Mining – India 1
1. Panic pause on ore supply continues 1
2. Vedanta ties up Rs 10K cr for Orissa project: Sources 2
3. Divestment, sops likely for steel sector 3
4. K’taka minister’s mining ops defended 4
5. India Globalization Capital Secures $2.6 Million Iron Ore Contract 4
Mining – International 5
6. BHP plays down radioactive haulage risk 5
7. Native Title Tribunal rejects first mine application 6
8. Another 15 dead illegal miners found at Free State mine 7
9. NSW farmers rally against coal mining 8
10. 6000 mining jobs disappear 10
11. Nigeria seeks power from coal in mining revival 11
12. Conservation Council wants ridge protected from mining 12
13. Copper Futures get firm: Hindalco, Sterlite shine 13
Other News 13
14. Amnesty International Report 2009 on India 13
15. India a very important part of the US foreign policy' 19
16. The Global Food Crisis: The End of Plenty 19
17. UN to study security threat of climate change 30
18. Crunch-time for climate change 32
19. BHEL ties up with IIT for water purification 35
Mining – India
Panic pause on ore supply continues
AMIT GUPTA
Maoist fear
Ranchi, June 3: It has been three weeks since Maoist rebels torched six trucks carrying bauxite on Ghaghra-Bishunpur road. But Hindalco Industries Limited, a flagship company of the Aditya Birla Group, is paying the price till date.
Two units of Hindalco, one in Renukoot and the other in Muri, are on the verge of running out of bauxite deposits as dispatch and transportation of ores from mines in Gumla and Lohardaga districts have stopped after that incident. Fearing fresh Maoist attacks, transporters have stopped ferrying bauxite ores to the units.
“For over 21 days, we have not been able to send bauxite to our Muri-based refinery and integrated plant in Renukoot. As a result, the units are slowly running out of bauxite deposits, thus dealing a blow to manufacture of aluminium products,” said K.K. Dave, the general manager (mines) of Hindalco Industries Limited. He added that 7,000 to 8,000 tonnes of bauxite get transported from the mines every day under normal circumstances.
He further pointed out that in the 2008-09 fiscal, out of 365 days, there were 200 non-working days in the mines due to the bandhs called by various rebel outfits in the area. “The scene has not changed in this fiscal. How can industries exist in the state under these circumstances?” asked Dave.
To ensure that trucks and dumpers can safely ply on the route, the police top brass held a high-level meeting with transporters in Gumla on May 29. Senior police officials, including IG (operations) D.K. Pandey, DIG (Ranchi zone) R.K. Mallick and superintendents of police of Lohardaga, Gumla and Latehar — three districts where either mines are located or ore-carrying vehicles ply through — tried to convince the transporters to ply their vehicles, assuring protection.
After the meeting, Mallick had even claimed that dispatch and transportation of bauxite from the region would resume soon. But the situation has failed to look up.
According to sources, People’s Liberation Front of India had attacked the trucks on May 12 to avenge the death of two of their top cadres.
Besides, the outfit has asked the state and the company to ensure better health, education, electricity and road facilities for villages located around the mines.
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1090604/jsp/jharkhand/story_11055904.jsp
Vedanta ties up Rs 10K cr for Orissa project: Sources
Nisha Poddar
Thursday, June 04, 2009 (New Delhi)
Vedanta Aluminium Limited (VAL) is raising a debt of Rs 10,000 crore for expansion of its aluminium project in Orissa. Sources close to the development say the State Bank of India has been signed up as the lead underwriter for the loan. SBI is talking to various bankers for the syndication of Rs 10,000 crore for Vedanta.
ICICI Bank, IDBI, PNB, BoI, Canara Bank, and Axis Bank are expected to be part of the syndicate to provide PLR-linked long-term debt to VAL, in which Sterlite Industries holds 29.5 per cent stake. Anil Agarwal’s global metal group, Vedanta Resources Plc, holds rest of the 70.5 per cent stake in VAL through Twin Star & Welter Trading. This loan is expected to be a non-recourse loan for Indian company, Sterlite Industries, to be serviced by Vedanta Resources.
VAL is raising debt for investing in its alumina and aluminium-producing units in Orissa. In the second phase of the expansion plans, the capacity of the alumina refinery will increase to 5 MTPA from 1.4 MTPA currently. The capacity of the aluminium smelter will be raised to 1.75 MTPA, from close to 0.7 MTPA. The total investment is expected to be $5.8 billion for next three years.
Reacting to the debt tie-up, Tarang Bhanushali, a senior metal analyst with India Infoline said, “That they raised the fund easily in the financial crisis is positive.” The Sterlite Industries stock is trading lower today, after trading advancing for eight straight trading sessions.
Sources in the Vedanta Group also suggest that the group is targeting to raise Rs 15,000-20,000 crore in the next six months. A large chunk of that is already tied up for the Orissa project. In April, Sterlite Energy, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sterlite Industries, raised Rs 6,000 crore for part-investment in the 2400 MW power project at Jharsuguda in Orissa.
http://profit.ndtv.com/2009/06/04122515/Vedanta-ties-up-Rs-10K-cr-for.html
Divestment, sops likely for steel sector
Raj Kumar Sahu
Thursday, June 04, 2009 (New Delhi)
The picture is getting clearer on the divestment front as the new government is now settling down. The steel ministry seems to have even sorted out few names and not just divestment but some other sops for the steel industry may also be on offing.
Well, raising money for various initiatives is a priority for the government and the steel sector could lend a helping hand to begin with the entire disinvestment process.
The Steel ministry is renewing efforts to sell stake in two of the state owned companies.
Past attempts to disinvest stake in Rashtriya Ispat did not take off due to various performance reasons. But now, the company is being seen as a cash cow.
However, for investors what does it really mean if an initial public offer is made for RINL?
One could for comparison sake, compare it to Ispat industries in the listed space, which has a market cap of Rs 3000 crore. RINL's present capacity of about 3 million tonnes is similar to Ispat's and will be doubled by 2011. Even performance wise, RINL's profits of about Rs 1900 crore seems to be much better than Ispat Industries' Rs 35 crore.
Similarly, Manganese Ore India Ltd has no immediate comparison in private sector but the cash reserves of about Rs 1200 crore and big mines of the company are attractive enough for investors.
But the steel ministry is keen to protect Indian companies under the new regime by once again looking at the issue of safeguard duty to protect companies from cheap imports.
Meanwhile, disinvestment is not the only priority for the steel ministry. Things like touching the production capacity of 100 MT as soon as possible and securing raw material supply for steel mills are also on top of the agenda.
http://profit.ndtv.com/2009/06/03205539/Divestment-sops-likely-for-st.html
K’taka minister’s mining ops defended
Express News Service
First Published : 04 Jun 2009 04:09:00 AM IST
HYDERABAD: Mines and Geology Minister B Srinivasa Reddy today defended the operations of the Obulapuram Mining Corporation owned by Karnataka Tourism Minister G Janardhan Reddy, saying they were in accordance with the laws.
Speaking to mediapersons, Srinivasa Reddy said his endeavour would be to increase revenues from mineral wealth. In fact, over the past three years the state had topped the nation in this respect, he noted.
When the supervision of sand mining, previously done by the panchayat raj department, was entrusted to the mines department, income increased from Rs 11 crore to Rs 71.63 crore, he said.
As for the granite industry which is reeling under recession, the minister said the Government had given 40 per cent concession in `seigniorage’ fee for the first year and 20 per cent in the second year.
Srinivasa Reddy said the State was attracting investment in mineral-based industries, adding that bauxite- based industries would bring in about Rs 25,000 crore worth of investment.
The public sector National Aluminum Company (Nalco) was setting up alumina and aluminium projects in Visakhapatnam, and in Tummapenta village of Kadapa district a Rs 1100-crore uranium mining plant was being set up by the Uranium Corporation of India.
The State would also encourage rock-sand plants, the minister said.
http://www.expressbuzz.com/edition/story.aspx?Title=K’taka+minister’s+mining+ops+defended&artid=efc2HtjZR34=&SectionID=e7uPP4|pSiw=&MainSectionID=fyV9T2jIa4A=&SectionName=EH8HilNJ2uYAot5nzqumeA==&SEO=
India Globalization Capital Secures $2.6 Million Iron Ore Contract
Establishes Presence in Chinese Iron Ore Market
BETHESDA, MD--(Marketwire - June 3, 2009) - India Globalization Capital, Inc. (NYSE Amex:IGC), a company competing in the rapidly growing materials and infrastructure industry in India, today announced it has secured a 2.6 million dollar contract to supply a Chinese company with iron ore. The order is for 40,000 metric tons (mT) of ore with a ferrous content of 62.5%.
"This order will be filled out of our shipping hub at the Krishnapatnam port in India. We expect demand for commodities to increase as China and India ramp up their infrastructure investment activities. Our strategy of establishing a brand and securing long-term delivery contracts is in place, and we are in the process of setting up another shipping hub on the west coast of India at Goa as part of this strategy. India Globalization Capital is well positioned to take advantage of the growth in the materials marketplace, and we expect our materials segment to be a meaningful addition to the company's operations," said Ram Mukunda, Chief Executive Officer of India Globalization Capital, Inc.
The importance of iron ore cannot be overstated. It is the most widely used of all metals, comprising 95% of the metal tonnage produced worldwide. Global use of finished steel products has increased markedly since 2005. The requirement for iron ore is particularly large in China where steel demand has risen by more than 13% in recent years. Worldwide, crude steel production climbed from 1,251 mT in 2006 to 1,344 mT in 2007, an increase of 7.5%, and has followed a similar trajectory in 2009, with China accounting for 46% of world iron ore imports.
