The information would be used to mount a challenge against Japan's annual whale hunt, which Tokyo claims is conducted for "scientific research".

Australia's new policy would not, however, involve the interdiction or apprehension of whaling vessels.

"We are going to use... military resources to monitor the activities of the whaling vessels," said Mr McClelland.

"What is important is getting evidence... as to what's going on and getting the facts that can actually be presented to an international tribunal to try to get rulings to stop this.

"That is going to be a really strong point of emphasis for a future Labour government."

Japan does not recognize an Australian-declared whale sanctuary in the Southern Ocean.

Labour argues that Australia could take action against the whalers in the International Court of Justice in The Hague or the International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea in Hamburg.

But the foreign minister, Alexander Downer, dismissed Mr McClelland's declaration as a political stunt aimed at winning the election.

"It shows a complete lack of understanding of the legal status of Antarctica," Mr Downer said in a statement.

In 2004, the Australian Federal Court rejected an application by animal welfare group Humane Society International for an injunction preventing a Japanese whaling company from killing whales.

The decision was later overturned on appeal but remains unresolved. The Japanese company has said it will ignore any court order.

Mr McClelland said an end to whaling could become a condition of a free trade agreement being negotiated between Australia and Japan, its second largest trading partner after China.

"The issue is of such significance to Australians that everything has got to be on the table," he said.

Labour's position has been welcomed by a militant environmental group which plans to disrupt the Japanese whaling fleet this southern hemisphere summer, as it did last year.

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society has accused Australian prime minister John Howard of "kissing the arse" of the Japanese government in not taking stronger action against the whale slaughter.

The group has two anti-whaling vessels, one of them equipped with a hull-slicing hydraulic ram which president Paul Watson has described as a giant can-opener.

Last year he threatened to use it to give the Japanese fleet's factory ship, Nissin Maru, a "steel enema".

The Japanese government has described Mr Watson and his activists as "environmental terrorists" but they plan to sail into Antarctic waters at the beginning of next month. They have named their campaign Operation Migaloo.

 

 

Item 61: Taking on the Goliath of Doom from the Land of the Rising Sun

(Commentary by Paul Watson, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, 15 November, 2007) The Japanese whaling fleet is so threatened by Sea Shepherd's history of successful interventions that they have officially appealed to the governments ofAustralia and New Zealand to detain our vessels and to not allow them to depart for the Southern Oceans.

At the same time the Japanese are boasting that they will kill 50 endangered humpbacks and they will kill Migaloo the famous white whale if they come across him. In addition they will kill 50 endangered Fin and nearly a thousand defenseless piked whales.

The Japanese whalers are so arrogant that they believe they can smack Aussies and Kiwis across the face with the insult of targeting Australia's beloved humpbacks and at the same time they expect Australia and New Zealand to "protect" them from interventions by the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

The Japanese arrogance on this issue has evolved to a point where they are intentionally targeting highly endangered whales like humpbacks and fins in a Whale Sanctuary in violation of the global moratorium on commercial whaling and yet despite this blatantly illegality they are accusing the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and even pacifist Greenpeace of being "eco-terrorists and pirates."

Now I don't have any problem with the pirate bit. It's a little romantic and after all it was the pirate Henry Morgan who ended piracy in the Caribbean and not the British Royal Navy or the British politicians who were on the take and more concerned with illicit profits then upholding the law - sort of like politicians today actually.

But this "eco-terrorist" label is just plain and simply nonsense. If I was a "terrorist" then I would not be allowed to reside where I live in the United States. I would not be able to hold a passport and to travel freely and I would be on the no fly lists. As it is I have no criminal record, and Sea Shepherd has never caused a single injury to a single person in our 30 year history.

But what is an eco-terrorist really? By definition it is a person or group that terrorizes the environment or by destroying the environment thereby terrorizes humanity. By this definition the Japanese whaling fleet is a terrorist organization.

In the last two years the Japanese whaling fleet through negligence and incompetence has caused the death of two Japanese seaman. One died in a fire onboard the Nisshin Maru last February and one man was crushed in a conveyor belt on the Nisshin Maru this past summer. And there have been other casualties and numerous injuries in the past. This ship has a reputation as a death ship.

And this death ship has illegally slaughtered tens of thousands of gentle intelligent whales in ways that are barbarically gruesome, cruel and repugnant. These ruthless whalers have literally spilled thousands of gallons of hot blood into the cold seas and they have the gall to refer to those who block their harpoons as "violent."

This is like the Nazi who routinely described the Jews as violent terrorists as they rounded them up and exterminated them. You see the Japanese whalers can afford expensive public relation firms whose business is really to spin lies into "truths" and to convince the public through gross deception and arrogant posturing that black is white and two plus two equals five.

The Japanese constantly state that they are involved in "research whaling" yet there has not been a single peer reviewed scientific paper ever published from this so called research. They have also admitted that they would not be doing this "research" if they could not sell the whale meat at a profit. If they are doing any research at all it is in product development and marketing - trying to sell mercury poisoned whale and dolphin meat to a gullible public who destroy their own health in the name of patriotism.

The Japanese say that whaling is a tradition although commercial whaling was really introduced to them in the last century by the Norwegians and encouraged by the Americans. The Japanese say that whaling is a matter of national pride. What kind of sick perverse culture can take pride in the cruel and bloody slaughter of whales and dolphins? oh yes, I almost forgot, the same culture responsible for the Rape of Nanking and the beheading of Australian, American, Canadian and Dutch soldiers and civilians.

The Japanese whalers believe that Japan's reputation as an international economic bully allows them to dictate this sick morality to the rest of the world where they call non-violent whale defenders terrorists as they spill lakes of steaming blood into the sea.

What Japan is allowing to be done to the whales and dolphins is a crime against the Earth and a crime against humanity. Slaughtering entire families of dolphins on their beaches by the thousands, driving cruel harpoons into defenseless endangered whales in the Southern Oceans and the North Pacific, this is an evil and disgusting morality and one which every civilized person on this planet should rise up and denounce. The red ball on the Japanese flag symbolizes blood and it is that blot of cruel blood on a white background that symbolized Japanese arrogance in staining the decency that humanity could be capable of.

In the distant future, if we have a future, people are going to look back in astonishment at the brutality of our generations - the insane wars, the starvation, the racism and the horrendous slaughter of sentient life forms and they will be ashamed that they descended from such indecency, such arrogance and such amazing ignorance.

And there are those blinkered individuals who will say that this essay is racist because we are targeting the Japanese. My answer to this is that we are not targeting the nation of Japan because of the colour of their skin or their culture. I happen to be a great admirer of many thing Japanese and I am well versed in Japanese history but this on-going atrocity against the whales and dolphins is not part of Japanese culture. It is a modern perversion driven by greed and arrogant pride on the part of a few Japanese people who are painting their entire nation with the shame of their behaviour. This whaling industry is controlled by the Yakusa and is not an activity the average Japanese person supports. In fact the average Japanese person does not even eat whale or dolphin meat.

These animals are dying in agony so that an elite few can eat whale meat and boast that they can do whatever they wish with nature because it is their will to do so. And these greed driven criminals, and criminals are what they are, have used their illicit profits, their blood money to hire public relations whores to defend their atrocities and to accuse those of us who attempt to end the slaughter of being violent and dangerous people.

I have never hurt a single whaler in my life nor do I ever intend to but they have shot at my crew and I, assaulted my crew and I, and threatened our lives, yet their public relations mouthpieces defend this as defending their culture.

Strip away the illusions peppered by the P.R. firms throughout the media and it is plain to see who the real criminals and terrorists are.

Killing highly endangered species in a whale Sanctuary in violation of a global moratorium on commercial whaling are crimes. Trying to stop this insanity through non-violent tactics is simply attempting to uphold the rule of law against criminal actions.

Fortunately the governments of Australia and New Zealand are not so beholden to Japanese economic leverage that they will jump without hesitation to do the bidding of these ruthless killers or at least their people will not tolerate them doing so.

What Australia and New Zealand should do is to send their navies down to the Southern Oceans to uphold the laws were are trying to enforce.

And if they do that, we need not do so. We would happily surrender our efforts to a serious effort on the part of New Zealand and Australia to do more than just posture and talk about saving the whales.

 

 

Item 62: China Defends Mega-Dam, Guards Against Disaster

(Chris Buckley, editor Roger Crab, Reuters, 16 November, 2007) BEIJING - China defended the environmental effects of its huge Three Gorges Dam on Thursday, with a senior official saying pollution was under control and threats from landslides under close guard.

The dam on the Yangtze River lies in the central province of Hubei and holds a 660-km (410-mile) reservoir. In September, an official warned of environmental calamity if landslides, siltage and pollution were not contained.

But in an implicit denial of that warning, the office director of the Three Gorges Project Committee, Wang Xiaofeng, said problems were manageable and within expectations.

"I can say with all responsibility that the environmental impact of the Three Gorges Project has not exceeded the scope of what was predicted in the original viability report," he told the official Xinhua news agency.

Yet Xinhua also paraphrased Wang as saying that "the ecological and environmental security of the dam area merits a high degree of attention".

Wang's defence comes in the wake of the official's warning and signs of geological strain around the dam. Last week, Vice Premier Zeng Peiyan told dam officials to "double efforts" against environmental and geological threats, Xinhua said.

The Three Gorges Dam is the world's biggest, an engineering feat that seeks to tame the world's third longest river while displacing 1.4 million people, many of them poor farmers from Hubei and neighbouring Chongqing.

"LAST BLOCKS" GO

Xinhua reported that the last blocks of apartments on land to be engulfed by the reservoir had been razed on Thursday, with one row going up in smoke at the push of a button.

Kaixian was the last of Chongqing's eight counties to finish relocation work for the project, the report said.

But the "last blocks" appeared to be a symbolic watershed, as other towns along the reservoir's length still have buildings waiting for demolition -- and residents waiting to be moved.

Since the dam was finished in 2003, the reservoir has been filled with water in stages. If all goes to plan, it will reach its maximum of 175 metres above sea level by late 2008, providing what Wang called an "irreplaceable" protection from devastating floods downstream.

Critics have long said the dam was a folly that would trap silt and pollution and dangerously destabilise the brittle hills on its shores and tributaries.

During a recent visit to the dam area by Reuters, residents pointed to erosion, landslides and deformed terrain they said had seriously worsened since last year.

Wang said pollution from algae blooms was localised and temporary, and "the frequency of geological disasters has been effectively controlled".

Since the dam's water level rose to 156 metres last year, there had been no "major geological disasters" creating large loss of life, Wang said.

In the summer of 2007, landslides across the dam area killed at least 13 people, according to local news reports and the dam environmental agency.

