Ocean ‘desert’ zone extends to isles

Helen Altonn, Honolulu Star Bulletin 25 Feb 08;

The least productive ocean waters -- biological deserts -- have reached the Hawaiian archipelago, Hawaii scientists report.

The largest ecosystems in the major ocean basins are subtropical gyres, large-scale regions of winds and currents with low chlorophyll for plant and animal growth. These areas cover 40 percent of Earth's surface and in nine years have expanded 10 to 25 times faster than global-warming models predict, the scientists said.

"What's happening is, large portions of the area are becoming less productive," said Jeffrey Polovina, with the National Marine Fisheries Service in Honolulu.

This will likely decrease the carrying capacity for larger animals such as tunas, sharks and marlins, he said in an interview. "We will just have less productivity at the base of the food web."

He said there might be a change in species composition with the absence of larger, predator animals favoring the smaller fish, such as mahimahi and skipjack.

Polovina and colleagues Evan Howell, research oceanographer, and Melanie Abecassis, research assistant, analyzed data from a nine-year time-series of remotely sensed ocean color data from the Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor on the orbiting SeaStar spacecraft.

The craft, launched in 1997, maps the oceans in color, with surface chlorophyll in green reflecting the amount of plant life supporting the base of the food chain.

"SeaWiFS is a remarkable sensor that gives us a picture of ocean biology all around the globe," Polovina said, explaining the data is valuable for many different applications.

From January 1998 to February 2007, all biological deserts in the Pacific and Atlantic subtropical gyres expanded at average annual rates of 0.8 percent to 4.3 percent a year, the scientists said in a paper published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Total expansion was about 6.6 million square kilometers, or about 15 percent, they reported.

In the North Pacific, they said, the gyre "has expanded to the northeast, reaching portions of the Hawaiian archipelago and well into the eastern Pacific." The South Pacific desert area also grew on the southern and northern sides.

The rapid expansion of low surface chlorophyll in four ocean basins suggests global warming as the likely cause, but it is premature to attribute it to global warming, Polovina said.

"If it is due to an increase in greenhouse gases, it really does represent something that is going to be a long, permanent change."

Because of the large size of the ocean deserts, "even modest changes can result in significant impacts on the spatial distribution of surface chlorophyll in the entire ocean," the scientists pointed out.

The only exception to the spreading biological deserts was in the South Indian Ocean. "There is probably a lot more variability in that ocean," Polovina said. However, the researchers noted a trend toward expansion that could show up in a few more years, he said.

SeaWiFS Project scientist Charles McClain at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., was not involved with the study, but told ScienceNOW Daily News, "Everything seems to hold together."

Various oceanographic observations and models point to global warming as the cause of the expanding subtropical gyres and low-productivity ecosystems, he said.

But he said there is a question whether part or all of the expansion might be due to a natural event that could reverse itself in a decade or two -- something Polovina agreed cannot be ruled out.

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Top China plastic bag maker closes amid green drive

Reuters 26 Feb 08;

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's largest plastic bag maker has closed following a state-led environmental campaign discouraging plastics use, Xinhua news agency said on Tuesday.

China launched a surprise crackdown on plastic bags in January, banning production of ultra-thin bags and forbidding its supermarkets and shops from handing out free carrier bags from June 1.

Suiping Huaqiang Plastic Co, owned by Guangzhou-based Nanqiang Plastic Industrial Ltd. and employing 20,000 workers stopped production in mid-January.

"Our factory has officially closed, we are in the process of liquidation and there are very few people on hand," an employee told Reuters by phone.

The pressure from the crackdown proved too much for the plastics giant which produces 250,000 tons of plastic bags valued at 2.2 billion yuan ($305 million) annually.

"Over 90 percent of our products are on the limit list, so the only way forward for the factory is closure," a management official was quoted by Xinhua as saying.

Worries about pollution are growing among ordinary citizens, as years of breakneck growth take their toll on the country's air and water.