Iron ore is rock and minerals from which metallic iron can be extracted. The primary form used in industry today is hematite, and is often the principal raw material used to make pig iron, a material critical to the production of industrial steel.
About India Globalization Capital:
India Globalization Capital is a construction and materials company operating in India, which builds roads, bridges and highways, and provides materials to the infrastructure industry in India and China.
The company has offices in Maryland, Mauritius, Nagpur, Cochin, Delhi and Bangalore. Copies of the Form S-3 and India Globalization Capital's other filings with the SEC containing information about India Globalization Capital, our Indian operations and other relevant documents, are available at no charge on the SEC's website (http://www.sec.gov).
For more information about India Globalization Capital, visit the company's web site at:www.indiaglobalcap.com.
Forward-Looking Statements:
This press release may contain forward-looking statements. These statements reflect management's current views and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected, expressed or implied in these statements. Factors, which could cause actual results to differ, relate to: (i) the ability of the parties to successfully execute on the contracts and business plan, (ii) our ability to raise additional capital and the structure of such capital including the exercise of warrants, and (iii) changes in the exchange rate between the U.S. dollar and the Indian Rupee. We undertake no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Other factors and risks that could cause or contribute to actual results differing materially from such forward-looking statements have been discussed in greater detail in the company's definitive proxy statement and supplement filed with the SEC and incorporated by reference into the Form S-3.
http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/India-Globalization-Capital-Inc-NYSE-Amex-IGC-998782.html
Mining – International
BHP plays down radioactive haulage risk
Posted 6 hours 52 minutes ago
"We've been shipping uranium oxide out of Darwin since 2005" ... BHP Billiton spokesman Richard Yeeles. (Reuters: Christian Charisius, file photo)
Map: Darwin 0800
Mining giant BHP Billiton says plans to increase the amount of radioactive material it sends to Darwin by rail will not be a risk to public health.
The company wants to freight about 1.6 million tonnes of radioactive copper concentrate to Darwin each year if its proposed expansion of the Olympic Dam in South Australia gets the green light.
BHP Billiton spokesman Richard Yeeles addressed a public meeting in Darwin last night.
He says copper concentrate is far less radioactive than the uranium oxide which is already shipped out of Darwin.
"We've been shipping uranium oxide out of Darwin since 2005 and of course the Ranger mine in the Northern Territory has been doing it a lot longer than that," he said.
"The uranium in the copper concentrate is about 2000 parts per million, that contrasts with about 990,000 parts per million for uranium oxide, so you can see that it's a much lower level of radiation."
Mr Yeeles says trains loaded with the radioactive product will not pose a risk to Territorians living along the rail corridor.
"The material is put in the rail wagons at Olympic Dam and then comes up through the Territory. It's a closed system, it gets to the port. The system remains closed while the product is handled at port as well so we believe we can do this very safely."
BHP Billiton will hold another meeting in Alice Springs tonight.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/06/04/2588760.htm
Native Title Tribunal rejects first mine application
By Babs McHugh
Posted Tue Jun 2, 2009 2:23pm AEST
Map: Perth 6000
For the first time in its 15 year history, the Native Title Tribunal has knocked back an application for a mining lease on Aboriginal land in Western Australia.
The Tribunal ruled the significance of a proposed mine site to a local Aboriginal group, the Martu, overruled the economic and public interest.
Many mining companies are struggling against the poor economic tide, so could the ruling have long term ramifications for foreign investment?
It is the second historic win for The Western Desert Martu People.
In 2002 they were awarded the largest ever native title determination when 136,000 square kilometres of WA's resources rich Pilbara in the north was ceded to them.
Now Reward Minerals Ltd has been denied a lease over a a potash deposit at Lake Disappointment in WA's east Pilbara.
The mine would have created 60 permanent jobs and generated $500 million a year in state royalties.
Native title lawyer Ben Zillmann says it is unlikely foreign companies will be deterred from investing in Australian mines despite the ruling
"Now they may not be as familiar with the concept of Native Title are the companies based in Australia and they'll need a little bit of education around it," he said.
"But I think it would probably be putting it a bit too strong to say that this case signals a massive ringing of alarm bells that Australia's a risky environment to negotiate in, or try to get a mining project up."
Acting CEO of the Western Desert Land Council Tony Wright says he understands the Martu could make a lot of money from the mine but that is not enough.
"It's not all about money," he said. "It's not culture for sale."
You can hear that story and longer versions of interviews with Ben Zillmann and Tony Wright atwww.abc.net.au/rural follow links to mining stories.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/06/02/2587235.htm
Another 15 dead illegal miners found at Free State mine
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By: Mariaan Webb
4th June 2009
Updated 0 minutes ago
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JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – The illegal miners death toll at South African gold producer Harmony Gold’s Eland shaft has now reached 76, after more bodies were found on Thursday morning.
Spokesperson Marian van der Walt told Mining Weekly Online that the bodies of another 15 miners had been brought to surface at the abandoned shaft, near Welkom, in the Free State.
The illegal miners death toll stood at 61 on Tuesday, after 36 bodies were recovered on Monday, and another 25 the following day.
The deaths follow an apparent underground fire. It was suspected that the people died of smoke and gas inhalation.
Van der Walt said in an interview that it remained uncertain what the extend of the incident was, and whether or not more bodies would be found.
Almost 300 illegal miners have been brought to surface in the past two weeks. These people were charged and will be criminally prosecuted.
Illegal mining in South Africa has been taking place for a number of years, but is intensifying with the higher gold price. Almost 100 people have now died as a result illegal mining activities this year alone, after 20 trespassing miners were killed at gold junior Pan African's Consort mine, in Barberton, earlier this year.
Chamber of Mines CEO Mzolisi Diliza said on Wednesday that illegal activities continued to undermine the industry's iniatives to put in place safety measures. South Africa's mining sector have reported 74 deaths this year.
Mining Minister Susan Shabangu said earlier in the week that South Africa would intensify its fight against illegal mining, which is believed to be linked to syndicates.
"It is clear that we are dealing with organised crime, with syndicates that are running intricate operations involving hundreds of people, who not only bribe security guards to enter old mine shafts and stay underground for weeks and even months, but go as far as melting gold in disused mines. We will leave no stone unturned in the hunt for these ruthless bosses,” she said, after visiting the Welkom mine where the bodies were recovered.
She described illegal mining as a threat to the mining industry and the economy.
Edited by: Mariaan Webb
http://www.miningweekly.com/article/another-15-dead-illegal-miners-found-at-harmony-mine-2009-06-04
NSW farmers rally against coal mining PRINT FRIENDLY
EMAIL STORY
The World Today - Thursday, 4 June , 2009 12:46:00
Reporter: Brigid Glanville
PETER CAVE: Farmers from the Liverpool Plains area of northern New South Wales are hopeful that a bill will be passed in State Parliament today to stop mining on prime agricultural land. More than 200 producers attended a protest outside Parliament House in Sydney this morning, claiming the State Government doesn't care about Australia's food bowl.
Liverpool Plains farmers recently had a win when they managed to stop BHP-Billiton from mining the area, but the threat still remains.
Brigid Glanville reports.
PROTESTER: We will not go away! We will go the distance!
(Crowd cheers)
BRIGID GLANVILLE: More than 200 farmers from northern New South Wales rallied outside State Parliament this morning, warning the Rees Government they will fight to stop mining in their area. They say the area, which produces 40 per cent of the nation's cereals, should be protected from coal mining.
Gary Ferris is the president of the Gloucester Residents in Partnership.
GARY FERRIS: Water, our most precious resource, is abundant. We have one of the most pure and reliable sources of water on the east coast of Australia. Our valley feeds the Manning Valley and Myall Lakes and Port Stephens catchments.
The State Government has ignored our approved, long-term, sustainable, local environment plan. Instead they have allowed coal exploration to occur in scenically protected zones. Shame on you Labor!
(Crowd cheers)
We are sick of being disregarded! The thoughtless, long-term destruction of our valuable agricultural and food-producing land has to be stopped.
BRIGID GLANVILLE: In New South Wales Parliament today the Greens MP Lee Rhiannon is putting forward a bill to ban coal mining within a kilometre of rivers and aquifers which feed prime agricultural land. The Greens and farmers say only 8 per cent of land in New South Wales is zoned agricultural and of that less than 1 per cent is what's classified as key agricultural land.
Greens MP Lee Rhiannon:
LEE RHIANNON: The Greens bill would stop exploring and mining on land designated as prime agricultural land and also the land from which the water rises, that feeds that land.
Now we're not talking about a large amount of land. Agricultural land in New South Wales is no more than 8 per cent so it's certainly not about shutting the industry down.
I am disturbed that there's been scare tactics that people will lose their jobs, that the industry will close down. That's nothing to do with this bill. The bill is about restoring balance between mining and farming.
BRIGID GLANVILLE: Last year Liverpool Plains farmers were successful in their fight to stop mining in an area just south of Tamworth. BHP-Billiton pulled out of its plans to develop an open-cut coal mine.
But Tim Duddy a farmer and spokesman for the Caroona Coal Action Group says this bill is needed to ensure Australia has enough food to eat.
TIM DUDDY: Destroying prime agricultural land or huge underground water resources such as we have in the Liverpool Plains, it's not acceptable. There's plenty of coal in plenty of other places.
If they remove a tonne of coal from Broken Hill or they remove a tonne of coal from the Liverpool Plains, it's no different to the money that comes to the state. It is simply the difference of the money that goes to the shareholders of the mining companies. It is not acceptable to compromise Australia's agricultural production for the sake of mining.
BRIGID GLANVILLE: But farmers may have to wait a bit longer. While the Greens have the support from the Liberal and National parties it's unlikely the bill will get up as the Labor Government has the numbers.