On Thursday, an official in Chongqing -- a sprawling municipality of 28 million that covers many rural areas affected by the dam -- denied a previous report that 4 million of its residents would have to move due to the dam's environmental strains.

Chongqing spokesman Wen Tianping said the ambitious plan was a development programme "to narrow the urban-rural wealth gap", and not an environmental retreat. The policy would not involve "forced relocation", Xinhua said.

 

 

Item 63: Last Buildings Demolished by Three Gorges Reservoir

(Nick Macfie, Editor Roger Crabb, Reuters, 16 November, 2007) BEIJING - The last blocks of flats standing on land to be engulfed by China's vast Three Gorges reservoir were razed on Thursday, with one row going up in smoke at the push of a button.

Thirteen blocks in Kaixian county, under the jurisdiction of Chongqing municipality in the country's southwest, were reduced to rubble within four seconds by 400 kg of dynamite as their former occupiers looked on at a safe distance.

Kaixian was the last of Chongqing's eight counties to complete relocation work for the Three Gorges project. Residents could be seen carting away furniture as late as Wednesday.

A total of 457 households living in Kaixian had been relocated by the end of October.

The Three Gorges Dam lies across the country's longest river, the Yangtze, and when completed will be the world's largest flood control and hydropower station.

Construction began in December 1994, and officials say the final bill will be about US$25 billion.

Two cities, 11 counties, 116 towns, and hundreds of cultural sites in Hubei province and Chongqing have been flooded to create the reservoir and about 1.4 million people have been displaced.

The vast scheme is meant to subdue the Yangtze River, but as water levels rise, parts of its shores have strained and cracked, dismaying scientists and officials and alarming villages.

Along the 660-km (410-mile) reservoir, residents pointed to erosion, landslides and deformed terrain they said have seriously worsened since last year, when the water level was raised a second time.

But a high-ranking Chinese official said on Thursday the environmental impact had been less damaging than feared.

"The problems, including landslides, trapped silt and algae blooms, did not go beyond the scope predicted by the feasibility report in 1991, and in some aspects, they are even less severe than predicted," Wang Xiaofeng, director of the office of the Three Gorges Project Committee of the State Council, told Xinhua.

 

 

Item 64: Japan: Eating a whale? Choices are many

(Joseph Coleman, AP, 17 November, 2007) Breaded, deep-fried or raw, whale is considered a tasty staple in some parts of Japan, no matter what the world and its animal-lovers may think.

Tastes vary among regions, depending on what kinds of whale are caught. Northerners prefer the lighter flesh of the minke, while the cooking traditions of Wada, a village outside Tokyo, focus on the dark meat of the Baird's beaked whale.

Akiji Ichihara, who runs Wada's Piman restaurant, stews the meat with ginger, leaves, soy sauce, sake and miso soy bean paste, or pan-fries it in oil like a steak.

Tare is meat sliced thin, slathered with soy sauce and sun-dried. A chewy snack with beer or sake, and can last in the fridge for a year.

"It's black and doesn't look very appetizing," says Ichihara, but "it tastes good."

However, scientists say that toothed whales like those eaten in Wada have high levels of mercury contamination.

The dark, bloody meat of the Baird's beaked whale doesn't make for very attractive sashimi. The minke, with lower mercury levels, is preferable.

Coastal whalers are banned from taking minke commercially. But Japan kills more than 1,000 of them every year as part of a scientific whaling program allowed by the International Whaling Commission.

Some of that meat eventually makes it to Ichihara's kitchen, where patrons dip raw strips of it into a mixture of soy sauce, ginger and garlic.

"The tail meat is good for sashimi," he said. "It's like tuna, nicely marbled. And the taste is lighter, so it's best for sashimi."

 

 

Item 65: China World’s Largest Importer of Hard and Soft Woods: Investors Embrace Trees to Tap China Boom

(Alison Leung, Reuters, 19 November, 2007) HONG KONG - Investors looking for new ways to cash in on China's strong economic growth are turning to its emerging forestry industry, which is flourishing amid a clampdown on the global trade of unsustainable rainforest timber.

China is the world's largest importer of soft and hard woods. Total forest product imports more than tripled between 1997 and 2005 to 134 million cubic metres, accounting for around half the log exports from Papua New Guinea, Myanmar, Indonesia and Russia.

But with campaigns against deforestation prompting tighter rules on international trade, a handful of listed logging firms are looking to exploit China's 960 million hectares (9.6 million sq km) of forests, of which only 5 percent is in plantation use.

The fledgling industry is planting fast growing, high-yield trees such as eucalyptus to feed demand from explosive growth in home ownership and construction -- and trying to soothe investors by battling accusations it is harming the environment by using timber taken illegally or unsustainably from the world's forests.

China's insatiable demand for raw materials has helped push up the price of commodities from iron ore and palm oil to copper and milk powder and wood products are no different. Benchmark NBSK pulp prices have risen more than 30 percent in two years.

Analysts say firms such as Temasek-invested Sino-Forest Corp and China Grand Forestry Resources Group can cash in on rising demand and tighter supply.

"With China's significant imbalance of wood supply, upstream players should benefit from rising wood prices," said Chuan Tang, an analyst at Deutsche Bank.

China Grand Forestry, which transformed itself from a garments maker formerly called Good Fellow Group, has seen its market value balloon nearly 18 times since the beginning of 2006, when it announced the purchase of Beijing Wan Fu Chun Forest Resources Development Co Ltd.

"Despite early scepticism, the market now recognises that the company's earnings model is sound," HSBC's Ken Ho said in a research report.

China Grand signed an agreement with Lee & Man Paper last month to supply the container board maker's pulp facilities in China with raw materials from its fast-growing, genetically modified paper mulberry trees.

China Grand also agreed this week to pay US$820 million for Yunnan Shenyu New Energy, a Chinese company that plans to make biodiesel from Jatropha Curcas trees.

DODGY LOGS?

But some analysts say investing in Chinese forestry firms is risky, as they are small and could be hit by unpredictable changes in government policy -- common for any nascent industry.

China is just beginning to regulate its forestry industry and detailed laws are lacking in many areas.

"They're mainly small-caps and investors may see difficulties when they want to offload the stocks," said Alex Tang, a research director at Core Pacific-Yamaichi International.

There is also the risk the highly cyclical pulp and timber markets fall, denting what forestry firms can get for their logs.

Chinese companies also face competition for forestry assets from both global timber operators and pension funds, which view growing trees as a good match for their long-term liabilities.

The world's top paper and board producer Stora Enso, which began the development of plantations in China's Guangxi province in 2002, has plans to plant a 160,000 hectare forest to support the establishment of a pulp and paper/board mill in the province, boarding Vietnam. It spent US$37 million buying suitable land for a mill in April.

Morgan Stanley singled out Sino-Forest among its best China materials plays, initiating coverage of the Chinese forestry and paper industry with an attractive view.

"Not only do we forecast demand growth for industrial wood to be robust for many years, but China's dependence on increasingly scarce imported wood should ensure strong pricing power of at least 10 percent per year through the end of the decade," Morgan Stanley's Charles Spencer wrote recently.

Apart from more established names such as Sino-Forest, a clutch of up-and-coming producers is getting in on the act.

At least half a dozen Hong Kong firms, such as China Timber and Venture International Investment, have either been bought by forestry operators or shifted their focus to logging and wood products manufacturing in the last two years.

They reason that with 42 percent of logging land owned by the state and the rest operated in deals with local governments, there is plenty of room for the private sector to expand.

And if their new plantations are eligible for carbon credit trade under the Kyoto Protocol, that could bring in extra cash.

"This is a sector with great potential, but it's new to many analysts and involves technical and government regulation requirements, so investment risks are relatively high," an analyst with a major European house said.

Firms are also dogged by environmentalist complaints about deforestation and illegal logging in tropical forests, often far from China.

Omnicorp Ltd -- which is buying a tropical rainforest in Suriname in South America -- has insisted it will practise "sustainable forest management", cutting selectively to maintain biodiversity.

But another Hong Kong-listed firm, Malaysia-based Samling Global, said last month one of its units was fined US$470,000 by the Guyana Forestry Commission for regulation breaches, including under-invoicing the trees harvested.

The firm denied the allegations and will appeal against the sanctions, which include the suspension of its sub-contracting operations relating to the concessions. But the stock has fallen more than 30 percent from a July peak of HK$3.55. (US$1=HK$7.765) (Editing by Dominic Whiting & Lincoln Feast)

 

 

Item 66: Japan to Unveil Emissions Proposal at ASEAN Summit

(Reuters, 20 November, 2007) SINGAPORE - Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda plans to unveil a major environmental initiative at a summit in Singapore on Wednesday that will aim for drastic emissions cuts and incentives for developing-nation polluters.

Japanese government officials said on Monday the initiative would aim to include the world's biggest polluters, such as the United States and China, which have no targets to cut emissions under the United Nations' Kyoto Protocol.

The offer, which would be conditional on assistance to developing countries in exchange for environmental protection, would be presented at talks between the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the leaders of Japan, China, South Korea and India.

"We will give incentives to East Asian countries to protect the environment," said an official, who declined to be identified, adding that China already received US$450 million in yen-denominated loans to help environmental improvements.

The United States pulled out of Kyoto, saying it would hurt economic growth and did not include developing countries, who say that rich-nation polluters should take the lead on emission cuts.

China has pledged to improve energy efficiency but does not want absolute caps on emissions, while Indonesia wants rich nations to pay it to preserve its emissions-trapping forests. These are issues to be wrangled over at a UN summit in Bali next month aimed at agreeing on a successor to Kyoto, whose current targets end in 2012.

"For a new framework to be meaningful, it has to be comprehensive," the official told reporters. The initiative would follow on from a previous Japanese call for "Cool Earth 50" -- a target for a 50-percent emissions cut by 2050.

But even Japan, the only Asian country with a Kyoto target, is way behind its Kyoto goal of cutting greenhouse gases, due to rising transport and housing emissions.

"The Japanese people suffered so much during our rapid growth in the 1960s and 1970s. We want to share our mistakes with our Asian neighbours so they do not make the same mistakes," he said.

He said Japan's economy was 10 times more energy efficient than China, and Japan was willing to share technology to help China reduce emissions. He said that western Japan suffered from pollution from China carried across the sea.

China is trying to focus more on sustainable industrial growth as it struggles with rampant air and water pollution.

(Reporting by Geert Declercq; writing by Neil Chatterjee; editing by Roger Crabb)

 

 

Item 67: Japan urged to recall whaling fleet, Humpbacks hunted for first time since 1963, • 'Scientific' hunting claims disputed, Campaigners accuse fleet of underhand tactics

(Justin McCurry, The Guardian, U.K., 19 November, 2007) New Zealand and Australia today called for a Japanese whaling fleet to return to port a day after it set off for the southern ocean whale sanctuary vowing to slaughter more than 1,000 whales.