Chinese people use up to 3 billion plastic bags a day and the country has to refine 5 million tons (37 million barrels) of crude oil every year to make plastics used for packaging, according to a report on the Web site of China Trade News (http://www.chinatradenews.com.cn).

(Reporting by Beijing Newsroom; Editing by Nick Macfie and Alex Richardson)

$1=7.156 yuan

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Taps shut in central China due to red, bubbly river

Reuters 26 Feb 08;

BEIJING (Reuters) - A spill on the Hanjiang River, in central China's Hubei Province, has affected water supply for 200,000 people living along three tributaries since Sunday, the Xinhua news agency said on Tuesday, citing local media.

The water became "red with large amounts of bubbles," Xinhua said, citing Gao Qijin, head of Xingou Township Tap Water Company in Jianli County, which is along the Dongjing River, one of the affected tributaries.

Water supply has been cut for about 60,000 residents in the town, who are relying on bottled water. Five schools also have stopped classes.

The environmental protection authorities were investigating the source of the contamination, Xinhua said.

Meanwhile, in southeastern China's Yunnan Province, police have detained a farmer whose homemade fertilizer contaminated the drinking water of 9,000 people and killed 20 tonnes of fish in a fishery last week, Xinhua said.

The villager, Zhou Shunfu, dumped 120 tonnes of waste residue with phosphor onto his own fields, thinking that it could be used as fertilizer, and wiped out a neighbor's fish farm.

After a string of well-publicized cases of water pollution, China is moving to crack down on industrial polluters. It is debating a draft law to fine the heads of companies that foul water, and contemplating ending tax breaks for polluting exporters

But accidents and careless use of chemicals still poses a grave hazard, especially in smaller towns.

(Reporting by Lucy Hornby)

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Seagrass study calls for chemical cuts

ABC News 26 Feb 08;

A study into why seagrass is disappearing from the South Australian coastline says nitrogen and phosphate levels need to be cut by up to 75 per cent to protect what is left of the fish habitat.

The six year study has just been finished, and says high levels of both nitrogen and phosphate has caused the seagrass to die.

Professor David Fox, who led research on the problem, says the reduction target will be hard to achieve, but is vital.

"This is a target that now sits with government and industry and also natural resource managers and everyone will have to get together now and work towards figuring out what's the best way of achieving that 75 per cent reduction," he says.

Study helps solve seagrass mystery
Brisbane Times 26 Feb 08;

Reduced water quality has been blamed for the loss of seagrasses along the Adelaide coastline over the past 60 or 70 years.

A CSIRO study, involving 60 researchers, investigated the loss of more than 5,000 hectares of seagrasses along the coast since the mid-1930s.

Study director David Fox said it found that many years of near-continuous discharge of nutrient-rich and turbid wastewater had resulted in significant changes and degradation of Adelaide's coastal marine environment.

"This study has focused on the loss of seagrass - mainly Amphibolis and Posidonia - seabed instability and water quality degradation," Prof Fox said.

"Seagrass meadows are primary producers at the bottom of the food chain and they provide natural habitat for many species of fish, crustaceans and other marine animals.

"Taking the seagrasses out of the system causes a domino effect, where the seafloor becomes less stable and promotes a further loss of seagrass."

Prof Fox said moves to improve water quality over the past 10 years had improved the marine environment.

But he said large scale recovery of seagrass meadows required continued reductions in coastal discharge and a significant replanting effort.

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Coral Reefs and What Ruins Them

Cornelia Dean, New York Times 26 Feb 08;

Researchers who studied a string of Pacific Ocean atolls are painting the first detailed picture of pristine coral reefs and how they can be disrupted by people — particularly, they said, by fishing.

The researchers, from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and elsewhere in the United States and abroad, surveyed every form of life last summer in the northern Line Islands, a chain south of Hawaii. Their survey encompassed everything from microbes to sharks and other big fish at the top of the food chain.

“Reefs without people” were healthier than populated reefs, they say in a report to be posted Wednesday in the online Public Library of Science Biology.

