April 10, 2008
Global slump
“The International Monetary Fund (IMF) said on Wednesday … [that] the global slump could prove worse than predicted. There is a one-in-four chance that a global recession — seen when world economic growth falls below 3.0 percent — will ensue, it said.
“‘The financial market crisis that erupted in August 2007 has developed into the largest financial shock since the Great Depression,’ it said.
“Latin America and countries linked to the plummeting U.S. dollar will be hardest hit as the U.S.-led
slump spreads around the globe, the IMF said.
“Rapidly growing emerging economies, such as China and India, will suffer the least pain, it said.
However, even they will feel a sting as rich countries cut their imports.”
Economist Dean Baker has said that he could see average American incomes fall by as much as 40 percent before we hit bottom.
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Thai police find 54 dead Burmese workers in lorry
Fifty-four illegal Burmese migrants who were being smuggled by traffickers in southern Thailand suffocated in the sweltering confines of a tiny seafood container lorry today after the air-conditioning system failed.
Some of the 67 survivors told how they were just 30 minutes into their journey to the resort island of Phuket, where they hoped to find work, when conditions became unbearably stifling.
But the driver warned those trying to alert him by banging on the container’s walls and calling him on his mobile phone to be quiet for fear of tipping off the police as they passed through check-points along the route.
He turned on the air-conditioning, but it failed and went off after a few minutes. When the driver finally stopped on a quiet road running along the Andaman Sea 90 minutes later, many of the migrants, mostly women, had already collapsed. After discovering the horrific scene, he ran away.
“I thought everyone was going to die,” said survivor, Saw Win, 30. “I thought I was going to die. If the truck had driven for 30 minutes more, I would have died for sure.”
It underscored the plight of Burmese migrants fleeing conflict and economic collapse in their homeland who flood into Thailand across the porous border desperately seeking work.
As many as 150,000 languish in refugee camps along the border. But another 1.5 million live and work in Thailand, often in the seafood processing, fishing and construction industries that Thais shun.
Just 482,925 have managed to secure work permits leaving at least a million working illegally, vulnerable to abuse from corrupt officials and exploited by unscrupulous employers. They are forced to work for as little as £1.15 a day, half what a Thai worker could expect.
The 121 migrants who found themselves crammed in the seafood container left Song Island in Burma last night for the short sea crossing by fishing boat, landing near Ranong.
They paid the traffickers £82 each to transport them to Phuket to work as day labourers, but were so tightly packed into the truck there was standing-room only in the air-tight container measuring just six metres long and 2.2 metres wide.
“It was hot when the truck started moving,” one 40-year-old survivor explained from his bed in Ranong hospital, where another 20 were treated. “We asked the driver to turn the air-conditioner on. The heat made me pass out and the next thing I knew I was in hospital.”
Police Colonel Kraithong Chanthongbai said: “The people said they tried to bang on the walls of the container to tell the driver they were dying, but he told them to shut up as police would hear them when they crossed through check-points inside Thailand.”
When police reached the scene in the early hours of this morning, tipped off by local villagers, they found 54 of the migrants already dead. Officers were seen lifting the bodies of the 37 women and 17 men, dressed in little more than T-shirts and shorts, from the truck’s rear where only rags of discarded clothing remained.
The bodies were taken to a shed where they were laid out in rows on plastic sheets. Police said they would be buried in temporary graves so that relatives could reclaim them in the future.
Tonight just two survivors remained in hospital while the other 65 were being detained by police who said they were likely to be deported as illegal immigrants.
Police were searching for the driver. The owner of the truck, part of the Rung Thip company’s fleet, was detained for questioning despite claiming to have no knowledge of the human cargo.
“We believe this must be part of a smuggling racket which has to be tracked down,” said Col Kraithong. “The large number of illegals represents a very brazen act.”