Among the targets of the hunt, which is being carried out in the name of scientific research, are 50 protected humpbacks.

The demand follows international protest at the fleet's departure yesterday. Britain is one of several other countries to have condemned the expedition, which will see humpbacks killed for the first time since they became a protected species more than 40 years ago.

Helen Clark, the New Zealand prime minister, said the fleet should have stayed at home, and condemned the expedition as commercial whaling in the guise of scientific research.

In a TV interview, Clark said she hoped there would be no repeat of last year's clashes between the whalers and protesters, and indicated that New Zealand was not in a position to assist the Japanese fleet. "It is very difficult for us, as the nearest country with any sort of search and rescue capacity, to offer any help," she said.

"Of course, we don't like the Japanese whaling fleet being down there at all. It would just be better if the Japanese stayed home and didn't come down under the guise, the deception, the claim, that it is scientific whaling when they want to take 1,000 whales."

Under the 1986 International Whaling Commission's ban on commercial whaling, Japan is allowed to hunt whales for scientific research.

Japan says such research is vital to understanding the size of whale populations, the age and reproductive status of the creatures and the effects of environmental damage, but critics denounce it as commercial whaling in disguise. Most of the meat from the scientific hunts is sold to markets and restaurants, and the profits are used to fund future expeditions.

Japan has killed almost 10,500 whales, mainly minkes and Brydes, since the commercial ban was introduced. This year, the fleet expects to catch 835 minke whales and 50 endangered fin whales in its biggest scientific expedition yet. But most international anger is directed at plans to kill humpback whales for the first time since the species was protected in 1963.

Having dwindled to just 1,200 in the 1960s, the humpback population now stands at between 30,000 and 40,000, according to the American Cetacean Society. The species is listed as vulnerable by the World Conservation Union.

Known for their size, complex songs and athleticism, humpbacks are a favourite among the estimated 1.5 million whale-watchers, who watch them make their way along the Australian coast every year.

Alex Dower, the Australian foreign minister, said he was "deeply disappointed" with Japan's decision to go ahead with the hunt.

"The government again appeals to Japan to reconsider its position on this inhumane practice, which is also opposed by the majority of nations," he said.

Robert McClelland, foreign affairs spokesman for the opposition Labour party, suggested the Australian military could be dispatched to track the whalers if, as the polls indicate, Labour takes power in elections this weekend.

"We really need to rattle a cage here," he said. "It's unacceptable that it's not only going on but getting worse."

Britain is also considering making a "high-level diplomatic protest" to Japan, according to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

Anti-whaling campaigners today accused the fleet of using underhand tactics after the vessels, led by the factory ship the Nisshin Maru, left port following a send-off from a brass band and flag-waving supporters.

Greenpeace said it had yet to locate the whaling vessels, which had sailed into international waters under cover of darkness after switching off their automated identification system, preventing other vessels from learning their location.

"They are operating by stealth, and we see that as a demonstration that that they don't want to be seen for what they are," Dave Walsh, a Greenpeace spokesman, told the Guardian from aboard the group's ship the Esperanza. "But we're confident we'll find them."

Walsh said the group would attempt to frustrate the whalers by positioning themselves between the whales and whalers and creating "walls" of water to bock the harpoonists' view of their prey.

"But we are also stepping up our campaign in Japan, because change will start there, not in the southern ocean," he added.

Greenpeace is understood to be seeking legal advice after Japanese officials repeatedly denounced it and other campaigners as terrorists.

In a speech at the weekend, the hunt's leader, Hajime Ishikawa, said: "They are violent environmental terrorists. Their violence is unforgivable ... We must fight against their hypocrisy and lies."

Last year's expedition was marred by clashes on the high seas between the whalers and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, which favours direct action.

The hunt was abandoned in February after the Nisshin Maru caught fire, killing a crewman. The current expedition is expected to end in April.

 

 

Item 68: S. Korea’s Population Exceeds 50 Million: Addition of foreign residents makes South Korea 24th most populous in world

(Hankyoreh, 19 November, 2007) The number of people residing in South Korea exceeded the 50-million mark for the first time in October, a government report showed yesterday.

According to the Ministry of Government Administration and Home Affairs, South Korea’s population, including foreign residents, totaled 50,087,307 at the end of last month, making South Korea the 24th most populous country in the world.

Including the population of North Korea raises the total population on the Korean Peninsula to 73 million. A united Korea would be the 17th most populous country in the world, the report showed. As of July 1, the world’s population stood at 6.67 billion.

South Korea’s population has been increasing steadily over the past few decades. The figure broke the 30-million mark in 1969 and exceeded the 40-million point in 1984. Earlier this year, it was approximately 49 million.

Excluding foreign residents, South Korean males accounted for 50.11 percent of the total population or 24,652,936, while females made up the remainder of 49.89 percent, or 24,541,149. Those aged over 19 years old, who will be eligible to vote in the December presidential election, totaled 37,805,262 or 76.8 percent of reported number of residents, the report showed.

Nearly half of the population lived in Seoul and Incheon and the surrounding Gyeonggi Province. Gyeonggi Province ranked first in terms of population density with 11,055,658 people living in the region. Seoul followed with 10,190,249.

Gyeonggi Province also came in first in terms of a net increase in population. It saw the number of residents grow 149,625, compared with that of late 2006. Icheon came next with a net increase of 33,487, followed by South Gyeongsang and South Chungcheong Province with 17,347 and 16,124, respectively. Busan, by contrast, saw its population decrease by 21,645, the largest, and South Gyeongsang Province and South Chungcheong Province followed with decreases of 10,755 and 7,766.

In terms of population growth rates, Hwaseong of Gyeonggi Province ranked first with 14.54 percent, trailed by Sunchang of North Jeolla Province with 6.33 percent. Of the municipalities, the city of Suwon topped the list in terms of population size, while Ulleung of North Gyeongsang Province ranked last.

 

 

Item 69: S. Korea Is World’s Third Largest Consumer of U.S. Beef: Relaxed rules may soon pave path for more beef imports, if Seoul and Washington reach a deal

(Hankyoreh, 20 November, 2007) South Korea has already become the world’s third-largest buyer of U.S. beef, even though current rules require Seoul to import boneless meat from cattle less than 30 months old. However, it is very likely that South Korea may soon ease quarantine rules to clear the way for more imports of U.S. beef. If negotiations between the two countries allow Seoul to import "bone-in" beef, South Korea’s imports of U.S. beef are likely to grow at a faster pace.

According to statistics by the U.S. Meat Export Federation on November 19, South Korea imported US$33.45 million worth of U.S. beef, or 6,076 tons, in September.

In early October, South Korea temporarily halted quarantine inspections of U.S. beef after finding spinal fragments in some boxes of American meat. This followed several similar incidents over the summer in which prohibited bone fragments were found and inspections halted. Bone fragments and meat from animals more than 30 months old have been identified as being at particular risk for mad cow disease, an outbreak of which in December 2003 initiated South Korea’s ban on U.S. beef. Seoul partially lifted the ban in January 2006 to allow imports of boneless beef from animals less than 30 months old.

As of September, Canada was the world’s bigger buyer of U.S. beef with $52.67 million worth of the meat, or 11,199 tons, imported, followed by Mexico with $50.81 million, or 13,621 tons. South Korea’s U.S. beef imports are often compared in contrast to those of Japan, which imported $18.93 million for the month.

For the first nine months of this year, South Korea ranked fourth, with imports worth $106.51 million. Mexico came first with $541.8 million, Canada was second with $310.52 million and Japan ranked third with $174.16 million, according to the data. Given the fact that South Korea resumed imports of U.S. beef in late April, South Korea was actually third in the ranking.

The data also showed that South Korea was the world’s fourth-largest importer of U.S. pork. For the first nine months of this year, South Korea imported U.S. pork worth $149.24 million, up 9 percent from a year ago. Japan came first with $846.56 million and Canada was second with $337.21 million, while Mexico was third with $220.9 million.

 

 

Item 70: Ancient Chinese Town on Front Lines of Desertification Battle

(AFP, 20 November, 2007) DUNHUANG, China (AFP) — Towering sand dunes loom over the ancient Chinese city of Dunhuang like giant waves about to break, and they are already lapping at Ma Wangzhen's onion farm.

She points a rough finger at a line of dead trees, half-buried in sand, planted years ago as part of her 20-year losing battle to halt the once-distant dunes which now threaten to spill into her onion crop. "It moves very fast, much faster than anything I can do to stop it," said Ma, 60.

Ma is on the front lines of a national struggle against a relentless foe: desertification.

An ancient oasis in destitute Gansu province along the historic Silk Road, Dunhuang is in danger of being swallowed by the sands of the adjacent Kumtag desert, which are creeping closer at a rate of up to four metres (13 feet) a year.

The city's plight starkly illustrates the threat of desertification and the hard choices it presents to tens of millions of people living across northern and western China.

About 2.6 million square kilometres (one million square miles) were classified as desert wasteland in the most recent government survey in 2004, up more than 50 percent in a decade and challenging China's ability to feed its 1.3 billion people.

The problem stems from centuries of unsustainable grazing and farming practices and overuse of already slim and strained water resources.

The government has attempted to blunt the spread through reforestation, incentives and other means, said Greenpeace China climate change campaigner Li Yan.

But the hotter, drier climate due to global warming poses a renewed threat, she adds.

"This is already a serious problem for China, and Greenpeace is extremely worried that climate change will worsen it," she said.

Once a welcome oasis for Silk Road travelers thanks to an ancient store of groundwater, Dunhuang is drying up.

The water table in the city of 100,000 has dropped 12 metres (39 feet) since 1975 and is still falling as city growth strains the water supply, according to official figures.

Its rivers and lakes have shrunk 80 percent in 30 years while the Kumtag dunes creep closer as vegetation that restrained the sands for aeons dies out.

"It's a very complicated issue that shows we have ignored the environment too much in the past," Mayor Sun Yulong told AFP.

"Now, changes are occurring. This is mother nature's way of punishing us."

Sandstorms -- higher in number and intensity -- also have accelerated the deterioration of the 1,000-year-old Buddhist frescoes at Dunhuang's Mogao caves, one of China's great historical sites and a growing tourist draw for the traditionally agrarian community.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao called recently for renewed efforts to prevent Dunhuang becoming "a second Loulan," referring to another Silk Road stop further west that was swallowed by the desert in the last century.

Dunhuang, where large ubiquitous signs urge water conservation, has moved aggressively, placing tight restrictions on all new inward migration, wells and farms.

But the impact on residents has been harsh.

Standing amid his withering cotton fields, 64-year-old Dai Nianzuo said tough water rationing has dramatically reduced yields.