The ecosystems at Kingman and Palmyra, the northernmost and least populated atolls, are dominated by large predators like sharks and groupers, and corals there are robust, they said, while Tabuaeran and Kiritimati to the south, the most populated atolls, are characterized by fleshy algae, small plankton-eating fish and degraded corals.

In a commentary also published online, Nancy Knowlton and Jeremy B. C. Jackson, coral experts at Scripps and the Smithsonian Institution, said the new work was notable because it produced data at sites “across a full spectrum of human impacts.” Without this kind of data, they write, studying coral reefs is like trying to discern the ecological structure of the Amazon rain forest by looking at the cattle ranches and soybean fields that have replaced much of it.

Actually, they write, it is even worse. Scientists can still visit vast areas of intact rain forest and have decades of data from earlier researchers. “The situation is very different for the oceans,” Dr. Knowlton and Dr. Jackson wrote, because degradation of ocean ecosystems is so pervasive, and underwater observation is relatively recent. As a result, they said, scientists disagree over the relative importance for coral of local factors like overfishing and pollution as against global problems like climate change and the acidification of oceans it causes.

The Line Islands work will not settle those arguments. But the scientists noted great differences in the fish communities at inhabited and uninhabited reefs, which they attributed to fishing pressure on shark, grouper, snapper and other large predators, said Enric Sala, an ecologist formerly at Scripps and now at the National Council for Scientific Research in Spain.

Kingman is unpopulated — in fact, none of it is permanently above water. Palmyra was dredged extensively in the 1940s, the researchers said, and fishing has occurred there, but today both atolls are protected by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service as part of the Pacific/Remote Islands National Wildlife Refuge. A camp at Palmyra, with a capacity of 20, has its own sewage treatment center.

Tabuaeran, with a growing population estimated in 2005 at 2,500, and Kiritimati, with 5,100 people and growing even faster, are part of the Republic of Kiribati. People there subsist on fishing and have no sewage treatment facilities.

At Kingman and Palmyra, the ocean ecosystem is dominated by large top-predator fish, species “virtually absent” at Tabuaeran and Kiritimati, also known as Christmas Island. The researchers said this was the typical pattern elsewhere in the world, except the northwestern Hawaiian Islands.

They attributed it to fishing pressure which, they said, “tends to disproportionately reduce densities of longer-lived, larger-bodied individuals.”

The pattern in the uninhabited atolls, though, “is similar to what we see in Yellowstone — the landscape of fear,” Dr. Sala said. “In Yellowstone there are all these wolves, and the deer are much more attentive.”

As a result, he said, small fish spend much of their time hiding. “When people see photos they say, ‘Well, the water is empty,’ ” he said. “For me, it’s prettier because the corals are healthy and clean and you don’t see seaweed in the reefs and you see these big snappers and sharks.” There are far more fish on degraded reefs, he said, but they are far smaller. “The percentage of the bottom cover by large corals declines, the seaweed takes over, then the microbes become much more abundant,” he said.

The researchers said coral cover, density and species richness were highest at Kingman and lowest at Kiritimati. Coral disease was most prevalent at Kiritimati, they said.

Dr. Sala acknowledged that by the standards of the Caribbean and other heavily exploited areas, Tabuaeran and Kiritimati are in pretty good shape. But, he added, “there are 5,000 people living in Christmas and fishing there,” enough “to transform the whole ecosystem.”

At the moment, the assessment leaves the researchers with questions as well as answers. For example, reefs like Tabuaeran and Kiritimati don’t seem to survive as well in episodes of disease or bleaching. Is it because of fishing? To find out, the researchers wrote, they will have to measure how coral growth and fish productivity respond to fishing pressure and how they all interact with episodes of warm water.

But for Dr. Sala, the reefs are like “ecological machines” whose parts include plants, fish, corals and microbes. “You can hit the system with a disturbance, but the system comes back,” he said. But if pieces — like big predatory fish — are removed, he said, “the machine is going to malfunction.”

As a result, he said, the new work “is an argument for marine reserves large enough to include healthy populations of top predators.”