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Food price riots
The UN’s most senior emergency relief co-ordinator has given warning that spectacular food price rises will trigger riots throughout the developing world. A year ago his remarks might have been prescient. Now they are a statement of fact: in Haiti, five people have died in the past week and thousands more have been reduced to eating biscuits made of soil and cooking oil as food riots drag the western hemisphere’s most fragile and impoverished democracy back to the brink of collapse. In Egypt, where wholesale rice prices have more than doubled since October, food price inflation has triggered the worst urban unrest for a generation. From Yemen to Uzbekistan, simple hunger has emboldened citizens to protest against regimes more used to cowed docility.
Public order is at risk in at least 33 countries, according to the World Bank. But the high food prices bringing misery to poor consumers offer the chance of transformative change to poor producers. These are, principally, the rice growers of India, China and South-East Asia, whose output would fetch twice what it commanded just six months ago if they had free access to world markets. Securing this access, and the investment in agricultural infrastructure that would follow, is the only long-term solution to an accelerating global crisis.
The factors bringing the age of cheap food to such a shuddering halt are well understood. Devastating droughts wrecked last year’s grain harvests in Australia and sub-Saharan Africa. The breakneck – and ill-advised – replanting of farmland for biofuels in the Americas helped to double world wheat and livestock feed prices between 2006 and 2007 alone, while high oil prices are transmitted to agriculture via the rising cost of planting, harvesting and distribution. Above all, soaring Indian and Chinese demand for land-intensive meat and dairy products are fuelling food price inflation with global impact and little sign of slowing.
The emerging economic superpowers account for more than a third of the world’s population but less than a quarter of global food output. India and China must, therefore, take urgent steps to modernise their farming sectors as fast as their export-led manufacturing. But no amount of investment in irrigation or high-yield crops will ease the current crisis unless developed as well as developing economies can agree to lift trade barriers instead of impose them.
The EU, on paper at least, has led the way with an undertaking to scrap large-scale food subsidies provided it can keep smaller ones for as-yet undefined “sensitive” commodities. The Philippines has followed by lifting rice import tariffs out of an urgent need to buy more on world markets. But the same emergency has led Vietnam, one of the world’s largest rice producers, to introduce new export tariffs.
Vietnam’s dilemma is acute and repeated across the developing world. Its people cannot go hungry for the sake of its exports, and its Government’s first duty is to craft safety nets for the most vulnerable. But beyond that, the solution is not to hoard food but to grow more of it, and to sell it on open markets that reward the most efficient farmers. That will take political courage and an unsqueamish approach to GM foods. Affordable food and social stability will require a greater openness to science and trade.
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April 8, 2008
Vanuatu newspaper written by hand
Vanuatu’s Pentecost Island can boast to have the only newspaper that’s written by hand.
The Pentecost Star, now eight months old, is a weekly newspaper.
It is the brainchild of Keith Hango, a former newspaper boy for the Trading Post newspaper.
The newsletter is written in English and comes out every Saturday.
Hango single-handedly writes all of the newspaper’s contents by hand.
His only tools are pen, paper, ruler and a stapler and staples all of which he buys himself.
Hango said he started the newsletter because he saw a great need to disseminate interesting, factual information to the people of Pentecost.
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April 7, 2008
The Jubilee Act
The Jubilee Act, a bill currently moving through Congress, would extend debt
cancellation to 67 low-income countries, provided they demonstrate plans to spend the
money wisely on poverty reduction programs.
Despite debt relief agreements in 1999 and 2005, countries of the Global South continue
to spend $100 million every day to pay foreign debts, often incurred by undemocratic
governments and under unfair lending practices. In 2005, Mexico spent $44 billion to
service debt, more than the entire budget allocated for education. Such a tremendous
outflow of money to rich countries clearly contradicts the international community’s
commitment to end poverty. Instead, debt payments limit a country’s ability to create
opportunities for people to live the lives they choose at home and force millions to
migrate in search of work.
Debt cancellation stimulates economies. For example, Uganda has invested its 2006 debt
relief savings of $57.9 million in primary education, healthcare and infrastructure
upgrades. Newly available resources can also support agricultural advancements and
other critical economic development projects. Greater economic prospects result from
debt cancellation and fair economic policies
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