The 3,000 yuan (400 dollars) he used to make each year from his crops has been slashed to about 1,200 yuan.

"The situation is very bad for us and the government does not have an answer," he said, holding a tattered burlap bag full of freshly picked cotton.

Greenpeace's Li commends official efforts so far but says authorities must make the issue -- and especially the climate change impact -- a higher priority.

Greenpeace recommendations include incentives to develop wind power in threatened areas so that precious vegetation is not harvested for use as fuel, and taking biodiversity into account when selecting tree species for reforestation.

"If we don't stress climate change in the overall plan, that could make for a very unpleasant future," Li said.

Ma, the onion farmer, hopes to turn the situation to her advantage by turning her property into a tourist stop for the growing numbers of visitors coming to hike the majestic Kumtag dunes.

But the government has placed restrictions on operations such as these, too.

"I need money to start something like that but the government gives me no support," she said, her feet crunching along in the sand.

 

 

Item:71: South Korea Land Grab Hurts Shorebirds

(Jon Herskovitz, Reuters, 21 November, 2007) SEOUL - Land reclamation in South Korea is taking a heavy toll on shore birds by destroying the habitat that once served as a main source of food to sustain their global migration, a study released on Tuesday said.

South Korea completed its Saemangeum land reclamation project on its west coast in 2006. It covers an area of 400 square km (155 sq miles) -- about seven times the size of Manhattan.

"All shore bird species that formerly staged there regularly have been affected, and most species have shown declines," said the study from Birds Korea and the Australasian Wader Studies Group.

Migratory birds travelling between Russia and Alaska in the north to New Zealand and Australia in the south congregate for refuelling stops at Yellow Sea tidal flats to feast on shellfish and other food.

"The whole of the Yellow Sea is an amazing crossroads for migratory shore birds," said Nial Moores, a British-born conservationist and director of Birds Korea.

Among the species most affected at Saemangeum are the Great Knot, which numbered about 88,000 in mid-May 2006 but fell to about 3,500 a year later, and Bar-Tailed Godwit, the study said.

The groups in 2006 started a three-year survey on the number of shore birds at Saemangeum and adjacent sites.

The loss of tidal flats had also hurt water quality in the area and led to mass deaths of marine animals, the study said.

South Korea, now one of the world's largest economies, launched its reclamation project decades ago to increase its farm land when it was trying to rise from the ashes of the 1950-1953 Korean War.

The government has said it is trying to develop other shore areas for the migratory birds.

A separate study in May said migratory shore birds are starving and at least two species face extinction due to the reclamation project that has removed one of the largest feeding grounds on the Yellow Sea for 400,000 birds that pass a year. (Editing by Jonathan Thatcher and David Fogarty)

 

 

Item 72: Autumn Rain Down 90 Percent in China Rice Belt

(Reuters, 21 November, 2007) BEIJING - Large areas of south China are suffering from serious drought, with water levels on two major rivers in rice-growing provinces dropping to historic lows, state media said on Tuesday.

Rainfall since the beginning of October had dropped by 90 percent in Jiangxi and 86 percent in neighbouring Hunan, the country's largest rice-growing province, from average figures, Xinhua news agency said.

Rice is a staple for most Chinese and a crop which needs a constant supply of water

The Gan and Xiang rivers running through the two provinces had seen their lowest water levels in history, Xinhua said. The shallow water has caused a jam of barges in some sections of the Gan.

Authorities had rushed to ensure drinking water supplies in big cities along the rivers and irrigation of fields by diverting water from reservoirs and installing pumps, Xinhua said.

Water levels on China's longest river, the Yangtze, and on the Pearl River in the southern province of Guangdong had also dropped, Xinhua said.

Drought and floods are perennial problems in China where meteorologists have complained about the increased extreme weather, partly blaming it on climate change.

More than 1,100 Chinese were killed during summer floods this year.

But some parts of the south were hit by weeks of scorching heat and drought in the summer, when as much as a third of farmland was damaged and millions of people were short of drinking water.

It was not immediately clear how much damage had been caused to the rice crop.

The China National Grain and Oils Information Centre early this month estimated rice production this year would rise by 2 percent to 186.5 million tonnes.

(Reporting by Guo Shipeng and Niu Shuping, editing by Nick Macfie)

 

 

Item 73: US Asks Japan to "Refrain’ from Whaling Expedition

(Joanne Allen, editing by Chris Wilson, Reuters, 21 November, 2007) WASHINGTON - The United States urged Japan on Monday to "refrain" from a research whaling expedition that environmental activists contend is for commercial purposes and will, for the first time, target humpbacks.

A Japanese whaling fleet departed on Sunday from Shimonoseki port in southwestern Japan for the Antarctic Ocean.

Environmental group Greenpeace said if the fleet does not heed its demands to return home, it will follow the expedition to protest against the hunt.

Greenpeace said the Japanese fleet aims to catch more than 1,000 whales, including 50 humpbacks and some 50 fin whales, which environmentalists say are endangered.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the United States recognizes Japan's legal rights under the Whaling Convention to conduct this hunt, but noted that there were "nonlethal ways to conduct scientific research."

"We call on Japan to refrain from conducting this year's hunt, especially with respect to humpback and fin whales," he said.

The United States also urged restraint by those who may be planning protests against the Japanese fleet, McCormack said.

Japan abandoned commercial whaling in accordance with an international moratorium in 1986, but began the next year to conduct what it calls scientific research whaling.

The whale meat, which under rules set by the International Whaling Commission must be sold for consumption, ends up in supermarkets and restaurants.

Japan has long argued that its whaling program promotes the understanding of whale stocks and species.

 

 

Item 74: EU Urges Japan to Stop Whale Hunt

(Jeff Mason; editing by Sami Aboudi, 21 November, 2007) BRUSSELS - The European Commission urged Japan on Tuesday to stop a hunt it said could kill up to 1,000 mink, fin and humpback whales.

"There is no need to use lethal means to obtain scientific information about whales," the European Union executive said in a statement, noting that fin and humpback whales were classified as endangered by the World Conservation Union.

"The European Commission urges Japan to reconsider its decision and stop the hunt," it said.

A Japanese whaling fleet left on Sunday for an expedition that activists say will for the first time target humpbacks.

The United States has also urged Japan to "refrain" from the trip. Japan says whaling is a cherished cultural tradition and says the hunt is for research purposes.

Whale meat ends up in Japanese supermarkets and restaurants.

 

 

Item 75: (Not Just Bluefin…) Big-Eye Tuna Stocks Near Collapse, Report Warns

(Robert Evans, Reuters, 21 November, 2007) GENEVA - Worldwide stocks of bigeye tuna, a prime source for Japanese restaurants serving sushi and sashimi around the world, are on the verge of collapse from overfishing, a report released on Wednesday said.

The wildlife trade monitoring network, TRAFFIC, which is part-run by the conservation group WWF, said a collapse would have a profound effect on fishing fleets as well as on processing and trading industries in Japan and Taiwan.

Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Maldives, which have artisanal fleets and provide processing centres for large vessels, could also be affected.

"Science demands a sharp reduction in the catch of the bigeye tuna, but over the past decade this advice has been ignored," said Simon Cripps, director of the WWF's International Marine Programme.

He called on member countries of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission to agree on a 14 per cent cut "before it is too late", ahead of their meeting in Guam next month.

Organisations which regulate fishing on the high sea have been generally slow to respond to scientists' advice and have failed to address the problem of overfishing of the bigeye, the study said.

Two days ago campaigners said stocks of the Mediterranean bluefin tuna, another staple of Japanese cuisine, were facing exhaustion because of overfishing.

Greenpeace and the WWF said a collapse of the bluefin seemed certain after the international supervisory body for the fish, ICCAT, failed to agree on cutting quotas at a meeting in Turkey last week.

A decline in bluefin stocks has increased demand for the bigeye tuna which is also excessively fished in the Indian and Atlantic oceans and the Western and Central Pacific, the report added.

 

 

Item 76: Japan Stands By Its Renewed 'Scientific' Whale Slaughter

(Justin Norrie, The Age, 24 November, 2007) LUIS Pastene's name is virtually unknown in the anti-whaling countries of the Western world. But the Chilean-born marine biologist feels their wrath every November when Japan's whaling fleet sets out on another expedition to cull hundreds of whales in the name of science.

"I'm getting so tired of the biased articles I read in Western newspapers each year at this time," says Dr Pastene, who supervises nine scientists studying whale samples at Tokyo's Institute of Cetacean Research.

It is the work his team does here that drives Japan's "scientific whaling" program, and in turn provokes international outrage. Invariably, he says, the substance of his research is lost amid invective from activists. "It's time someone told the truth," he insists.

The truth, in simple terms, is that Japan's giant 8030-tonne factory ship, the Nisshin Maru, and three smaller whaling boats, left last Sunday for the Antarctic Ocean on the biggest scientific whale hunt in history. The fleet is intent on slaughtering as many as 935 minke whales, 50 fin whales, and, crucially, 50 of the vulnerable humpback whales protected by an international moratorium since 1966.

Back at the laboratories of the institute, not far from the world's biggest fish and seafood market at Tsukiji, Dr Pastene and his colleagues will scrutinise thousands of samples taken from blubber, livers, ear-plugs, ovaries and testes, bones, lungs and even the skin of foetuses borne by cows at the time of their death.

The institute is the centre of Japan's scientific whaling program. Critics say its research is a sham designed to allow the country to continue commercial whaling, but its staff says the data is crucial to understanding whale populations, their "stock structures", movements, feedings habits and contamination by pollutants. It should also give an indication, Dr Pastene says, of competition between different whale species for food.

"For example, when the size of a population has decreased substantially, more food will be available (per capita), blubber will be thick and these better nutritive conditions will promote a younger age at sexual maturity and the pregnancy rate will increase," he says.

"Ear wax is used to determine the age of the whales and the ovaries are used to check the maturity status of the females." Also, he says, pollutants such as mercury are absorbed through food and indicate how much krill — small crustaceans — the whale communities are consuming, and therefore how they are faring against other species.

This and other research, Japan's Fisheries Agency insists, is all carried out with the innocent aim of monitoring changes to environmental conditions and whale populations in the Antarctic. That could require "employing control of whale populations if needs be", the Government says more ominously in its whaling plan.

The institute's director-general, Minoru Morimoto, rejects claims by Australian scientists that more humane methods of study could produce the same results. "Mortality, birthing rates and accurate age determination, important for whale management, cannot be done through DNA analysis of random skin flakes," he says.

Because changes occur so slowly in a whale population, he says, a large sample is needed each year to gain accurate data. The whale meat left over is then sold by the institute, formerly a government agency, to fund research for the following year.