Studies show scope of damage to reefs
Local researchers assess range of coral ecosystems
Mike Lee, SignOnSanDiego 26 Feb 08;

The few pristine coral reefs remaining in the world are teeming with biological diversity – a stark contrast to the damaged reefs where microbes, algae and small fish have replaced sharks, snappers and other large predators.

That's the conclusion of a landmark pair of studies to be published online tomorrow by a multidisciplinary team of researchers, including some from UCSD's Scripps Institution of Oceanography and San Diego State University.

Authors of the peer-reviewed reports, which will appear in the journal Public Library of Science ONE, described them as the first studies to assess a range of coral ecosystems from the top to the bottom of the food chain.

They said the findings form a comprehensive baseline for marine biologists and conservationists trying to preserve what's left of reefs, which are huge tourist attractions and major producers of seafood for people worldwide. The insights also underscore the sheer difficulty of restoring these habitats.

“Only now are we starting to realize that throughout the tenure of coral reef ecology as a discipline, we have been seeing the wholesale loss of entire ecosystems,” said Stuart Sandin, lead author of one of the papers and a scientist at Scripps.

Robert Warner, a professor and reef-fish expert at the University of California Santa Barbara, commended the Scripps team.

“This is our first view of how the changes due to human (activities) resonate through the entire ecosystem. The Scripps team did an incredibly good job,” said Warner, who did not help write the reports but was familiar with them.

Scientists traditionally have focused on specific aspects of reef ecology, often in areas where pollution and overfishing have badly degraded the environment. That's partly because most of the world's easily accessible reefs already were damaged by the time researchers possessed the tools to carry out sophisticated marine studies.

In recent decades, people have harmed coral reefs – and oceans in general – by dumping garbage, overharvesting large fish and fouling the waters with chemical-laced sewage and urban runoff. Also, reefs have declined as ocean temperatures rise because of forces such as global warming.

To explore reefs mostly untouched by humans, Sandin and his colleagues had to travel about 1,000 miles south of Hawaii to the Line Islands. They compared the uninhabited Kingman Reef with more heavily populated areas such as Kiritimati, also known as Christmas Island.

“We use Kingman as a window into the past, a time machine that allows us to understand what we have lost and how we lost it,” said Enric Sala, an author of the studies and an adjunct Scripps professor who is based at the National Council of Scientific Research in Spain.

Sala and his team made a milestone discovery: The world's typical reefs have far fewer top-level – or predator – species than what apparently was the norm before human activities damaged them.

For example, predators accounted for 85 percent of all the fish biomass at Kingman Reef but only 19 percent at the more degraded Kiritimati.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the researchers reported that healthy reefs are better than ailing ones at recovering from periods of warm water linked to climate change. Higher temperatures bring about “coral bleaching,” a process that causes the food chain to collapse.

Sandin said the new studies show that localized reef protections, such as restrictions on fishing and other seafood harvesting, can help the ecosystems survive temperature changes.

In addition to looking at the predator populations, team members assessed the microbiology of the water at the reefs – a whole new dimension in coral studies.

New technology allowed the scientists to gain an unprecedented look at waterborne microbes, said Elizabeth Dinsdale, a biologist at SDSU.

Dinsdale and other researchers discovered that Kingman Reef had 10 times fewer microbial cells and viruslike particles than the more degraded reef at Kiritimati.

The data suggest that human activities likely are connected to the high bacterial counts at Kiritimati, though scientists are still trying to figure out how the two are linked.

“Ecosystem-based management of coral reefs has traditionally focused on animals and plants. Our findings highlight the need to explicitly include microbial processes and their influence,” Dinsdale and her co-authors said in one of the studies.

Other contributors to the new reports include those from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Princeton University, the University of Florida and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Although the latest research highlights the poor condition of the world's reefs, scientists said, it also offers reasons for optimism.

“Despite the wholesale loss of reefs from the planet, there are still these gems left . . . (that) really do represent the last stand of all the coral reefs from the past,” Sandin said.