But Lee Rhiannon remains hopeful.
LEE RHIANNON: It's certainly hard to muster the numbers in the upper house because the Government does do a deal with some of the other MPs but it is heartening that the Coalition is supporting it; Gordon Moyes is supporting it. We only need the vote of one other MP to pass this bill.
And I know that many, four busloads have come from Caroona and Gloucester. There's many Sydney supporters here, many farmers from other areas, and they're working hard on those three remaining crossbenchers to give their vote.
PETER CAVE: The New South Wales Green MP Lee Rhiannon ending that report from Brigid Glanville.
http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2008/s2589230.htm
6000 mining jobs disappear
AAP
June 04, 2009 04:34pm
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THE Queensland mining industry has shed almost 6,000 jobs since the economic crisis hit in October last year, but there are signs of a recovery, the state government says.
Queensland Energy Minister Stephen Robertson told parliament the industry, which once employed 191,000 workers, had shed 3500 from the Bowen Basin, 940 from the northwest, and about 1000 from Gladstone refineries.
"In an encouraging sign for the mining industry, I am pleased to report that there have been no announcements of further large job losses in the mining sector since early May this year," Mr Robertson said.
"There are also further positive signs in the sector, with commodity markets remaining strong last month."
He said the prices of copper, lead, zinc and tin on the London Metal Exchange all remained higher than at the start of the year.
And despite a drop in coal exports to major trading partners such as Japan, exports to other countries, including South Korea and China, had increased this financial year compared to last financial year.
He said that in financial year to date, Queensland had exported around 117 million tonnes of coal, compared with 118.5 million tonnes in the corresponding period a year before.
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Mr Robertson said his department had cleared 527 applications for exploration over the past month.
And a number of major projects, including a thermal coal mine in central Queensland proposed by Waratah Coal, showed promise for the future.
http://www.news.com.au/business/story/0,27753,25586766-14334,00.html
Nigeria seeks power from coal in mining revival
Thursday, 04 Jun 2009
Reuters cited Ms Diezani Alison-Madueke mining minister of Nigeria as saying that Nigeria is working on a pilot project to use its untapped coal deposits to fuel power plants and boost its hard-pressed electricity generating sector.
Ms Diezani Alison-Madueke said that the move is part of a wider plan to also revive mining in commodities such as gold, iron ore and bitumen after years of neglect. She said that mining accounts for about 1% of gross domestic product in Africa's most populous nation and largest oil producer, but this could rise to 20% in coming years.
A key priority in reviving mining is to exploit Nigeria's coal deposits of 2.7 billion tonnes to generate electricity in a country that suffers from frequent power blackouts.
The Minister, who formerly worked for oil major Royal Dutch Shell said that a pilot project, organized in collaboration with the power ministry is expected to be started in four to 6 months once private sector financing and government agreements are put in place.
A first stage of the project, which will likely be located in Kogi state, could supply 600 MW of electrical capacity after 13 months. She added that "It would be a substantial contribution, not just the pilot project but also the whole schedule of projects that would fall into place. The first project is hopeful that once they kick off, over a period of 72 months they can ramp up to output of up to 3 600 MW, although as minister I am much more conservative."
Ms Alison-Madueke said that the government is attempting to revive mining after being hit by the sharp drop in oil prices. The price of a barrel crashing the way it did, I think it shook the Nigerial government in exactly the way that I think it should have."
She said that "Really and truly, this sector should have been extremely robust by now if it had been worked along the same lines as oil and gas exploration sector. It's very exciting times particularly because we are intent on insuring we have the correct framework in place for investors to come into the country."
In other mining sectors, the ministry launched tenders this week for bids to exploit three blocks of properties containing bitumen. The bidding process is expected to last for four and a half months.
The country holds bitumen deposits of around 27 billion barrels of oil equivalent. Nigeria also hopes to exploit its estimated iron ore deposits of 3 billion tonnes and gold reserves.
(Sourced from Reuters)
http://steelguru.com/news/index/2009/06/04/OTcwNTM%3D/Nigeria_seeks_power_from_coal_in_mining_revival.html
Conservation Council wants ridge protected from mining
Thursday, 04 Jun 2009
ABC reported that Conservation Council is considering asking Western Australia's environmental watchdog to block any mining activity at a sensitive vegetation range south-east of Geraldton.
The Environmental Protection Authority recently recommended the State Government reject plans by Sino Steel Mid West to mine the Mungada East Ridge. The EPA did give conditional approval to the iron ore miner's proposal to mine Koolanooka Hills and Mungada West.
The Conservation Council's Mr Tim Nichol said that the ridge is a biodiversity hotspot and wants the entire ridge protected.
He said that "The EPA has recognized that in the interests of conservation not all mining can go ahead we welcome the rejection of the Mungada East proposal. But we think they should have gone further and said that we won't have any mining in the area of Mungada Ridge."
(Sourced from ABC.Net)
http://steelguru.com/news/index/2009/06/04/OTcwNjE%3D/Conservation_Council_wants_ridge_protected_from_mining.html
Copper Futures get firm: Hindalco, Sterlite shine
2009-06-03 12:45:00
Commodity Online
MUMBAI: Copper stocks gained momentum on the Indian bourses as the copper prices strengthened on the commexes following improved demand scenario in the domestic as well as in the international market.
Leading copper miner, Vedanta Resources Group company, Sterlite Industries Ltd (BOM:500900) recorded gains of over 4% to Rs.718.60, while Birla Group firm, Hindalco Industries Ltd (BOM:500440) surged by over 5% to Rs.92.35 during the morning trading hours on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE).
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Similarly, Hindustan Copper Ltd (BOM:513599) too witnessed a rise of close to 2% to Rs.267 on BSE. Since beginning of June, the copper stocks have been on the rise with improved demand from domestic and international consumers.
Copper stocks, especially, Hindalco, Sterlite and Hindustan Copper gained sharply from the start of June. Hindustan Copper surged by over 13% since 1st June, while Hindalco gained close to 9% and Sterlite Industries shot up by over 15% since the start of June 2009.
In the wake of renewed demand in the international market, copper prices have started recovering from its sluggish pace. According to rough estimates, the copper prices have touched a seven month peak in recent times. In India copper Futures traded firm at Rs.239.30 per kg for MCX June contract after touching Rs.240.20 for the day’s high. However, in the spot market the metal price remained at a lower end of Rs.229.10 per kg. However, in the international market copper prices remained low at USD 5018 per MT.
http://www.commodityonline.com/commodity-stocks/Copper-Futures-get-firm-Hindalco-Sterlite-shine-2009-06-03-18331-3-1.html
Other News
Amnesty International Report 2009 on India
Dr. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis
June 03, 2009
Like Pakistan and Bangladesh, India is an impossible state; but, in striking difference with its neighbors, India is a vast state that is most loathed by the outright majority of its population which has ceaselessly become the target of every sort of oppression and persecution due to the evil concepts that always prevailed among India´s ruling elites.
India´s size represents the epitome of the English vicious hatred of Islam; when the colonial English started becoming an influential part in the Indian politics, in the mid 18th century, the Mogul Islamic Sultanate controlled the largest part of India, although in decay. After two centuries of criminal and unprecedented pillage, the English left a fallaciously designed and prefabricated state that had the appearance of a secular state and the nature of a racist administration – all machinated against the Indian Muslims and the rightful political prevalence of Islam in Southern Asia.
The Indian Muslims are not the only to be oppressed, persecuted and targeted in India. Indo-European Indian social, behavioural and political concepts and practices constitute an anathema for the permanently mistreated egalitarian Dravidians of the Indian South (in the south of Narmada river).
Oppression is the bitter but overwhelming reality in India´s daily life. That´s why the racist Indian elite is the loathed allied of the West (the Americans and the British) in a Love – Odium relationship of confusion, misguidance and chaos – all to the benefit of the West and to the detriment of the numerous and diverse nations and ethno-religious groups that have been entrapped in the technical entity "India".
Small part of the tyrannical policies carried out in India has been described in the Amnesty International Report 2009 on India that I reproduce herewith integrally.
Amnesty International Report 2009 – India
http://thereport.amnesty.org/en/regions/asia-pacific/india
Portrait
Head of state: Pratibha Patil
Head of government: Manmohan Singh
Death penalty: retentionist
Population: 1,186.2 million
Life expectancy: 63.7 years
Under-5 mortality (m/f): 73/83 per 1,000
Adult literacy: 61 per cent
Amnesty International Report 2009 – India
Police were either inactive or responded with excessive force in the face of sectarian violence against religious and linguistic minorities and ethnic clashes. Adivasis (indigenous communities) and small farmers continued to protest their exclusion from government decision-making on new development projects which could threaten their livelihoods and result in forced evictions. The low-level conflict continued between Maoists and the government and militia widely believed to be supported by the government. Both sides committed abuses including targeting civilians. Bomb-blasts in various parts of the country killed hundreds of people. In response the government arbitrarily detained and tortured suspects. Following the November Mumbai attacks in which more than 170 people were killed, the government tightened security legislation and set up a federal agency to investigate terrorist attacks. Judicial processes failed to ensure justice for many victims of communal violence. The courts sentenced at least 70 people to death. No executions took place.
Background
In addition to the 170 killed in the November Mumbai attacks, more than 400 people were killed in bomb attacks in the cities of Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Malegaon, Delhi and Imphal and in the states of Tripura and Assam.
India-Pakistan ties deteriorated following allegations by the Indian authorities that the November Mumbai attacks had been carried out by people or groups based in Pakistan. India-Pakistan peace initiatives including talks on Kashmir failed to make progress.
The government´s response to widespread violence against women remained inadequate.