By using mostly anecdotal data to hypothesise that an increase in the number of protected humpback whales — from roughly 1200 in 1963 to 30,000-40,000 now — is hurting minke whale populations, the body has now decided to add the humpback species, beloved of whale watchers across the world, to its research program. This "major shift" in the ecosystem must be closely watched, it warns. Due to the lack of hard data available, however, it has opted for a "precautionary approach" and settled on a small sample size of 50.

"Humpback whales in our research area are rapidly recovering," says Hideki Moronuki, whaling chief at the Fisheries Agency. "Taking 50 humpbacks from a population of tens of thousands will have no significant impact."

As Dr Pastene points out, the main purpose is to obtain the scientific information that will allow a "rational use of whale stocks in future". In other words, it might be said that Japan is killing whales to justify more killing — an irony that is not lost on its fiercest critics.

One of them has appeared recently from within the ranks of Japan's own scientific fraternity. Toshio Kasuya, a retired professor who worked for the Fisheries Agency's whaling program in the 1980s, launched a scathing attack on his former colleagues.

"Without the earnings from the meat sales, the whaling organisation that undertakes the government-commissioned research program would be unable to continue operation, and the shipping company that provides the fleet for the program would not be able to recover costs for whaling vessel construction," he wrote in a newspaper.

"This is nothing other than an economic activity. It leaves no room for researchers to carry out research based on their own ideas."

More controversially, he says scientists were told in the 1980s to manipulate the quota of whales needed for research to ensure the program continued for as long as possible. "I regret very much my role in setting up this illegal whale research."

Twenty years later, Japan has killed almost 10,500 mostly minke and Bryde's whales, and has plans to slaughter several thousand more. By contrast, it killed just 840 whales in the name of scientific research between 1954 and the international moratorium on commercial whaling, imposed in 1986.

Whale meat, meanwhile, is more widely available than ever in Japanese supermarkets and was also included in the regular menu of the Tsubohachi izakaya (Japanese-style pub) chain this year.

In 2005, Kushiro, a small town in Hokkaido, became one of the first in Japan to put whale meat back into school lunches in a push to rejuvenate its depressed economy through the whaling industry. A local seafood processing company began producing whale burgers and even whale curry — in "handy boil-in-a-bag pouches".

Naoka Funahashi, the Japanese director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, believes it is only national pride, compounded by indignation at criticism from the West, that stirs many Japanese into professing support for whaling.

Several hotly disputed polls suggest young Japanese people nowadays have little liking for the fatty meat, and one Australian study has found university students are mostly opposed to whaling.

But Mr Moronuki, from the Fisheries Agency, scoffs at this. "I also felt in the same way when I was a student … but the thing is, students don't fully understand the facts.

"On the other hand, when I try to explain the problem about the resources level of whales or what we should do to use resources continuously, many people start to understand."

This and other research, Japan's Fisheries Agency insists, is all carried out with the innocent aim of monitoring changes to environmental conditions and whale populations in the Antarctic. That could require "employing control of whale populations if needs be", the Government says more ominously in its whaling plan.

The institute's director-general, Minoru Morimoto, rejects claims by Australian scientists that more humane methods of study could produce the same results. "Mortality, birthing rates and accurate age determination, important for whale management, cannot be done through DNA analysis of random skin flakes," he says.

Because changes occur so slowly in a whale population, he says, a large sample is needed each year to gain accurate data. The whale meat left over is then sold by the institute, formerly a government agency, to fund research for the following year.

By using mostly anecdotal data to hypothesise that an increase in the number of protected humpback whales — from roughly 1200 in 1963 to 30,000-40,000 now — is hurting minke whale populations, the body has now decided to add the humpback species, beloved of whale watchers across the world, to its research program. This "major shift" in the ecosystem must be closely watched, it warns. Due to the lack of hard data available, however, it has opted for a "precautionary approach" and settled on a small sample size of 50.

"Humpback whales in our research area are rapidly recovering," says Hideki Moronuki, whaling chief at the Fisheries Agency. "Taking 50 humpbacks from a population of tens of thousands will have no significant impact."

As Dr Pastene points out, the main purpose is to obtain the scientific information that will allow a "rational use of whale stocks in future". In other words, it might be said that Japan is killing whales to justify more killing — an irony that is not lost on its fiercest critics.

One of them has appeared recently from within the ranks of Japan's own scientific fraternity. Toshio Kasuya, a retired professor who worked for the Fisheries Agency's whaling program in the 1980s, launched a scathing attack on his former colleagues.

"Without the earnings from the meat sales, the whaling organisation that undertakes the government-commissioned research program would be unable to continue operation, and the shipping company that provides the fleet for the program would not be able to recover costs for whaling vessel construction," he wrote in a newspaper.

"This is nothing other than an economic activity. It leaves no room for researchers to carry out research based on their own ideas."

More controversially, he says scientists were told in the 1980s to manipulate the quota of whales needed for research to ensure the program continued for as long as possible. "I regret very much my role in setting up this illegal whale research."

Twenty years later, Japan has killed almost 10,500 mostly minke and Bryde's whales, and has plans to slaughter several thousand more. By contrast, it killed just 840 whales in the name of scientific research between 1954 and the international moratorium on commercial whaling, imposed in 1986.

Whale meat, meanwhile, is more widely available than ever in Japanese supermarkets and was also included in the regular menu of the Tsubohachi izakaya (Japanese-style pub) chain this year.

In 2005, Kushiro, a small town in Hokkaido, became one of the first in Japan to put whale meat back into school lunches in a push to rejuvenate its depressed economy through the whaling industry. A local seafood processing company began producing whale burgers and even whale curry — in "handy boil-in-a-bag pouches".

Naoka Funahashi, the Japanese director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, believes it is only national pride, compounded by indignation at criticism from the West, that stirs many Japanese into professing support for whaling.

Several hotly disputed polls suggest young Japanese people nowadays have little liking for the fatty meat, and one Australian study has found university students are mostly opposed to whaling.

But Mr Moronuki, from the Fisheries Agency, scoffs at this. "I also felt in the same way when I was a student … but the thing is, students don't fully understand the facts.

"On the other hand, when I try to explain the problem about the resources level of whales or what we should do to use resources continuously, many people start to understand."

 

 

Item 77: Koreas Fail to Strike Deal on Joint Fishing Area

(Yonhap, 29 November, 2007) Defense chiefs of the two Koreas failed Thursday to agree on a joint fishing area around the disputed western sea border, as the North insisted on drawing the zone further south of the de-facto maritime border, according to South Korean delegates here.

The two sides, however, agreed to a seven-point agreement calling for security guarantees for inter-Korean economic projects and the next round of defense ministerial talks to be held next year, they said. The two Koreas also agreed to set up a joint military committee to explore ways of reducing tensions. The committee will be headed by the vice defense ministers of the two countries.

No other details of the agreement to be released at the end of the three-day talks were available yet.

"South and North Korea will release a joint statement soon," a South Korean delegate said.

Fixing the joint fishing zone was South Korea's primary goal of the first inter-korean defense ministerial talks in seven years.

The fishing zone, designed to prevent accidental naval clashes in the crab-rich West Sea, was agreed upon at the October summit between the South and North Korean leaders.

The wrangling over the Northern Limit Line (NLL) acted as a deal-breaker again, as it had for the previous meeting between the defense chiefs of the two countries in 2000.

North Korea does not recognize the NLL by the United Nations troops commander at the end of the 1950-53 Korean War.

North Korea refused to offer an area north of the NLL for the fishing area. Pyongyang has wanted to create it south of the NLL, while South Korea has called for both sides to give the same amount of area for the zone. The NLL dispute led to bloody naval skirmishes between the two Koreas in 1999 and 2002.

 

 

Item 78: South Korea contributes more than US$4 million to First Environmental Project between Two Koreas

(UNEP, 22 November, 2007) Nairobi/Bangkok, 22 November 2007-The United Nations Environment Programme and the Republic of Korea today signed an agreement for establishing a Trust Fund that addresses key environmental issues in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). The Republic of Korea will contribute US$4.4 million in total for this project. The first venture of its kind on the environment between the two Koreas, the Trust Fund will tackle forest depletion, declining water quality, air pollution, land degradation and biodiversity in DPR Korea. It will also support eco-housing initiatives as well as conservation and management of the Taedong watershed, environmental education, integrated environmental monitoring system, clean development mechanism and renewable energy technology.

"This multilateral cooperation with UNEP is of great significance for both South and North Korea and a huge step forward in addressing pressing environmental issues in DPR Korea,"said LEE Kyoo-Yong, Ph.D., Minister of Environment of the Republic of Korea.

The past decade has seen declining forests in DPR Korea due to timber production, firewood consumption, wild fires and insect attacks associated with drought, population growth and conversion of land to agricultural production. Pollution of rivers and streams has become severe in recent years, particularly in the Taedong River, which flows through central Pyongyang. DPR Korea's reliance on coal for power generation, industrial processes and domestic heating also led to serious air pollution, particularly in cities like Pyongyang and Hamhung.

To counter this, the country has encouraged community, youth and children's groups to establish tree nurseries and to participate in campaigns such as the National Tree Planting Day on March 2 every year. The government is currently strengthening legal control on effluent from factories by applying the"Polluter Pays Principle" and has initiated mass media campaigns to inform the public of the need for water conservation.

Environmental protection was also recognized as a priority issue and a prerequisite for sustainable development after a series of natural disasters in the mid-1990s led to a critical drop in yields of major crops. In 1998, DPR Korea revised its constitution and designated environmental protection as a priority over all productive practices and identified it as a prerequisite for sustainable development. National laws on forests, fisheries, water resources and marine pollution were also adopted.

"This agreement will build on the momentum that DPR Korea has begun. It will also go a long way in strengthening the spirit of cooperation between the two countries," said UN Under-Secretary General and UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner.

Since 2000, UNEP has been working in partnership with the National Coordinating Committee for Environment and UNDP to strengthen the capacity of the national government for environmental assessment and monitoring and implementation of Multilateral Environmental Agreements. In 2004, UNEP and DPR Korea signed a Framework Agreement for Cooperation in Environment. The first DPR Korea State of the Environment report was also launched that year.

Notes to Editors:

The population of DPR Korea was 22 million during 1996 and growth trends show that by 2020 the population will be around 29 million.

In DPR Korea more than 80 percent of the land area consists of mountainous terrain where suitable land for the cultivation is limited. Severe degradation of land resources has been closely associated with natural disasters like landslides, flooding and the incidence of drought in recent years had substantial impacts on sustainable management of land resources, in particular agricultural production. The inundation of arable land by flooding in 1995 inflicted damage estimated at US$925 million.

The bulk of remaining forests are in the mountains. Seventy percent of this forest stands on slopes above 20o. Forest degradation in DPR Korea leads to: decrease of timber resources and habitats, weakness in control function of the biosphere on atmosphere and hydrology, loss of biological species, flooding and soil erosion.