The research, he said, “highlights the importance of putting conservation dollars toward saving these areas.”

Read more!

Best of our wild blogs: 26 Feb 08

Once upon a tree episode 2
to feature Chek Jawa and Zaki? more on the wildfilms blog

'Green' versus 'Red'
discussing Chinese New Year on the champions of the environment blog

Naked at Chek Jawa
a NEW blog with great shots of our best guide at work on the sgbeachbum blog

Afternoon on the ridge
Amazing what you can find if you look on the wonderful creations blog

Black-naped raid
drama on the bird ecology blog

Where are all the frogs?
an upcoming talk at the zoo on the habitatnews blog

Singapore tarantula
and why we shouldn't keep tarantulas as pets on the manta blog

Ants bite
a photo to make you cringe on the budak blog

Read more!

Felling of trees a blow to Pasir Ris residents

Felled old trees were pride of quaint neighbourhood They were healthy – why cut them down?

Today Online 26 Feb 08;
Letter from Ong Siew Khim
Letter from David Law Kah Hock

I AM shocked and utterly disappointed at the felling of several old handsome casuarina trees along Elias Road.

We have been staying here for about 15 years and my family and neighbours take a lot of pride in these majestic willowy trees, which add a lot of character to the quaint neighbourhood.

Even visiting friends and relatives often comment about how beautiful they are. Very often, I look out of the window and spot various breeds of exotic birds resting and feeding on the fruit. They are one of the main reasons why we have chosen to stay here for many years.

So, imagine our horror on Saturday morning when we discovered a team of workers chopping down the trees.

When I approached them to find out why, they asked me to contact the Pasir Ris Town Council, which is closed during the weekend. They also told me they were going to chop down all the casuarina trees.

My family and I are upset that this has happened and hope to hear the justification for this insensitive action. As we are a green garden city, we should have more respect and consideration for residents and our surroundings.

I hope that through this letter, we can prevent more of these trees being felled. It takes just minutes to cut them down, but decades for them to flourish.

I AM dismayed by the Pasir Ris Town Council's decision to cut down mature and healthy casuarina trees in the area.

For many years, these tall and graceful trees have provided residents shade and comfort. One gets a sense of peace and calm just by looking at them.

Now, two of these gentle giants, each about 14 storeys high, have been cut down.

I do not see a need for such action. Many visitors have said that these beautiful trees give this estate a distinct feel.

I spoke to the contractor in charge and he attested that the trees were very healthy. He, too, is at a loss as to why he was instructed to cut them down.

I am disappointed with the National Parks Board for allowing this to happen. I am sure that without their approval, these trees could not have been felled. Can someone explain why these trees were cut down?

Read more!

High Court dismisses bid to save temple site but Bodhi tree to be saved

Jin Long Si has two months to relocate to site offered by Govt; acquired land to be used for homes
Peh Shing Huei, Straits Times 26 Feb 08;

A LEGAL bid by three devotees to save their 65-year-old Buddhist temple site from government acquisition was dismissed by the High Court yesterday.

The Jin Long Si Temple, off Bartley Road, now has two months to move to a temporary site, likely to be in Tai Seng Avenue in Paya Lebar.

The devotees of the temple had filed a suit last month against the acquisition, alleging that it is in violation of the Constitution.

The case was heard in chambers, behind closed doors, on Jan 29, and the court ruled yesterday that the devotees had no standing to make the application.

Even if they did, Justice Tan Lee Meng said, the Government did not breach the Constitution.

The site was acquired by the Government in 2003 as part of redevelopment plans in conjunction with the construction of the Circle Line's Bartley station.

The wood-walled, zinc-roofed temple was given a five-year period, up to Jan 31 this year, to relocate.

But because of the lawsuit, the move was postponed.

The Government had offered the temple alternative sites and discussions were underway for the direct alienation of these sites to the temple late last year, said the Law Ministry in a statement.

The temple's land is to be merged with state land next to it, where the Millennia Institute used to be, so that more homes can be built there.