While India continued to experience economic growth, a quarter of the population, approximately 300 million people, 70 per cent of whom lived in rural areas, remained in poverty. Indian authorities had not managed to ensure the rights of already marginalized communities, such as landless farmers and adivasi communities, who oppose exploitation of their land and other resources for industrial projects.
Violence against minorities
In August, a prominent local Hindu leader and four of his associates who campaigned against conversion to Christianity were killed in the state of Orissa, sparking two months of attacks against Christian minorities. The attacks, which resulted in at least 25 deaths, were led by supporters of Hindu nationalist organizations reportedly allied to the Bharatiya Janata Party – part of Orissa´s ruling coalition – and included arson, looting and sexual assault of women.
Police either failed to act or used excessive force resulting in the fatal shooting of 15 people. At least 15,000 people, mostly Christians, were displaced by the violence. In at least two camps for the displaced, Christians continued to be subjected to violent attacks by supporters of Hindu nationalist organizations. During the two months of violence, more than 250 people were arrested in connection with the attacks. However, no judicial inquiries had been completed at the end of the year.
Excerpt
"...Orissa police shot dead 20 people in nearby forests claiming them to be Maoists and their supporters"
In September, supporters of Hindu nationalist organizations damaged about 30 Christian places of worship in Karnataka. The suspected perpetrators were arrested only after opposition party protests.
In Mumbai city and other places in Maharashtra, linguistic minorities from northern states were subjected to repeated attacks by supporters of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, resulting in around 1,000 migrant workers fleeing the state. Police were slow to stop the attacks and arrest suspected perpetrators.
More than 50 people were killed in intra-ethnic clashes between members of the Muslim community and the Bodo community in the predominantly Bodo districts of Assam. The authorities failed to take timely action to prevent the violence.
During July and August, communal protests in Jammu and Kashmir rose to levels unseen in recent years and erupted into violence on several occasions. Police used excessive force to deal with the violence and shot dead more than 60 people.
Members of Dalit communities in several states continued to face attacks and discrimination. The authorities failed to use existing special laws enacted to prosecute perpetrators of ethnic violence.
Human rights defenders working on minority rights including rights of Dalits and adivasis in Chhattisgarh continued to face harassment, including arbitrary detention by state police.
Legislation introduced in 2005 to address communal violence was still pending before parliament at the end of the year.
Forced evictions
Local authorities forcibly displaced or evicted marginalized communities in rural areas, including landless farmers and adivasis to make way for mining, irrigation, power, urban infrastructure and other industrial projects. In several states, authorities evicted adivasis from land demarcated as exclusively adivasis by constitutional provision. Authorities failed to comply with new legislation guaranteeing access to information by denying affected communities information on planned development projects. In most cases communities were excluded from decision-making processes. Legislation containing improvements in land acquisition procedures and rehabilitation and resettlement policies was pending before parliament.
Local community protests continued over land acquisition and forced evictions. In some cases, police responded by baton-charging peaceful protesters and detaining them without charge for up to one week. Police failed to protect protesters when private militias, reportedly allied with ruling political parties, violently suppressed the protests. Authorities did not carry out timely or impartial inquiries into several of these incidents.
In May, private militia reportedly shot dead Amin Banra, an adivasi leader, during a protest against forced displacement in Kalinganagar steel city complex, Orissa. The authorities arrested two people but failed to investigate reports that they were part of a large private militia.
In August, members of the endangered Dongria Khond adivasi in Orissa resumed protests after the Supreme Court permitted a joint venture between Vedanta, a multinational company, and the government to open a bauxite mine in protected forest areas on Dongria Khond land.
At least 30 people were injured in six-month-long protests by farmers and opposition parties in Singur, West Bengal, against acquisition of their lands for an automobile manufacturing plant without the farmers´ prior and informed consent. Subsequent negotiations between the protesters and the state authorities failed, forcing the project to relocate to Gujarat.
Human rights defenders
Human rights defenders campaigning for land and environmental rights of rural communities were subjected to harassment, torture and other ill-treatment by police and to violent attacks by private militias, sometimes resulting in death.
Ongoing monitoring by local communities and human rights defenders ensured that new legislation guaranteeing the rural poor a right to work for at least 100 days per year was implemented in a few states.
Violence between security forces, militia and Maoists
In Chhattisgarh, clashes continued between Maoist armed groups and state forces supported by Salwa Judum, a militia widely believed to be state-sponsored. Both sides targeted civilians, mainly adivasis who reported killings, abductions and torture and other ill-treatment. Around 40,000 adivasis continued to be internally displaced, of whom 20,000 lived in camps in Chhattisgarh and 20,000 were scattered in neighbouring Andhra Pradesh.
In November, India´s National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) submitted its findings of a month-long inquiry to verify reports of human rights abuses by Salwa Judum and the Maoist armed groups. The NHRC found that both sides were responsible for abuses. Human rights organizations criticized the findings, stating that the NHRC had failed to fully investigate abuses committed by the Salwa Judum.
Violence escalated between Maoist armed groups and police in Orissa and Jharkhand.
On 15 February, more than 500 armed Maoists raided the Nayagarh district police armoury in Orissa, killing 16 police. In a combing operation following the raid, the Orissa police shot dead 20 people in nearby forests claiming them to be Maoists and their supporters.
Human rights defenders in Orissa and Jharkhand who exposed abuses by the parties to the conflict continued to be at risk of harassment by state authorities.
Dr Binayak Sen, who worked for the rights of adivasis and contract labourers and had been critical of the Salwa Judum militia, remained in Chhattisgarh prison while his trial continued. He was imprisoned in May 2007 on charges relating to aiding Maoists. Human rights organizations expressed fair trial concerns.
Security and human rights
The authorities responded to the November Mumbai attacks by tightening security legislation and setting up a federal investigating agency. The amended legislation includes sweeping and broad definitions of "acts of terrorism" and of membership of terrorist organizations and extends the minimum and maximum detention periods for terrorism suspects before they are charged.
More than 70 people were detained without charge, for periods ranging from one week to two months in connection with bomb-blasts in several states throughout the year. Reports of torture and other ill-treatment of suspects led to protests from both Muslim and Hindu organizations.
In November, the authorities in Andhra Pradesh announced cash compensation for 21 Muslims who had been detained without charge for five to ten days and tortured in the wake of multiple bomb-blasts in Hyderabad in August last year. No criminal proceedings were initiated against those responsible for their torture.
In January, Abujam Shidam, a college teacher and member of the opposition Manipur People´s Party, was arrested and tortured in police custody for four days following the December 2007 bomb-blast that killed seven people in Manipur. No action was taken against those responsible for his torture.
Despite ongoing protests, the authorities refused to repeal the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, 1958. The UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions stated that the Act could facilitate extrajudicial executions by giving security forces the power to shoot to kill in circumstances where they are not necessarily at imminent risk.
Gujarat, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh joined the list of states that enacted special security legislation meant to control organized criminal activity. The legislation provided for detention without charge for periods ranging from six months to one year. Uttar Pradesh repealed a similar law.
Jammu and Kashmir
Between June and August, central security forces shot and killed at least 40 people who defied curfew restrictions. The curfew had been imposed during demonstrations and counter-demonstrations over a proposal to transfer forest land to the Amarnath Shrine Board.
Impunity continued for past offences including enforced disappearances of thousands of people during the armed conflict in Kashmir since 1989.
Impunity
Impunity continued to be widespread.
Gujarat
Those responsible for the violence in 2002 in which thousands of Muslims were attacked and more than 2000 killed largely continued to evade justice. The Mumbai High Court made limited progress towards accountability by convicting 12 people in January for one incident of sexual assault.
Punjab
Many of the police officers responsible for serious human rights violations between 1984 and 1994 were not brought to justice. Findings of a Central Bureau of Investigation inquiry into allegations of unlawful killings of 2,097 people cremated by police has not been made fully public.
Assam
No action was taken on the Commission of Inquiry findings published in 2007 that found the unlawful killings of 35 individuals between 1998 and 2001 were carried out at the behest of a former chief minister and the state police.
Death penalty
The authorities failed to make public information detailing the number of executions and people on death row. However, no executions were known to have taken place during the year. Despite government claims that the death penalty was used only in the "rarest of cases", the courts sentenced at least 70 people to death. The NHRC began conducting a study into the application of the death penalty.
In December, India voted against the UN General Assembly resolution calling for a worldwide moratorium on executions.
Amnesty International visits
Amnesty International delegates visited India in May, July-August and December and met government officials and civil society organizations.
Note
Picture: AI India death penalty action, Delhi, 10 October 2008.
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/104797
India a very important part of the US foreign policy'
Washington (PTI): India is "very important" for America's foreign policy and crucial for the stability and peace in the region, an influential US lawmaker today said.
"India is a very important part of the United States foreign policy," Congresswoman, Sheila Jackson Lee, who is co-chair of the Congressional caucus on Pakistan and heads Afghan caucus said at a panel discussion here.
Lee, Democrat lawmaker from Texas praised India's growth as an economic power. "It (India) is also important from the perspective of its growing economy. I look forward to India being a growing partner of the United States not only on the issues of national security, but also on the issues of economics," she said.
Favouring a dialogue between India and Pakistan, she said, "Kashmir may be a long and on-going and controversial discussion... Now that Prime Minister, (Manmohan) Singh has won resoundingly... The dialogue that he started with President (Pervez) Musharraf was interesting. They began to open up the opportunities for the family members to be united.
That was an important step."