With expansion of industry and population growth, problems related to water conservation and management are emerging. The demand for drinking water, public water supply and water for industrial and other needs is increasing with economic development and the improvement in standards of living.

Together with industrial development and population growth, air quality is deteriorating, particularly in urban and industrial areas. The major causes of air pollution have been associated with industrial boilers, kilns, motor vehicles in and around cities and industrial areas.

DPR Korea meets its primary energy demand by using domestic coal resources, releasing sulphur dioxide, suspended particulate matter and oxides of nitrogen. These are the main air pollutants associated with coal combustion. Primary energy consumption is expected to double in 2020.

The volume of municipal solid waste generated from Pyongyang is estimated to be 420 thousand tonnes per annum.

 

 

Item 79: Russia Giddy with Petro Dollars

($martMoney, 26 November, 2007) This year, Russia has topped the world list of oil producers, with 9.87 million bbl/pd in January-October, 10%-12% more than the second largest producer, Saudi Arabia.

The latter could have easily boosted production and outmatch Russia, but they prefer not to do it for a reason. The United States, also a major oil nation, has been reducing production of late, but augmenting refining capacity instead.

The U.S. currently refines 180% more oil than it produces. Russia, on the contrary, processes less than half of the oil it produces, with the average degree of conversion (the percentage of light products) barely reaching 70% (85%-95% in the West).

The reckless drive to pump more and more oil will soon lead Russia to an uncontrolled fall in production, not because it will start saving its resources like the U.S., but because it will not be able to compensate for depletion in the traditional oil-producing areas. Russian oil majors can no longer boost production, and it is only growing because of the recent Sakhalin projects.

The situation in the oil-processing sector is no better either. Russia is currently using around 80% of its refining capacities. Oil processing is growing by 5%-6% a year, but it has remained static for the past three years, according to a BP statistics review. Which means that by the time Russia is in a position, where it can no longer boost production, it will also be unable to increase processing if it does not start building new refineries now. The old ones will be running at full capacity by then.

It is a shame that the billions of dollars that state oil companies have poured into buying more assets, have not been invested in either production (if they are so determined to export all their crude) or, better still, in building refineries based on cutting-edge western technology.

 

 

Item 80: Roh Calls for US FTA Ratification

(Yoon Won-sup, The Korea Times, 30 November, 2007) President Roh Moo-hyun Friday called for ratification of a free trade agreement (FTA) with the United States.

"We should not leave the FTA with the United States unsettled just because of any political interest or agenda. This is an issue for which we should take responsibility for our future economy," Roh said at a ceremony to mark the 44th Trade Day in Seoul.

The President asked business people to push the National Assembly to ratify the FTA as soon as possible.

Roh's remarks reflect his concern that the FTA, which was signed in June, may fail to be ratified before his term ends in February.

The government has submitted the FTA bill to the Assembly but lawmakers haven't put it on the agenda for approval yet.

He also said that it is the right time for South Koreans to invest in North Korea as the reconciliation process and inter-Korean economic cooperation are gaining ground on the Korean Peninsula.

"North Korea, which was a burden to our economy, has now become a land of opportunity for our companies," Roh said. "Of course, some are still hesitating to invest, but inter-Korean relations will not go back to the past given the progress of six-party talks and the peace system on the peninsula."

He said early investors will gain more profits, and inter-Korean economic cooperation will contribute not only to the nation's economy but also to the peace and prosperity on the peninsula.

"Following the inter-Korean summit (on Oct. 2-4), inter-Korean relations have significantly improved. Various inter-Korean cooperation projects, such as the establishment of a West Sea peace zone, the construction of a joint shipyard and a tour of the North's Mount Baekdu, will proceed smoothly," said Roh.

Roh presented awards to businessmen and companies that contributed to the nation's overseas trade.

Korea's trade volume in 2007 is expected to surpass $700 billion of which $360 billion is accounted for by exports, according to him. The figures are more than the double of those in 2002, he added.

 

 

Item 81: Deep Concern Over Three Gorges Dam

(Michael Bristow, BBC, 30 November 2007) There are fears that China's Three Gorges Dam is causing serious environmental problems, despite official claims to the contrary.

Local farmers, environmental campaigners and even officials themselves have voiced concern about environmental damage.

That damage includes landslides that have triggered 50 metre-high waves on the reservoir behind the dam, according to one local official.

But despite these widespread accusations, the Chinese central government insists there are no geological "abnormalities".

Critics of the Three Gorges Dam - the world's largest hydro-electricity project - have long argued that the scheme would lead to environmental problems in the area around the reservoir.

In September, those fears appeared to be confirmed when speakers at a government-organised conference warned of "environmental catastrophe".

They said there had been more frequent natural disasters, severe erosion, landslides and ecological degradation since the dam was constructed, according to state media reports.

Serious problems

And those making the comments are in a position to know - many are officials who are directly connected to the project.

Wang Xiaofeng, deputy director of the government's Three Gorges Project Construction Committee, told conference delegates: "[We cannot] profit from a fleeting economic boom at the cost of sacrificing the environment."

Tan Qiwei, vice-mayor of Chongqing, a municipality next to the reservoir, said the lake's banks had collapsed in 91 places.

These landslides are being caused by the huge weight of water behind the dam and fluctuations in the water level, delegates at the conference were told.

Farmers living near the dam's reservoir, which is 660 km (410 miles) long and an average of 1.1 km wide, tell a similar story.

They talk of frightening tremors since the dam was completed last year, that have left cracks in the walls of their homes.

Last week, a landslide in Badong County in Hubei Province, alongside the reservoir, killed more than 30 people after burying a bus.

Chongqing officials recently announced that four million more residents would have to be relocated to "protect the ecology of the reservoir area", according to state media reports.

The project's initial plan had been to move just 1.2 million people.

Conflicting views

But despite these developments, China now insists that there have been no unforeseen environmental problems related to the project, due for completion in 2009.

Wang Xiaofeng, the official who in September had seemed to warn of catastrophe, this week took a different line.

"Geological disasters in this area have been effectively controlled," he said at a press conference in Beijing to discuss the environmental impact of the Three Gorges Dam.

Although he did not discount the possibility of natural disasters in the future, he added: "There will not be any major damage to life or property."

He also rebutted the various accusations claiming the Yangtze River dam is causing environmental damage.

Mr Wang said there was less than half the expected levels of silt behind the dam, and outbreaks of algae in waterways feeding into the reservoir had been controlled.

Rare floral and fauna had been protected, he went on, and there was only a low risk of reservoir-induced earthquakes.

Mr Wang also denied that the issue of four million extra residents being moved from their rural homes in Chongqing was anything to do with the $24 bn (£11.7 bn) Three Gorges Dam.

And he added that the project was achieving its intended aims - to produce clean electricity, to control flooding and to improve shipping along the Yangtze.

Who to believe?

So with so much conflicting evidence, who is telling the truth?

Chinese writer Dai Qing, who has long campaigned against the Three Gorges project, is in no doubt.

She says there is environmental damage and the government is trying to cover it up.

"If they're saying that the landslides have nothing to with the reservoir than they are telling lies," she told the BBC.

The activist said the area was unstable before construction began, and was never a suitable site to build such a large dam.

"They're not truthfully reflecting a serious situation. The government is not being responsible to business or to China," she added.

Three Gorges Dam:

Type: Concrete Gravity Dam

Cost: Official cost $25bn - actual cost believed to be much higher

Work began: 1993

Due for completion: 2009

Power generation: 26 turbines on left and right sides of dam. Six underground turbines planned for 2010 Power capacity: 18,000 megawatts

Reservoir: 660km long, submerging 632 sq km of land. When fully flooded, water will be 175m above sea level

Navigation: Two-way lock system became operational in 2004. One-step ship elevator due to open in 2009.

 

 

Item 82: Is This Happening in East Asia? ‘More Than One-quarter Of US Bird Species Imperiled, Report States’

(ScienceDaily, 29 November, 2007) — One hundred seventy-eight species in the continental U.S. and 39 in Hawaii have the dubious distinction of landing on the newest and most scientifically sound list of America's most imperiled birds. WatchList 2007, a joint effort of Audubon and American Bird Conservancy, reflects a comprehensive analysis of population size and trends, distribution, and threats for 700 bird species in the U.S. It reveals those in greatest need of immediate conservation help simply to survive amid a convergence of environmental challenges, including habitat loss, invasive species and global warming.

We call this a 'WatchList' but it is really a call to action, because the alternative is to watch these species slip ever closer to oblivion," said Audubon Bird Conservation Director and co-author of the new list, Greg Butcher. "Agreeing on which species are at the greatest risk is the first step in building the public policies, funding support, innovative conservation initiatives and public commitment needed to save them."

The new Audubon/American Bird Conservancy WatchList identifies 59 continental and 39 Hawaiian "red list" species of greatest concern, and 119 more in the "yellow" category of seriously declining or rare species. It is based on the latest available research and assessment from the bird conservation community along with data from the Christmas Bird Count and the annual Breeding Bird Survey. The data were analyzed and weighted according to methods developed through extensive peer review and revision, yielding an improved assessment of actual peril that can be used to determine bird conservation priorities and funding.

"Adoption of this list as the 'industry standard' will help to ensure that conservation resources are allocated to the most important conservation needs," said David Pashley, American Bird Conservancy's Director of Conservation Programs and co-author of the new list. "How quickly and effectively we act to protect and support the species on this list will determine their future; where we've taken aggressive action, we've seen improvement."

Despite ongoing challenges and their continued place on the list, the status of some WatchList species is improving, according to the new data, as broader awareness of their plight has spawned effective conservation action. Several species have benefited from federal protection under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and now show stabilizing, or even increasing populations. Lacking an ESA designation or the political support needed to secure strong protective measures, others continue to decline.

"Habitat loss due to development, energy exploration and extraction, and the impact of global warming remain serious threats for the most imperiled species, along with others on both the red and yellow lists," said Pashley. "Concerted action will be needed to address these threats."

Listed species may seem unfamiliar to many Americans. Unlike those on Audubon's recent survey of Common Birds in Decline, the species on WatchList are often rare and limited in range. In combination with population declines and new threats, these factors make many of them acutely vulnerable to extinction.

 

 

Item 83: Xinjiang: Lake Shrinks, Desert Expands

(Zhang Ming'ai, China.org.cn, November 30, 2007) Due to shrinking surface area, Xinjiang's largest salt lake, Aibi Lake, has increased the desertification of the area and subsequently transformed into one of China's major sandstorm sources.

Down to just 500 square kilometers from its original 1,200, Aibi Lake has become a direct threat to the sustainable development of the Economic Belt on the northern slope of the Tianshan Mountains and the security of the new Euro-Asian Continental Bridge.