The plot is scheduled for sale in the second half of this year.

Now that the devotees' application has been dismissed, the Government will resume discussions with the temple trustees on the move to a temporary site, and subsequently to a permanent home.

The trustees and key committee members have indicated their preference for a site in Tai Seng Avenue.

Temple president Tan Poh Heong declined comment yesterday, saying he has to consult the temple's lawyers.

...but Bodhi tree to be saved
Straits Times 26 Feb 08;

THE Jin Long Si Temple made news two years ago when its devotees launched a petition to save it and the large Bodhi tree - estimated to be more than 100 years old - on its premises.

Yesterday, the Government announced that the tree will be saved after all.

While the acquisition of the Jin Long Si Temple will proceed as planned, the Law Ministry pledged yesterday to retain the Bodhi tree on the land.

The tender conditions for the redevelopment of the site off Bartley Road will require that the developer take necessary measures to ensure that the tree is preserved.

The tree has attracted much attention since 2006, when both nature lovers and temple devotees asked for its preservation.

The Bodhi tree is considered sacred as Buddha is believed to have gained enlightenment while sitting under one.

The tree at Jin Long Si has a girth of 8.5m and is 30.5m tall.

Court rejects devotees' case
Acquisition of Bartley temple land did not breach Constitution
Leong Wee Keat, Straits Times 26 Feb 08;

An application by three devotees to stop the relocation of a temple off Bartley Road was dismissed by the High Court yesterday.

The Jin Long Si Temple was acquired by the Government five years ago, in January 2003, for "comprehensive redevelopment" in conjunction with the construction of the new Bartley MRT station along the Circle Line. The temple site and the adjoining State land — the former Millenia Institute site — are slated for redevelopment for high-density residential use.

Last month, just two weeks before the "move out" date, three devotees initiated legal proceedings to stay the acquisition.

The trio, who are not trustees of the temple, argued that the acquisition of the site violated the Constitution. According to court documents, the three devotees — Ms Eng Foong Ho, Mr Hue Guan Koon and Ms Ang Beng Woon, all of whom claim "personal ties" to the temple — resorted to legal action after earlier appeals to the Government against the move had failed.

Their case was heard in chambers on Jan 29. Issuing his judgment yesterday, Justice Tan Lee Meng dismissed their application, ruling that the devotees had no standing to make the application and the acquisition had not breached the Constitution.

Justice Tan may release written grounds of his decision at a later date.

Over the years, several places of worship have been relocated to make way for redevelopment, including the Tang Suahn Kiong San Soh Hoo Chu Temple along Henderson Road, the Sri Marathadi Muneeswarar at Upper Changi Road North, the Velmurugan Temple along Bukit Merah and Sri Mariamman Muneeswarar Temple at Jalan Kayu.

The lawyer for the three devotees, Mr Ang Cheng Hock, said his clients would consider the ruling before deciding whether to appeal. They have a month to decide.

In a statement yesterday, the Ministry of Law noted that the temple had been given five years until the end of last month to relocate.

The temple's trustees and key committee members have also been in talks with the Government over a temporary site to relocate the 67-year-old temple, while they make plans to build a new temple on a new site.

To facilitate this, the Government had offered sites for both the temporary and subsequently permanent relocation. The temple trustees and key committee members have indicated their preference. It is understood that the temple is likely to move to a site at Tai Seng Avenue, near Paya Lebar.

The Government is also taking steps to help preserve the temple's 100-year-old Bodhi Tree. For example, tender conditions for the site's redevelopment will require the developer to take measures to ensure the retention of the tree.

Temple's acquisition appeal dismissed
Chew Xiang, Business Times 26 Feb 08;

THE High Court has dismissed an application by three devotees of the Jin Long Si Temple, off Bartley Road, to declare that the acquisition of the temple site violates the Constitution.

The government will now go ahead with the redevelopment of the land unless an appeal is lodged. Temporary and permanent sites have been offered to the temple trustees and committee members, as well as compensation. They will have to move out within two months.