Lee, who was recently in Pakistan, said that the world should acknowledge the difficult crisis the country is facing now.
http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/002200906041441.htm
The Global Food Crisis: The End of Plenty
It is the simplest, most natural of acts, akin to breathing and walking upright. We sit down at the dinner table, pick up a fork, and take a juicy bite, obliv ious to the double helping of global ramifications on our plate. Our beef comes from Iowa, fed by Nebraska corn. Our grapes come from Chile, our bananas from Honduras, our olive oil from Sicily, our apple juice—not from Washington State but all the way from China. Modern society has relieved us of the burden of growing, harvesting, even preparing our daily bread, in exchange for the burden of simply paying for it. Only when prices rise do we take notice. And the consequences of our inattention are profound.
Last year the skyrocketing cost of food was a wake-up call for the planet. Between 2005 and the summer of 2008, the price of wheat and corn tripled, and the price of rice climbed fivefold, spurring food riots in nearly two dozen countries and pushing 75 million more people into poverty. But unlike previous shocks driven by short-term food shortages, this price spike came in a year when the world's farmers reaped a record grain crop. This time, the high prices were a symptom of a larger problem tugging at the strands of our worldwide food web, one that's not going away anytime soon. Simply put: For most of the past decade, the world has been consuming more food than it has been producing. After years of drawing down stockpiles, in 2007 the world saw global carryover stocks fall to 61 days of global consumption, the second lowest on record.
"Agricultural productivity growth is only one to two percent a year," warned Joachim von Braun, director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, D.C., at the height of the crisis. "This is too low to meet population growth and increased demand."
High prices are the ultimate signal that demand is outstripping supply, that there is simply not enough food to go around. Such agflation hits the poorest billion people on the planet the hardest, since they typically spend 50 to 70 percent of their income on food. Even though prices have fallen with the imploding world economy, they are still near record highs, and the underlying problems of low stockpiles, rising population, and flattening yield growth remain. Climate change—with its hotter growing seasons and increasing water scarcity—is projected to reduce future harvests in much of the world, raising the specter of what some scientists are now calling a perpetual food crisis.
So what is a hot, crowded, and hungry world to do?
That's the question von Braun and his colleagues at the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research are wrestling with right now. This is the group of world-renowned agricultural research centers that helped more than double the world's average yields of corn, rice, and wheat between the mid-1950s and the mid-1990s, an achievement so staggering it was dubbed the green revolution. Yet with world population spiraling toward nine billion by mid-century, these experts now say we need a repeat performance, doubling current food production by 2030.
In other words, we need another green revolution. And we need it in half the time.
Ever since our ancestors gave up hunting and gathering for plowing and planting some 12,000 years ago, our numbers have marched in lock step with our agricultural prowess. Each advance—the domestication of animals, irrigation, wet rice production—led to a corresponding jump in human population. Every time food supplies plateaued, population eventually leveled off. Early Arab and Chinese writers noted the relationship between population and food resources, but it wasn't until the end of the 18th century that a British scholar tried to explain the exact mechanism linking the two—and became perhaps the most vilified social scientist in history.
Thomas Robert Malthus, the namesake of such terms as "Malthusian collapse" and "Malthusian curse," was a mild-mannered mathematician, a clergyman—and, his critics would say, the ultimate glass-half-empty kind of guy. When a few Enlightenment philosophers, giddy from the success of the French Revolution, began predicting the continued unfettered improvement of the human condition, Malthus cut them off at the knees. Human population, he observed, increases at a geometric rate, doubling about every 25 years if unchecked, while agricultural production increases arithmetically—much more slowly. Therein lay a biological trap that humanity could never escape.
"The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man," he wrote in his Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798. "This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence." Malthus thought such checks could be voluntary, such as birth control, abstinence, or delayed marriage—or involuntary, through the scourges of war, famine, and disease. He advocated against food relief for all but the poorest of people, since he felt such aid encouraged more children to be born into misery. That tough love earned him a nasty cameo in English literature from none other than Charles Dickens. When Ebenezer Scrooge is asked to give alms for the poor in A Christmas Carol, the heartless banker tells the do-gooders that the destitute should head for the workhouses or prisons. And if they'd rather die than go there, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."
The industrial revolution and plowing up of the English commons dramatically increased the amount of food in England, sweeping Malthus into the dustbin of the Victorian era. But it was the green revolution that truly made the reverend the laughingstock of modern economists. From 1950 to today the world has experienced the largest population growth in human history. After Malthus's time, six billion people were added to the planet's dinner tables. Yet thanks to improved methods of grain production, most of those people were fed. We'd finally shed Malthusian limits for good.
Or so we thought.
On the 15th night of the ninth month of the Chinese lunar calendar, 3,680 villagers, nearly all with the surname "He," sat beneath a leaking tarp in the square of Yaotian, China, and dived into a 13-course meal. The event was a traditional banquet in honor of their elders. Tureens of steaming soup floated past, followed by rapidly dwindling platters of noodles, rice, fish, shrimp, steamed vegetables, dim sum, duck, chicken, lily root, pigeon, black fungus, and pork cooked more ways than I could count.
Even with the global recession, times are still relatively good in the southeastern province of Guangdong, where Yaotian sits tucked between postage-stamp garden plots and block after block of new factories that helped make the province one of the most prosperous in China. When times are good, the Chinese eat pigs. Lots of pigs. Per capita pork consumption in the world's most populous country went up 45 percent between 1993 and 2005, from 53 to 77 pounds a year.
An affable businessman in a pink-striped polo shirt, pork-industry consultant Shen Guang rong remembers his father raising one pig each year, which was slaughtered at the Chinese New Year. It would be their only meat for the year. The pigs Shen's father raised were pretty low maintenance—hardy black-and-white varieties that would eat almost anything: food scraps, roots, garbage. Not so China's modern pigs. After the deadly protests of Tiananmen Square in 1989, which topped off a year of political unrest exacerbated by high food prices, the government started offering tax incentives to large industrial farms to meet the growing demand. Shen was assigned to work at one of China's first pig CAFOs, or concentrated animal feeding operations, in nearby Shenzhen. Such farms, which have proliferated in recent years, depend on breeds that are fed high-tech mixtures of corn, soy meal, and supplements to keep them growing fast.
That's good news for the average pork-loving Chinese—who still eats only about 40 percent as much meat as consumers in the U.S. But it's worrisome for the world's grain supplies. It's no coincidence that as countries like China and India prosper and their people move up the food ladder, demand for grain has increased. For as tasty as that sweet-and-sour pork may be, eating meat is an incredibly inefficient way to feed oneself. It takes up to five times more grain to get the equivalent amount of calories from eating pork as from simply eating grain itself—ten times if we're talking about grain-fattened U.S. beef. As more grain has been diverted to livestock and to the production of biofuels for cars, annual worldwide consumption of grain has risen from 815 million metric tons in 1960 to 2.16 billion in 2008. Since 2005, the mad rush to biofuels alone has pushed grain-consumption growth from about 20 million tons annually to 50 million tons, according to Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute.
Even China, the second largest corn-growing nation on the planet, can't grow enough grain to feed all its pigs. Most of the shortfall is made up with imported soybeans from the U.S. or Brazil, one of the few countries with the potential to expand its cropland—often by plowing up rain forest. Increasing demand for food, feed, and bio¬fuels has been a major driver of deforestation in the tropics. Between 1980 and 2000 more than half of new cropland acreage in the tropics was carved out of intact rain forests; Brazil alone increased its soybean acreage in Amazonia 10 percent a year from 1990 to 2005.
Some of those Brazilian soybeans may end up in the troughs of Guangzhou Lizhi Farms, the largest CAFO in Guangdong Province. Tucked into a green valley just off a four-lane highway that's still being built, some 60 white hog houses are scattered around large ponds, part of the waste-treatment system for 100,000 hogs. The city of Guangzhou is also building a brand-new meatpacking plant that will slaughter 5,000 head a day. By the time China has 1.5 billion people, sometime in the next 20 years, some experts predict they'll need another 200 million hogs just to keep up. And that's just China. World meat consumption is expected to double by 2050. That means we're going to need a whole lot more grain.
This isn't the first time the world has stood at the brink of a food crisis—it's only the most recent iteration. At 83, Gurcharan Singh Kalkat has lived long enough to remember one of the worst famines of the 20th century. In 1943 as many as four million people died in the "Malthusian correction" known as the Bengal Famine. For the following two decades, India had to import millions of tons of grain to feed its people.
Then came the green revolution. In the mid-1960s, as India was struggling to feed its people during yet another crippling drought, an American plant breeder named Norman Borlaug was working with Indian researchers to bring his high-yielding wheat varieties to Punjab. The new seeds were a godsend, says Kal kat, who was deputy director of agriculture for Punjab at the time. By 1970, farmers had nearly tripled their production with the same amount of work. "We had a big problem with what to do with the surplus," says Kalkat. "We closed schools one month early to store the wheat crop in the buildings."
Borlaug was born in Iowa and saw his mission as spreading the high-yield farming methods that had turned the American Midwest into the world's breadbasket to impoverished places throughout the world. His new dwarf wheat varieties, with their short, stocky stems supporting full, fat seed heads, were a startling breakthrough. They could produce grain like no other wheat ever seen—as long as there was plenty of water and synthetic fertilizer and little competition from weeds or insects. To that end, the Indian government subsidized canals, fertilizer, and the drilling of tube wells for irrigation and gave farmers free electricity to pump the water. The new wheat varieties quickly spread throughout Asia, changing the traditional farming practices of millions of farmers, and were soon followed by new strains of "miracle" rice. The new crops matured faster and enabled farmers to grow two crops a year instead of one. Today a double crop of wheat, rice, or cotton is the norm in Punjab, which, with neighboring Haryana, recently supplied more than 90 percent of the wheat needed by grain-deficient states in India.