With the smaller surface area, water resources from the lake have been reduced to 600 million cubic meters from 3 billion cubic meters. Shrinkage has also increased the salt content of the lake water yearly, which has now reached 3 percent, close to the average salt content of seawater.

The decrease in water has transformed the surrounding areas of Aibi Lake into a 1,500-square-meter desert belt, expanding at a speed of 39.8 square meters per year. Under the hot sun, large amounts of salt become particles less than 0.02 microns in diameter at the dried lake bottom.

According to the Xinjiang Environmental Protection Bureau, these tiny salt particles are more easily blown into the air than sand dust. Each year more than 4.8 million tons of salt dust is blown from the Aibi Lake area. The strong wind from Alataw Mountain Pass may blow them more than 5,000 kilometers away, constituting a big threat to the plants, crops, and people of all northern China.

According to Gao Xiang, Party chief of the Aibi Lake Wetland Nature Reserve Administration, the salt dust has accelerated the melting of glaciers in Bortala Prefecture, where the sandstorm weather has risen to 110 days from 13 days since the 1960s.

Gao said that the Aibi Lake Wetland Nature Reserve had 385 kinds of wild plants registered, but a 2005 investigation showed that there are only 322 kinds of plants left. The nature reserve has 111 kinds of bird species, numbering 1 million in total, but a strong wind could kill more than 10,000.

"If the comprehensive ecological treatment of the Aibi Lake area succeeds, it will erect an ecological protection shelter in northern Xinjiang; if it fails, the salt dust will directly threaten the ecological environment of the Hexi Corridor and all North China," Gao remarked.

According to the Bortala Forestry Bureau, water shortages have led to the shrinkage of the Aibi Lake surface. Three rivers including the Kuytun, which previously supplied 45.8 percent of the Aibi Lake water, dried up in the 1970s. Reduced supply of river water combined with severe lack of rain, about 90 mm per year, has caused a serious imbalance between the supply of lake water and evaporation.

Each year 713 million cubic meters of lake water evaporates, but the average water supply to the lake is only 662 million cubic meters. In addition, the increased population and expanded irrigation areas after the 1970s also sped up the shrinkage of the lake surface.

Various measures have been enacted to help solve the ecological problems around Aibi Lake including water conservation, tree planting and a limit on logging and hunting to protect the lake.

"The fundamental ecological problem of Aibi Lake is a water shortage," noted Wang Xinhe, a member of the Bortala People's Congress Standing Committee.

In order to maintain the existing Aibi Lake surface, the prefecture saves 20 million cubic meters of water per year to guarantee a water supply of 600 million cubic meters to the lake. But Bortala is running short of water resources with its economic and social development.

Wang Xinhe said helplessly, "Bortala's limited water resources are far from satisfying the water supply to Aibi Lake. The current situation constitutes a massive pressure to the sustainable development of the prefecture's society and economy and the coordinating development of population, resources, and environment."

According to preliminary estimates, an additional 1 billion cubic meters of water is needed to cover the dried lake bottom and deal with the surrounding deserts.

In 2004 Xinjiang launched a water project in the Aibi Lake area. Phase I of the project with a total input of 20 million yuan, will be accomplished by 2010. Each summer and winter, related institutions will fire rain enhancement devices using rockets or artillery to supply more water to the lake.

The air over Aibi Lake contains abundant vapor water and tuning this vapor water into liquid water will effectively supply water to Aibi Lake, according to the Xinjiang meteorological department. "In the long run, in order to win the battle to protect the lake, water transfer projects must be put on the agenda," Wang Xinhe explained. Inter-basin water transfers can increase the water volume of Aibi Lake, extend its surface, elevate its underground water level, and maintain and develop existing plants around the lake area.

"Currently the deterioration speed of the Aibi Lake ecological environment is much faster than the improvement speed. Protection of the Aibi Lake area requires the concerted efforts of people from all walks of life," Wang added.

 

 

Item 84: DPRK: Korean Central News Agency Reports: Leg-ringed Scops Owl Recovered in Pyongyang

(KCNA, North Korea, 30 November, 2007) -- A scops owl with an identification ring attached to its leg was found recently in Ryongsong District, Pyongyang. No sooner it had been caught than it was sent to the Animal Preservation Association under the DPRK Natural Conservation Union.

Inscribed on the leg ring are the letters "China Identification Ring Center" (PRC-NBBC) and BJP.O.BOX 1928 together with the number "I02-9263". The bill of the bird is 13 mm long, its wing 140 mm long and the length of its spread wings is 570 mm. The color of its feathers is ashy-maroon.

Associate Professor and Master O Myong Sok of the Animal Preservation Association said it is a beneficial bird belonging to the Strigidae family. It is distributed in Korea, China, Russia, Japan, Sri Lanka, India and other areas. It is drawing the interest of the specialists, being the first (ringed) scops owl to fly to Korea across the border. Officials of the Animal Preservation Association under the DPRK Natural Conservation Union continue investigation, contacting relevant units.

 

 

Item 85: Korea: WTO Proposal Limits Fisheries Subsidies

(Reuters, 03 December, 2007) GENEVA - New negotiating proposals at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) on Friday impose tough limits on subsidies on fisheries, a move that delighted environmentalists concerned about overfishing.

The proposals, from Uruguay's WTO ambassador Guillermo Valles Galmes, who is chairing WTO negotiations on "rules" -- dumping, subsidies and fisheries subsidies -- do not propose a blanket ban on all subsidies to fisheries.

But they list a large number of subsidies, including those for the construction of new vessels, and for operating costs of fisheries, including fuel,that would be banned.

Both the European Union and Korea subsidise fuel for fishing vessels.

Certain subsidies in developing countries, where many poor people depend on fishing for their livelihoods, are exempted from the proposed bans, but countries benefiting from waivers must operate fishery management systems to conserve fish stocks.

The proposals from Valles came in a negotiating text for the Doha round, launched six years ago to boost the world economy and help developing countries grow out of poverty.

WTO delegations agreed on Friday to aim to wrap up the round by the end of next year.

Oceana, which campaigns to protect the world's oceans, said the text from Valles was an important step by the WTO.

"A strong fisheries subsidies agreement would be a hands-down win for the environment," said Courtney Sakai, campaign director for Oceana, which also advises the United States on fisheries subsidies.

"The WTO faces challenges in tackling the issues of subsidies and overfishing, but the potential benefits are enormous," she said. "If the Doha round fails, the oceans will be the big loser.

(Reporting by Jonathan Lynn; Editing by Stephen Weeks)

 

 

Item 86: Record Breaking Year for Climate

(WWF, 03 December, 2007) Bali, Indonesia – The past year has seen more weather records smashed as extreme events take a firmer hold of the planet, says WWF at the start of the UN climate change conference.

The overview from the global conservation organization, Breaking Records in 2007 – Climate Change, shows record lows for sea ice cover in the Arctic, some of the worst forest fires ever seen and record floods.

"Events like these show the urgent need to take decisive action on climate change," says Hans Verolme, Director of WWF’s Global Climate Change Programme.

"Keeping warming below a 2ºC global average is key to preventing dangerous extreme events such as these which punctuated 2007."

In the Indonesian capital of Jarkata, torrential rainfall in February 2007 lead to one of the worst flooding in its history. The flooding displaced 400,000 inhabitants, caused numerous outbreaks of disease and cost the economy US$450 million.

"Indonesia is already suffering from the impacts of global warming," says Fitrian Ardiansyah of WWF-Indonesia. "The Indonesian government must lead the Bali summit towards a safer future."

Meanwhile, 2007 saw the continuation of severe droughts in many parts of the world, such as the Amazon, Australia, Africa and parts of China. More often than not, it has led to some of the worst forest fires we have seen, devastating areas in southern and eastern Europe and the western United States.

September 16 marked the lowest area of summer sea ice cover in the Artic beating the previous record set in 2005, decreasing by an area equivalent to Texas and California combined.

"Rich countries can show they are serious about stopping global warming in its tracks by committing in Bali to emissions reductions of at least 30% by 2020," said Dr Stephan Singer, Head of WWF’s European Climate Change Programme.

"Time is fast running out. We need to use the Kyoto system to expand global carbon markets and stimulate investments in clean technologies."

END NOTES:

• In 1992, most countries joined the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to fight global warming and to adapt to the inevitable temperature increases. Fifteen years later Indonesia will host the third Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (MOP3) in conjunction with the 13th session of the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC (COP13) in Bali from 3 to 14 December.

• The Bali conference will be the culmination of a momentous twelve months in the international climate debate. Over the past year, overwhelming scientific evidence of global warming, set out in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), put the reality of human-induced global warming beyond any reasonable doubt.

 

 

Item 87: US Seeks Alliance with China and India to Block Climate Protection

(Gregor Peter Schmitz , Der Spiegel, 03 December, 2007) Officially, the US government says it wants to push in Bali for a climate protection "road map." But SPIEGEL ONLINE has learned that this may not be true. US government officials are already attempting to coordinate with China and India to prevent binding emissions limits.

... In the run-up to the Bali Climate Conference that opened Monday, the administration of US President George W. Bush established contact with representatives of the Chinese and Indian governments in an attempt to curb progress on climate protection initiatives, SPIEGEL ONLINE has learned from a source familiar with the White House's Bali strategy.

According to the source, Washington is hoping that the two greenhouse gas emitters will openly declare during the conference that they are unwilling to accept any binding limits on emissions of greenhouse gases -- at least not as long as the US is unwilling to do more or if the Western industrial nations do not provide them with more financial aid for climate protection initiatives. If successful, the US could use the tactic to prevent itself from becoming an isolated scapegoat if negotiations in Bali end in a stalemate.

 

 

Item 88: South Korea Settles First Asbestos Death Suit

(Reuters, 05 December, 2007) SEOUL - The family of a South Korean woman on Tuesday became the first litigants to win a wrongful death suit in the country for exposure to asbestos, local media and the family's lawyer said.

The Daegu District Court ordered an unidentified asbestos manufacturer to pay 124.7 million won ($135,000) to the family of the woman who died last year at the age of 46 of what doctors said was cancer due to asbestos exposure during her employment from 1976-1978.

"The labour ministry said there have been an estimated 46 deaths due to asbestos-related diseases in South Korea over the past seven years," said the family's lawyer Lee Ho-chul.

Lee said the company has changed its name many times but was mostly recently known in South Korea as Cheil E&S Corp. It has since left the country and moved to Indonesia.

"More cases like this will be coming up," Lee said, but added they would be tough to win because the exposure took place many years ago and not much evidence documenting exposure remains.

Officials from the labour ministry were not immediately available to comment on the lawsuit or answer questions about asbestos exposure in the country.

