Poll shows Singaporeans the biggest spenders in Asia for Valentine's Day
Channel NewsAsia 13 Feb 08;
SINGAPORE : Singaporeans are the biggest spenders in Asia for Valentine's Day. This is according to a survey which found that 60 percent of Singaporeans would spend up to S$500 to mark this occasion
Besides respondents from Singapore, those in Korea and China are likely to be big Valentine's Day spenders.
50 percent of the Chinese surveyed indicated that they would spend up to S$500. 78 percent of Koreans who took part in the survey said they would spend up to S$250.
The survey was conducted by GE Money Asia, which had polled 3,115 GE Money Asia and Joint Venture partner employees.
Besides Singapore, China and Korea, the survey also covered India, Thailand, Japan and the Philippines.
The poll showed that 60 percent of Singaporeans used their credit cards to splurge on their loved ones, and only started shopping for the gifts a week before February 14.
Three in four Singaporeans felt that Valentine's Day is a commercial exercise.
90 percent of the women surveyed said that Valentine's Day is here to stay. 67 percent of men support Valentine's Day and do not think it should be cancelled.
Throughout Asia, the survey indicated that Asian women would spend slightly more than men for Valentine's Day.
In Singapore, all of the women surveyed said they would spend below S$500.
However, 19 percent of Singaporean men said they are willing to spend between S$500 and S$5,000.
63 percent of women in Singapore prefer to receive jewellery rather than cash as a Valentine's Day gift.
25 percent of the women rated a spa or luxury resort as their preferred activity for Valentine's Day.
39 percent of men here said they prefer travel packages. - CNA/ms
Buying a Valentine's Day gift? Think again
Business Times 14 Feb 08;
(WASHINGTON) There was a time, long ago, when a lover would buy diamonds, chocolate or roses for his beloved on Valentine's Day with a clear conscience.
But life has become more complicated.
For some, the romance is being overshadowed by concerns that the diamonds may have financed wars, that the cocoa beans were harvested by children and that the roses were kept perfect with mists of pesticides.
Let's start with roses, especially the red roses traditionally used to show passion.
'Most roses sold in the US are grown in Latin America. And they are grown in a way that uses a lot of chemicals,' said Rene Ebersole, a senior editor of the environmental Audubon Magazine.
'DDT is used,' she added, saying that workers who applied the pesticides often complained of irritated eyes and other ailments that they blamed on the chemicals.
And what about soft melty bonbons, dusted with cocoa powder? Ivory Coast, which grows 40 per cent of the world's cocoa, has a persistent child labour problem, according to the 2006 State Department Human Rights report, which was released in March 2007.
'The controversy over child labour in the local cocoa sector continued,' the report said, citing an earlier survey by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture.
That group had found that perhaps 5,000 to 10,000 children were trafficked to or within the country to work in the cocoa sector, the State Department said.
'The (institute's) research showed that approximately 109,000 child labourers worked in hazardous conditions on cocoa farms in the country in what the study described as the worst forms of child labour,' the State Department said.
Then there's the problem of blood diamonds, which refers to gems mined under brutal conditions and sold to support a war effort.
The problem is apparently one of the few things that Presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush agree on.
Mr Clinton issued an executive order in January 2001 barring Sierra Leone from exporting diamonds to the United States. When Liberia began to be used to get around the ban, Mr Bush acted in 2001 to bar rough diamond imports from Liberia.
A mechanism called the Kimberley Process was supposed to help buyers identify conflict-free diamonds, but there is criticism that it has fallen short.
Sigh. Lingerie anyone? - Reuters