The green revolution Borlaug started had nothing to do with the eco-friendly green label in vogue today. With its use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides to nurture vast fields of the same crop, a practice known as monoculture, this new method of industrial farming was the antithesis of today's organic trend. Rather, William S. Gaud, then administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, coined the phrase in 1968 to describe an alternative to Russia's red revolution, in which workers, soldiers, and hungry peasants had rebelled violently against the tsarist government. The more pacifying green revolution was such a staggering success that Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.
Today, though, the miracle of the green revolution is over in Punjab: Yield growth has essentially flattened since the mid-1990s. Overirrigation has led to steep drops in the water table, now tapped by 1.3 million tube wells, while thousands of hectares of productive land have been lost to salinization and waterlogged soils. Forty years of intensive irrigation, fertilization, and pesticides have not been kind to the loamy gray fields of Punjab. Nor, in some cases, to the people themselves.
In the dusty farming village of Bhuttiwala, home to some 6,000 people in the Muktsar district, village elder Jagsir Singh, in flowing beard and cobalt turban, adds up the toll: "We've had 49 deaths due to cancer in the last four years," he says. "Most of them were young people. The water is not good. It's poisonous, contaminated water. Yet people still drink it."
Walking through the narrow dirt lanes past pyramids of dried cow dung, Singh introduces Amarjeet Kaur, a slender 40-year-old who for years drew the family's daily water from a hand pump in their brick-hard compound. She was diagnosed with breast cancer last year. Tej Kaur, 50, also has breast cancer. Her surgery, she says, wasn't nearly as painful as losing her seven-year-old grandson to "blood cancer," or leukemia. Jagdev Singh is a sweet-faced 14-year-old boy whose spine is slowly deteriorating. From his wheelchair, he is watching SpongeBob SquarePants dubbed in Hindi as his father discusses his prognosis. "The doctors say he will not live to see 20," says Bhola Singh.
There's no proof these cancers were caused by pesticides. But researchers have found pesticides in the Punjabi farmers' blood, their water table, their vegetables, even their wives' breast milk. So many people take the train from the Malwa region to the cancer hospital in Bikaner that it's now called the Cancer Express. The government is concerned enough to spend millions on reverse-osmosis water-treatment plants for the worst affected villages.
If that weren't worrisome enough, the high cost of fertilizers and pesticides has plunged many Punjabi farmers into debt. One study found more than 1,400 cases of farmer suicides in 93 villages between 1988 and 2006. Some groups put the total for the state as high as 40,000 to 60,000 suicides over that period. Many drank pesticides or hung themselves in their fields.
"The green revolution has brought us only downfall," says Jarnail Singh, a retired schoolteacher in Jajjal village. "It ruined our soil, our environment, our water table. Used to be we had fairs in villages where people would come together and have fun. Now we gather in medical centers. The government has sacrificed the people of Punjab for grain."
Others, of course, see it differently. Rattan Lal, a noted soil scientist at Ohio State who graduated from Punjab Agricultural University in 1963, believes it was the abuse—not the use—of green revolution technologies that caused most of the problems. That includes the overuse of fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation and the removal of all crop residues from the fields, essentially strip-mining soil nutrients. "I realize the problems of water quality and water withdrawal," says Lal. "But it saved hundreds of millions of people. We paid a price in water, but the choice was to let people die."
In terms of production, the benefits of the green revolution are hard to deny. India hasn't experienced famine since Borlaug brought his seeds to town, while world grain production has more than doubled. Some scientists credit increased rice yields alone with the existence of 700 million more people on the planet.
Many crop scientists and farmers believe the solution to our current food crisis lies in a second green revolution, based largely on our newfound knowledge of the gene. Plant breeders now know the sequence of nearly all of the 50,000 or so genes in corn and soybean plants and are using that knowledge in ways that were unimaginable only four or five years ago, says Robert Fraley, chief technology officer for the agricultural giant Monsanto. Fraley is convinced that genetic modification, which allows breeders to bolster crops with beneficial traits from other species, will lead to new varie ties with higher yields, reduced fertilizer needs, and drought tolerance—the holy grail for the past decade. He believes biotech will make it possible to double yields of Monsanto's core crops of corn, cotton, and soybeans by 2030. "We're now poised to see probably the greatest period of fundamental scientific advance in the history of agriculture."
Africa is the continent where Homo sapiens was born, and with its worn-out soils, fitful rain, and rising population, it could very well offer a glimpse of our species' future. For numerous reasons—lack of infrastructure, corruption, inaccessible markets—the green revolution never made it here. Agricultural production per capita actually declined in sub-Saharan Africa between 1970 and 2000, while the population soared, leaving an average ten-million-ton annual food deficit. It's now home to more than a quarter of the world's hungriest people.
Tiny, landlocked Malawi, dubbed the "warm heart of Africa" by a hopeful tourism industry, is also in the hungry heart of Africa, a poster child for the continent's agricultural ills. Living in one of the poorest and most densely populated countries in Africa, the majority of Malawians are corn farmers who eke out a living on less than two dollars a day. In 2005 the rains failed once again in Malawi, and more than a third of its population of 13 million required food aid to survive. Malawi's President Bingu wa Mutharika declared he did not get elected to rule a nation of beggars. After initially failing to persuade the World Bank and other donors to help subsidize green revolution inputs, Bingu, as he's known here, decided to spend $58 million from the country's own coffers to get hybrid seeds and fertilizers into the hands of poor farmers. The World Bank eventually got on board and persuaded Bingu to target the subsidy to the poorest farmers. About 1.3 million farm families received coupons that allowed them to buy three kilograms of hybrid corn seed and two 50-kilogram bags of fertilizer at a third of the market price.
What happened next has been called the Malawi Miracle. Good seed and a little fertilizer—and the return of soil-soaking rains—helped farmers reap bumper crops for the next two years. (Last year's harvests, however, were slightly down.) The 2007 harvest was estimated to be 3.44 million metric tons, a national record. "They went from a 44 percent deficit to an 18 percent surplus, doubling their production," says Pedro Sanchez, the director of the Tropical Agriculture Program at Columbia University who advised the Malawi government on the program. "The next year they had a 53 percent surplus and exported maize to Zimbabwe. It was a dramatic change."
So dramatic, in fact, that it has led to an increasing awareness of the importance of agricultural investment in reducing poverty and hunger in places like Malawi. In October 2007 the World Bank issued a critical report, concluding that the agency, international donors, and African governments had fallen short in helping Africa's poor farmers and had neglected investment in agriculture for the previous 15 years. After decades of discouraging public investment in agriculture and calling for market-based solutions that rarely materialized, institutions like the World Bank have reversed course and pumped funds into agriculture over the past two years.
Malawi's subsidy program is part of a larger movement to bring the green revolution, at long last, to Africa. Since 2006 the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have ponied up nearly half a billion dollars to fund the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, focused primarily on bringing plant-breeding programs to African universities and enough fertilizer to farmers' fields. Columbia's Sanchez, along with über-economist and poverty warrior Jeffrey Sachs, is providing concrete examples of the benefits of such investment in 80 small villages clustered into about a dozen "Millennium Villages" scattered in hunger hot spots throughout Africa. With the help of a few rock stars and A-list actors, Sanchez and Sachs are spending $300,000 a year on each small village. That's one-third as much per person as Malawi's per capita GDP, leading many in the development community to wonder if such a program can be sustained over the long haul.
Phelire Nkhoma, a small whipcord of a woman, is the agricultural extension officer for one of Malawi's two Millennium Villages—actually seven villages with a total of 35,000 people. She describes the program as we ride in a new UN pickup from her office in Zomba District through fire-blackened fields dotted with the violet flush of jacaranda trees. Villagers get hybrid seeds and fertilizers for free—as long as they donate three bags of corn at harvesttime to a school feeding program. They get bed nets and antimalarial drugs. They get a clinic staffed with health workers, a gra nary to store their harvests, and safe-drinking-water wells within a kilometer of each household. Good primary schools, improved road systems, and connection to the power grid and the Internet are on the way in these villages, and in the "Madonna" village, which is farther north.
"The Madonna?" I asked.
"Yes. I hear she's divorcing her latest husband. Is that true?"
Good times are apparent in the Millennium Village, where Nkhoma shows me new brick houses topped with shiny corrugated-steel roofs, a grain bank full of seed and fertilizer, and beneath a shade tree, a hundred or more villagers patiently listening to a banker explaining how they can apply for an agricultural loan. Several are queued up at the teller window of an armored truck from Opportunity International Bank of Malawi. Cosmas Chimwara, a 30-year-old cabbage seller, is one of them. "The cabbage business is going well," he says. "I have three bikes, a TV and mobile phone, and a better house."
Such stories warm the heart of Faison Tipoti, the village leader who was instrumental in bringing the famous project here. "When Jeff Sachs came and asked, 'What do you want?' we said not money, not flour, but give us fertilizer and hybrid seed, and he will do a good thing," says Tipoti in a deep voice. No longer do villagers spend their days walking the road begging others for food to feed children with swollen bellies and sickness. He gazes over to where several children are frolicking as they wash clothes and gather water at the new village well. "With the coming of the project, everywhere is clear, fresh water," Tipoti says.
But is a reprise of the green revolution—with the traditional package of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation, supercharged by genetically engineered seeds—really the answer to the world's food crisis? Last year a massive study called the "International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development" concluded that the immense production increases brought about by science and technology in the past 30 years have failed to improve food access for many of the world's poor. The six-year study, initiated by the World Bank and the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization and involving some 400 agricultural experts from around the globe, called for a paradigm shift in agriculture toward more sustainable and ecologically friendly practices that would benefit the world's 900 million small farmers, not just agribusiness.