The court said in its decision posted on its Web site (http://daegu.scourt.go.kr/) that the company did not take adequate measures to prevent employees from breathing in asbestos or telling them about the risks of exposure.

(Reporting by Jessica Kim, writing by Jon Herskovitz, editing by Rosalind Russell)

 

 

Item 89: China Fires Up Biomass Plants, Eyes CO2 Reduction

(Lindsay Beck, Reuters, 05 December, 2007) BEIJING - China has fired up eight biomass plants in leading grain-producing provinces in hopes of cutting carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation, state media reported on Tuesday.

The plants have a total installed capacity of 200 megawatts and are expected to burn 1.6 million tons of stalks a year.

"Compared with coal-fired power plants, these biomass projects are expected to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 800,000 tons annually," Xinhua news agency quoted Cui Mengshan, of the National Bio Energy Co., as saying.

The company is a subsidiary of China's State Grid Corp., the country's top grid operator.

Coal-dependent China is set to surpass the United States as the world's largest emitter of heat-trapping carbon dioxide, bringing it under scrutiny as countries gather in Bali to begin negotiating a pact to fight global warming to succeed the Kyoto Protocol.

While it wants to eliminate the burning of biofuels in homes because of health impacts of burning wood or grain stalks in confined quarters, Beijing has been trying to step up their industrial use.

State Grid Corp. launched the country's first biomass plant last December in the eastern grain-producing province of Shandong, the report said.

 

 

Item 90: Warming, Biofuels to boost Food Prices for Years

(Emma Graham-Harrison, Reuters, 05 December, 2007) BEIJING - Food prices may climb for years because of expansion of farming for fuel, climate changes, and demand from richer consumers in fast-growing developing nations, a report from a top food research group said on Tuesday.

Biofuel expansions alone could push maize prices up over two-thirds by 2020 and increase oilseed costs by nearly half, with subsidies for the industry forming an implicit tax on the poor, the International Food Policy Research Institute said.

"The days of falling food prices may be over," said Joachim von Braun, lead author of the "World Food Situation" report and director general of the institute.

"Surging demand for food, feed and fuel have recently led to drastic price increases ... climate change will also have a negative impact on food production," he added.

Growing financial investor interest in commodity markets as prices climb is fuelling price volatility, and world cereal and energy prices are increasingly closely linked.

With oil prices hovering around $90 a barrel, this is bad news for the poor, who have already suffered "quite dramatic" impacts from a tripling in wheat prices and near-doubling in rice prices since 2000, the report said.

Global cereal stocks, a key buffer used to fight famines around the world, have sunk to their lowest level since the 1980s.

More investment in agricultural technology, a stronger social welfare net with particular support for children, an end to trade barriers and improved infrastructure and finance opportunities in less-developed countries, could all help improve food security.

Although increased trade, a key demand of many developing world nations in global trade talks, would bring economic gains, in many cases it would not significantly reduce poverty, the report added.

WARMING, BIOFUELS LOOM

Global warming could cut worldwide income from agriculture 16 percent by 2020, despite the potential for increased yields in some colder areas and the fertilising impact on plants of having higher carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.

"With the increased risk of droughts and floods due to rising temperatures, crop-yield losses are imminent," the report said.

It warned that Africa would be hit particularly hard by changes in weather patterns, in which scientist say man-made gasses pumped into the atmosphere are an important factor.

"When taking into account the effects of climate change, the number of undernourished people in Sub-Saharan Africa may triple between 1990 and 2080," the report said.

Biofuels also threaten nutrition for the poor. Under current investment plans, and assuming expansion in nations with high-potential but without detailed plans, maize prices would rise a quarter by the end of the next decade.

Under a more dramatic expansion, prices could climb up to 72 percent for maize and 44 percent for oilseeds, the report said.

Even when next-generation biofuels that use feedstocks such as wood and straw become commercially viable, competition for resources from water to investment capital may continue.

Global food demand is shifting towards higher-value vegetables, diary, fruits and meat as a result of rapid economic growth in developing countries including China and India.

But it can be difficult for smaller farmers to take advantage of the trend because of large retailers' growing grip on the market and their high safety, quality and other requirements.

 

 

Item 91: Korea: Major Candidates Trapped in Growth Myth

(Na Jeong-ju, The Korea Times, 06 December, 2007) Presidential candidates pledge to boost the economy beyond the nation's potential growth rate and create thousands of more jobs. Tired of years of a stagnant job market and weak income growth, most voters seem to long for a president who can help make their livelihood more affluent. Growth matters. But is it all? Also, do they have resources and capability to keep their promises?

As debates tend to focus on their growth-oriented policies, some political analysts say voters have had few opportunities to compare the pros and cons of the economic campaign pledges. Analysts say candidates are paying less attention to easing social disparity and reducing the wealth gap between the rich and poor.

"There is no argument that the country should achieve higher economic growth to become a more respected member of the global community," said Lee Byung-chun, an economics professor at Kangwon National University. "However, what's important is how to do it and how to minimize problems coming from the widening income disparity between the rich and poor. Candidates are only talking about growth."

Growth Myth

Lee Myung-bak, the presidential nominee of the largest opposition Grand National Party (GNP), came up with a so-called "747 Policy" to take the country's economy to a higher level.

He promised to lay the foundation to help the country achieve an average annual economic growth of 7 percent, $40,000 in per-capita income and become one of the top seven economic powers in the world, if he is elected.

He also said the country can create more than 600,000 jobs if its economy grows 7 percent.

Economists say his economic policies are more friendlier to companies and investors than ones pledged by other candidates.

Lee's promise to construct a waterway in the country to ease logistics and transportation problems has been a hot debate topic. Parties have often clashed again over the feasibility of the project.

The GNP's rivals argue Lee's project is not suitable for the environment and an outdated growth model, while the GNP insists that building canals will help the country accelerate growth.

"Lee's inland canal project will threaten the ecosystem and native species," Rep. Kim Young-joo of the United New Democratic Party (UNDP) said. "Besides, canals are not effective in cutting logistics costs due to the nation's geological features."

On the other hand, GNP lawmakers have insisted the canal project will prevent disasters and help utilize water resources.

In order to achieve higher economic growth, Lee promised to lower corporate taxes; ease regulations on equity investments by owners of business groups; achieve more flexible labor-management relations; and implement measures to reinforce management stability.

The UNDP flag-bearer Chung Dong-young calls Lee an advocate of "jungle capitalism." He claims Lee is attempting to create an environment where only the strongest survive.

Chung called for the need to increase investment in developing new technologies; nurturing promising small and mid-sized firms; and promoting economic cooperation projects between South and North Korea. He says his economic policies are more human-oriented, but are more productive than Lee's.

He is confident that the economy will be able to grow by more than 6 percent annually if his ideas are put into action in an appropriate way.

Chung has said he is seeking to create a new growth engine for the economy by establishing a long-lasting peace regime on the Korean Peninsula and promoting inter-Korean business projects.

He envisioned establishing a common economic community on the peninsular by 2020 in which people, goods and capital can move freely between the two Koreas.

Chung believes that once peace prevails on the peninsula, more South Korean and multinational firms will invest in the Gaeseong Industrial Complex and other areas throughout North Korea, which will create a win-win situation for the two Koreas.

He has said if elected president, he will also look to redirecting part of the country's defense budget to boost economic and welfare projects.

Chung's vision on economic growth is in contrast to those of his rival Lee, who has placed a greater emphasis on easing regulations and creating a business-friendly environment to encourage companies and investors to expand investment and create jobs.

Chung said he will implement a range of measures to support small and medium-sized enterprises and increase the number of middle-class households to 40 million by introducing friendlier policies for smaller firms.

Independent candidate Lee Hoi-chang has presented five policy goals.

He promised to cut taxes by 10 trillion won to reduce the tax burden on ordinary people; build a more corporate-friendly environment; introduce policies in support of smaller firms; conduct educational reform; and create more jobs for young people.

Lee said he will pursue a "small government" by reducing the national budget by 10 percent and sell government-owned corporations to private firms.

Moon Kook-hyun, a CEO-turned independent candidate, says his economic policies will create five million jobs and realize economic growth of 8 percent.

Based on his experience as a corporate executive, he promised to set up a more business-friendly environment and introduce policies aimed at doubling the average salary of company workers.

South Korea is faced with many social problems as a result of rapid economic development over the past decades, but it still needs to accelerate economic growth, he said.

"We have talked about only growth for the past decades. It is time to discuss policies for those who have been alienated from economic growth," said Kwon Young-gil, a candidate for the Democratic Labor Party. "Many people live under worse conditions despite growth and millions of workers have seen their salaries cut."

Kwon is the only candidate who has not come up with growth goals, while other candidates tend to put economic growth ahead of the fair distribution of wealth and public welfare. Kwon has criticized them of only thinking about policies for the rich and conglomerates.

Chaebol's Ownership in Banks

The idea of easing rules to enable chaebol, or Korea's family owned conglomerates, to own banks has also become a key subject of debate ahead of the presidential election as candidates have presented conflicting policy goals on the matter.

The GNP's Lee has made it clear that the regulations banning conglomerates from owning banks should be removed, while the UNDP's Chung has argued against this.

"There are only a few countries in the world that have regulations banning conglomerates' ownership of banks, and one of them is South Korea," Lee said in a recent forum in Seoul. "It is time for the country to remove the rules completely to ensure freer competition in the financial sector."

Lee said foreign capital is benefiting from such anti-corporate regulations in increasing their presence in the Korean financial industry.

In contrast, Chung said the restriction on chaebol's ownership of banks is necessary.

"The United Kingdom and the United States have tough regulations limiting investment of industrial capital in financial firms. The rules are essential to protect the financial industry," Chung said. "Some people are attempting to remove the rules for the benefit of conglomerates. Doing so only creates `jungle capitalism,' where only the strongest survive."

Conglomerates say removing regulations limiting chaebol's involvement with banks is necessary to halt growing foreign ownership of banks, while banks say that this will hamper the growth of the financial industry.

Currently, companies categorized as "non-financial" players are banned from owning more than four percent of stakes with voting rights in banks and other types of financial firms under the Banking Law. The law targets Samsung, LG, Hyundai and other family-owned business groups.

"The removal of investment restrictions for chaebol can create unfair competition in the financial industry, and will put banks under control of conglomerates," said Kim Sang-jo, an economics professor at Hansung University in Seoul. "Conglomerates with bank units will be able to secure crucial financial information about rival firms and use it for their interests. This kind of thing can happen at any time."

The Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) has pledged to back the lifting of the regulation, saying doing so is a strategic choice to take the country's financial sector to a higher level.

"Conglomerates have accumulated more than 360 trillion won in capital, but have been reluctant to invest because of so many anti-corporate rules, including one restricting chaebol's ownership of banks," former FSS Governor Yoon Jeung-hyun said.