The green revolution's legacy of tainted soil and depleted aquifers is one reason to look for new strategies. So is what author and University of California, Berkeley, professor Michael Pollan calls the Achilles heel of current green revolution methods: a dependence on fossil fuels. Natural gas, for example, is a raw material for nitrogen fertilizers. "The only way you can have one farmer feed 140 Americans is with monocultures. And monocultures need lots of fossil-fuel-based fertilizers and lots of fossil-fuel-based pesticides," Pollan says. "That only works in an era of cheap fossil fuels, and that era is coming to an end. Moving anyone to a dependence on fossil fuels seems the height of irresponsibility."
So far, genetic breakthroughs that would free green revolution crops from their heavy dependence on irrigation and fertilizer have proved elusive. Engineering plants that can fix their own nitrogen or are resistant to drought "has proven a lot harder than they thought," says Pollan. Monsanto's Fraley predicts his company will have drought-tolerant corn in the U.S. market by 2012. But the increased yields promised during drought years are only 6 to 10 percent above those of standard drought-hammered crops.
And so a shift has already begun to small, underfunded projects scattered across Africa and Asia. Some call it agroecology, others sustainable agriculture, but the underlying idea is revolutionary: that we must stop focusing on simply maximizing grain yields at any cost and consider the environmental and social impacts of food production. Vandana Shiva is a nuclear physicist turned agroecologist who is India's harshest critic of the green revolution. "I call it monocultures of the mind," she says. "They just look at yields of wheat and rice, but overall the food basket is going down. There were 250 kinds of crops in Punjab before the green revolution." Shiva argues that small-scale, biologically diverse farms can produce more food with fewer petroleum-based inputs. Her research has shown that using compost instead of natural-gas-derived fertilizer increases organic matter in the soil, sequestering carbon and holding moisture—two key advantages for farmers facing climate change. "If you are talking about solving the food crisis, these are the methods you need," adds Shiva.
In northern Malawi one project is getting many of the same results as the Millennium Villages project, at a fraction of the cost. There are no hybrid corn seeds, free fertilizers, or new roads here in the village of Ekwendeni. Instead the Soils, Food and Healthy Communities (SFHC) project distributes legume seeds, recipes, and technical advice for growing nutritious crops like peanuts, pigeon peas, and soybeans, which enrich the soil by fixing nitrogen while also enriching children's diets. The program began in 2000 at Ekwendeni Hospital, where the staff was seeing high rates of malnutrition. Research suggested the culprit was the corn monoculture that had left small farmers with poor yields due to depleted soils and the high price of fertilizer.
The project's old pickup needs a push to get it going, but soon Boyd Zimba, the project's assistant coordinator, and Zacharia Nkhonya, its food-security supervisor, are rattling down the road, talking about what they see as the downside of the Malawi Miracle. "First, the fertilizer subsidy cannot last long," says Nkhonya, a compact man with a quick smile. "Second, it doesn't go to everyone. And third, it only comes once a year, while legumes are long-term—soils get improved every year, unlike with fertilizers."
At the small village of Encongolweni, a group of two dozen SFHC farmers greet us with a song about the dishes they make from soybeans and pigeon peas. We sit in their meetinghouse as if at an old-time tent revival, as they testify about how planting legumes has changed their lives. Ackim Mhone's story is typical. By incorporating legumes into his rotation, he's doubled his corn yield on his small plot of land while cutting his fertilizer use in half. "That was enough to change the life of my family," Mhone says, and to enable him to improve his house and buy livestock. Later, Alice Sumphi, a 67-year-old farmer with a mischievous smile, dances in her plot of young knee-high tomatoes, proudly pointing out that they bested those of the younger men. Canadian researchers found that after eight years, the children of more than 7,000 families involved in the project showed significant weight increases, making a pretty good case that soil health and community health are connected in Malawi.
Which is why the project's research coordinator, Rachel Bezner Kerr, is alarmed that big-money foundations are pushing for a new green revolution in Africa. "I find it deeply disturbing," she says. "It's getting farmers to rely on expensive inputs produced from afar that are making money for big companies rather than on agroecological methods for using local resources and skills. I don't think that's the solution."
Regardless of which model prevails—agriculture as a diverse ecological art, as a high-tech industry, or some combination of the two—the challenge of putting enough food in nine billion mouths by 2050 is daunting. Two billion people already live in the driest parts of the globe, and climate change is projected to slash yields in these regions even further. No matter how great their yield potential, plants still need water to grow. And in the not too distant future, every year could be a drought year for much of the globe.
New climate studies show that extreme heat waves, such as the one that withered crops and killed thousands in western Europe in 2003, are very likely to become common in the tropics and subtropics by century's end. Himalayan glaciers that now provide water for hundreds of millions of people, livestock, and farmland in China and India are melting faster and could vanish completely by 2035. In the worst-case scenario, yields for some grains could decline by 10 to 15 percent in South Asia by 2030. Projections for southern Africa are even more dire. In a region already racked by water scarcity and food insecurity, the all-important corn harvest could drop by 30 percent—47 percent in the worst-case scenario. All the while the population clock keeps ticking, with a net of 2.5 more mouths to feed born every second. That amounts to 4,500 more mouths in the time it takes you to read this article.
Which leads us, inevitably, back to Malthus.
On a brisk fall day that has put color into the cheeks of the most die-hard Londoners, I visit the British Library and check out the first edition of the book that still generates such heated debate. Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population looks like an eighth-grade science primer. From its strong, clear prose comes the voice of a humble parish priest who hoped, as much as anything, to be proved wrong.
"People who say Malthus is wrong usually haven't read him," says Tim Dyson, a professor of population studies at the London School of Economics. "He was not taking a view any different than what Adam Smith took in the first volume of The Wealth of Nations. No one in their right mind doubts the idea that populations have to live within their resource base. And that the capacity of society to increase resources from that base is ultimately limited."
Though his essays emphasized "positive checks" on population from famine, disease, and war, his "preventative checks" may have been more important. A growing workforce, Malthus explained, depresses wages, which tends to make people delay marriage until they can better support a family. Delaying marriage reduces fertility rates, creating an equally powerful check on populations. It has now been shown that this is the basic mechanism that regulated population growth in western Europe for some 300 years before the industrial revolution—a pretty good record for any social scientist, says Dyson.
Yet when Britain recently issued a new 20-pound note, it put Adam Smith on the back, not T. R. Malthus. He doesn't fit the ethos of the moment. We don't want to think about limits. But as we approach nine billion people on the planet, all clamoring for the same opportunities, the same lifestyles, the same hamburgers, we ignore them at our risk.
None of the great classical economists saw the industrial revolution coming, or the transformation of economies and agriculture that it would bring about. The cheap, readily available energy contained in coal—and later in other fossil fuels—unleashed the greatest increase in food, personal wealth, and people the world has ever seen, enabling Earth's population to increase sevenfold since Malthus's day. And yet hunger, famine, and malnutrition are with us still, just as Malthus said they would be.
"Years ago I was working with a Chinese demographer," Dyson says. "One day he pointed out to me the two Chinese characters above his office door that spelled the word 'population.' You had the character for a person and the character for an open mouth. It really struck me. Ultimately there has to be a balance between population and resources. And this notion that we can continue to grow forever, well it's ridiculous."
Perhaps somewhere deep in his crypt in Bath Abbey, Malthus is quietly wagging a bony finger and saying, "Told you so." 
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/06/cheap-food/bourne-text
UN to study security threat of climate change
06/04/2009 | 09:24 AM
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UNITED NATIONS — With glaciers melting and oceans rising, the UN General Assembly on Wednesday expressed deep concern at the adverse impact of climate change and urged U.N. bodies to consider the possible security implications for all countries.
The nonbinding resolution, adopted by consensus, was the first ever sponsored by the 12-nation group of Pacific Small Island Developing States whose homelands are threatened by rising sea levels, and the first to raise the possible security threat from global warming.
It calls for a report by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon next year "on the possible security implications of climate change," based on the views of the 192 UN member states and regional and international organizations.
For the Pacific island nations, the implications are clear.
"The Pacific Ocean in which we have lived for centuries will eventually leave little of our homelands behind if urgent action is not taken," Ambassador Marlene Moses of Nauru, the world's smallest island nation covering only 21 square kilometers, warned the assembly.
Speaking on behalf of the group, she said, small islands are already grappling with the inundation of coastal areas where the majority of their population live, the submergence of islands, the loss of fresh water supplies, salt water intrusion, flooding, drought and damaged crops.
"In many cases, these impacts will ultimately render Pacific island nations uninhabitable, destroying our unique and ancient cultures," Moses said.
"As the rest of the world continues to debate the security implications of climate change, for our peoples the problem is astoundingly real," she said. "Communities on drowning islands throughout the Pacific are faced with a looming homelessness crisis due to rising sea levels. For some, the only viable option is to migrate. While many have already relocated, more are expected to follow as more of our islands eventually submerge."
Moses told the assembly before the resolution was adopted that the adverse effects of climate change could lead to the disappearance of many UN member states for the first time in the organization's history.
"The adoption of the resolution will not only prove that we are seriously concerned about the global environment but more importantly that we are seriously concerned about the survival of whole populations and the existence of their lands, from which they derive their sense of belonging and identity," she said.
Palau's deputy UN ambassador Joan Yang stressed that for the Pacific islands and other countries, climate change is a security threat.
"When we are told by scientists to prepare for humanitarian crises, including exodus, in our lifetimes, how can it be different from preparing for a threat like war?," she asked. "When we face the potential for economic and political disruption on a scale not seen since World War II, we must move to action."
The Pacific island states "are among those nations least responsible" for the harmful greenhouse gases, blamed for global warming, "yet will be among the first to disappear," Yang said.
She urged the UN Security Council to address the security threat posed by climate change and chart the way forward.
Ambassador Phillip Muller of the Marshall Islands said there is "a very small window for urgent international action, perhaps as little as 10 years, to best avoid irreversible and abrupt climate impacts."
"The people of the Marshall Islands pray that we shall not reach this point of no return," he said. - AP
http://www.gmanews.tv/story/164026/UN-to-study-security-threat-of-climate-change
Crunch-time for climate change
Representatives from 192 nations begin second round of talks
BY WILLIAM MARSDEN, CANWEST NEWS SERVICEJUNE 4, 2009
Each new piece of scientific data makes it clearer that we're running out of time to take action on climate change. So the question is: Are we at the beginning of a global revolution or the beginning of the end?
It begs a speedy answer. A deadline looms.
As representatives from 192 nations begin their second round of climate change talks, there is growing concern that the task of setting new targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is simply too onerous, despite the pressing urgency for the world to make drastic cuts.
They have only six weeks left of the allotted negotiating time to hammer out an agreement on emissions reductions to prevent catastrophic climate change and to agree on compensation packages to help poorer countries pay for the already devastating and costly effects of climate change, such as drought and flooding.
The main goal of the two-week session that started Monday in Bonn, Germany, is to keep the Earth's mean temperature from rising by more than 2 C. The fear is that an increase above that would mean widespread destruction of ecosystems and an irreversible melting of the polar ice caps that over the next few centuries would substantially increase sea levels. A total meltdown would essentially wipe out most coastal cities and low-lying regions, not to mention contaminate water tables with sea water. That scenario could be avoided by drastic cuts in emissions.
Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Forum Convention on Climate Change, notes that in the six weeks left, negotiators will try "to reach an agreement on what might well be one of the most complicated international treaties ever negotiated."
This session marks the first time a draft text will be on the table, serving as the basis for final negotiations this December in the Danish capital of Copenhagen. Participants hope that by year-end they will have a negotiated agreement that will essentially begin the process of revolutionizing our energy systems and the way we live.
Meanwhile, our carbon emissions are rising faster than even the most dire predictions as both industrialized and developing countries -- namely China and India -- have failed to stem the growth of their emissions.
Unfettered economic expansion and prosperity remain the priority in both industrialized and developing countries. For developed countries, it's a question of maintaining a consumer-based lifestyle. For emerging economies, it's a question of raising millions of people out poverty and establishing a middle class. Unfortunately, nobody has come up with a viable economic model for conspicuous consumption without growth.
China continues to build coal-fired power plants by the hundreds while India's burgeoning automobile industry is trying to sell a million cheap, fuel-efficient cars every year to its growing middle class. And who can blame them for wanting the same lifestyle as the West?
"You cannot say that people in developing countries should not have aspirations for higher standards of living," said Shyam Saran, India's chief climate change envoy. "So you cannot say, 'You stay where you are because you are a latecomer and we stay where we are because we have had a higher standard of living for the last so many years.'"
New scientific data suggesting an accelerating pace of climate change drive the negotiations. They show that if we fail to act quickly to reduce greatly our emissions, the impacts of climate change will be devastating.
"New scientific findings say change is going faster than envisaged," de Boer said. "They will enhance the sense of urgency. I hope they will make politicians realize that we really need to act on this issue and need to act in Copenhagen."
The negotiations are no longer simply a question of persuading industrialized countries to meet targeted emission reductions. Reducing emissions is no longer adequate.
"Change is inevitable and we need to manage the pace and intensity of climate change to assure that both people and ecosystems can adapt," de Boer said.
"Industrialized countries must take the lead given their historic responsibility (for emissions)," de Boer said.
He added that while the rich are overwhelmingly responsible for the climate change predicament, it is the poor who are suffering and who will suffer the most.
The IPCC concluded, for example, that by as early as 2020, 75 million to 250 million people in Africa could be suffering more water shortages as a result of climate change. The IPCC says some regions will experience a 50 per cent reduction in yields from rain-fed cultivation, which accounts for 90 per cent of sub-Saharan agriculture.
The entire African continent is responsible for only about five per cent of global emissions compared to the U.S., which is responsible for 22.2 per cent. In general, countries around the equator are harder hit by the effects of climate change.
Since it became one of the first countries to sign the Kyoto Protocol on April 29, 1998, Canada has totally ignored its treaty commitments to reduce emissions by six per cent of 1990 levels. Instead, it has ratcheted them up 27 per cent. This is among the largest increases of any industrialized nation. To meet its treaty commitments by 2012, Canada would have to reduce its emissions by at least 33 per cent, which is just not possible unless we were to shut down the oilsands as well as most of our refineries and coal-fired plants.
Canada's performance has not gone unnoticed by Kyoto Protocol members. Once one of the driving forces behind Kyoto, Canada is now being viewed with considerable scorn and its promises appear empty.
In Bonn, at the first round of talks in April, Malta's Michael Cutajar, chair of the working group negotiating post-Kyoto emission targets, at one point in the conference publicly scolded the Canadian delegation by noting that "international treaties are not made to be broken."
Canada is actively lobbying the UNFCCC for a post-Kyoto emission target for industrialized nations of 20 per cent by 2020. It also wants to change the benchmark level to 2006, from 1990. This would reduce much of its Kyoto commitments. But even without the benchmark change, a 20 per cent reduction would be nowhere near what IPCC scientists say is needed to forestall unmanageable climate change.
Canada also is pushing for a global 50 per cent decrease in GHG emissions by 2050. But it has not stipulated a benchmark date.
As well, Canada is trying to claim that its forests constitute a massive carbon sink and that any emission reduction targets should take that into account. The argument is questionable. Canada has destroyed so much of its forest -- and insect infestations, which are blamed on climate change, are destroying so much more -- that our forests are being turned into huge carbon emitters.
Hope of quick action by Canada was dashed this week when federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice announced that Canada will take no action to reduce emissions until the U.S. approves its own action program.
One problem with Kyoto is that there are no real penalties for breaking the treaty. The only punishment for Canada is that it has to make up for the shortfall during the next commitment period. It would also be penalized with 30 per cent heavier emission reductions requirements than what would normally be required during the next commitment period. But the likelihood that a new treaty will replace Kyoto means that Canada may never be punished.
Because the current Kyoto commitment expires at the end of 2012, Canada is not yet officially non-compliant. It could purchase carbon credits. At today's prices, it would cost Canada about $25 billion to make up for its emission increases. Ottawa has stated it will never buy credits.
The biggest question mark is still the United States, which is second only to China in total GHG emissions. In April, the U.S. negotiating team stated that the country intends to be a willing participant throughout the negotiations. Yet it has not put forth any recommendations on its targets.
The U.S. Congress is studying a bill that will call for 17 to 24 per cent reductions of 1990 levels by 2020. This still would not meet IPCC recommendations.
In any case, the possibility that the U.S. will pass an international treaty committing its economy to GHG reductions is slim. International treaties require a two-thirds majority in the U.S. Senate. This will be difficult to achieve. Even if all 57 Democrats plus the two independents voted in favour, supporters would still be nine votes short of ratification.
De Boer said without commitment to clear individual emission reductions targets for industrialized countries, Copenhagen will be a failure.
http://www.canada.com/Crunch+time+climate+change/1661704/story.html
BHEL ties up with IIT for water purification
4 Jun 2009, 0416 hrs IST, TNN
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CHENNAI: Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd (BHEL) is all set to enhance its spending on R&D to enhance the efficiency of water purification
processes like reverse osmosis and thermal desalination technologies. This is to ensure that its power plants get a steady supply of water and that a portion of it can shared with residential communities in the neighbourhood of its units.
Currently, BHEL resorts to desalination of sea water and treating of brackish or sewage water to feedpower plants. The R&D projects will be developed to cater to the needs of future power plants that are likely to be located away from rivers or water bodies. "Earlier, power plant used to be located near rivers or water bodies. In future, plants will located either close to coal mines or ports to minimise logistic cost. Also, availability of water will be difficult in coming years," said a BHEL official.
As part of the initiative, BHEL's Tiruchi and Ranipet units have entered into an industry-academia collaboration with the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras (IIT-M) to help foster research on new technologies that can make its power plants environment-friendly. Given the fact that all its units are currently coal-fired thermal power plants which emit vast amounts of carbon, the plan can also be interpreted as an effort to negate the adverse effects of global warming.
"IIT and BHEL will work on time-bound projects to identify future technologies for power plants. The number of projects is yet to be finalised," said BHEL Ranipet unit's executive director A V Krishnan, after signing the MoU at IIT-M on Wednesday. The joint research will focus more on sea water desalination and pollutant control system. Already, a ceramic membrane is being developed for reverse osmosis by IIT. Other areas of R&D collaboration will include super-critical steam generators, modelling and analysis, material characterisation, utilisation of nano materials, fuel cells and bio mass and zero emission technologies.
Collaborative efforts with academic institutions has worked well for BHEL even in the past in the field of super-critical steam generators and large capacity power stations. BHEL treats brackish water as well as sewage water for use in its plant in Delhi. R&D enabled the company achieve a record turnover of Rs 5,405 crore from products developed in-house.
BHEL executive director (R&D) R Krishnan said that the company was planning to enhance its R&D spending from 2.36% of the turnover to 3%. "There is no fund constraint. Last year's spending is the highest in the country for the industry," he pointed out. Since power plants of the future need to source water, the focus is now more on reverse osmosis technology for desalination, he said. "So, we want desalination to be economical through R&D."
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Chennai/BHEL-ties-up-with-IIT-for-water-purification-/articleshow/4614358.cms
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