Dismissing the application, the court said the applicants had no standing to make it, and that even if they did, there was no merit in their argument that the government had breached the Constitution. The case was heard in chambers on Jan 29.

The 60-year-old temple in Lorong How Sun was acquired in January 2003 for redevelopment in conjunction with the Circle Line MRT system.

The government gave the temple trustees five years - up to Jan 31 this year - to relocate from the site. Repeated appeals to the government to rethink the acquisition were rejected after due consideration.

The site, with adjoining state land that was formerly the Millenia Institute site, is slated for redevelopment to high-density residential use. The combined plot is scheduled for sale under the Government Land Sales programme in the second half of the year.

The acquisition has generated some controversy. A 100-year-old Bodhi tree, which is important to Buddhists, stands in the grounds and many have called for the tree to be preserved.

It is feared that redevelopment of the temple site, which sits on 1,840 sq metres of land, may damage the tree.

But the government has said measures will be taken to help preserve the Bodhi tree, which is more than 30 metres high.

The tender conditions for the redevelopment of the site will require the developer to retain the tree, the government has said.

Application of 3 temple devotees over land acquisition dismissed
Channel NewsAsia 26 Feb 08;

SINGAPORE : The High Court on Monday dismissed an application by three devotees of the Jing Long Si Temple. The devotees had initiated proceedings to declare that the government's acquisition of the temple site had violated the Constitution.

The three devotees had initiated proceedings on January 16 this year, and the case was heard in chambers on January 29.

The Court said the devotees had no standing to make the application, and even if they did, there was no merit in their arguments that the government had acted unconstitutionally.

The temple, at Lorong How Sun in the Bartley area, had been acquired in January 2003 for redevelopment in conjunction with the Circle MRT Line construction.

The temple site and an adjoining state land are slated for high density residential use.

The sites were scheduled for sale under the Government Land Sales Programme in the second half of this year.

In a statement, the Law Ministry said the government will now resume discussion with the temple's trustees and key committee members to facilitate a move - first to a temporary site, and subsequently to a permanent site.

Both these sites are located in nearby Tai Seng Avenue.

The government will also ensure that a Bodhi tree at the current site is preserved. Tender conditions for the site will ensure the developer takes necessary measures to retain the tree. - CNA/ms

Read more!

MP Inderjit Singh calls for review of "grow-at-all-costs" Singapore policy

Channel NewsAsia 25 Feb 08;

SINGAPORE: The MP for Ang Mo Kio GRC, Inderjit Singh, kicked off the debate on the Budget Statement on Monday.

The entrepreneur listed cost increases in 18 areas, among them the levy for skilled foreign workers, electricity tariffs, healthcare services, university tuition fees and public transport fares. All these have led to an overheated economy.

Mr Inderjit Singh said such increases were either triggered or allowed by what he called the government's "grow-at-all-costs" policy.

He called for a review of this policy which he argued, has worsened the income divide.

Mr Inderjit Singh said: "I feel a significant part of the inflation has been caused by factors that we could have controlled, what I call controllable factors - factors which the government can manage and could have done something about.

"In the last two years, the government has contributed to inflation by allowing multiple cost increases, both directly or through policy changes that resulted in cost increases. The end result is an era of very high cost increases, high inflation not supported by enough wage increases, especially for the lower and lower middle income Singaporeans and companies."

Mr Inderjit Singh also singled out the 2 percentage point GST hike last July as a 'very significant cost increase'. This had triggered off other cost increases which were passed on to consumers.

The MP recounted how the Finance Minister had strongly defended the GST hike, citing reduction of government income from other sources and the need to generate enough money to fund Singapore's growth.

But the government was faced with a 'pleasantly embarrassing outcome', he said. Instead of projected deficit of $0.7b, it had a surplus of $6.4 billion.

"The government had been too quick to increase the GST last year. In light of the booming economy, which should have been visible by mid-2007, the government could have made the late decision to hold off the GST rise by a year or two," Mr Inderjit Singh said. - CNA/ir

Read more!

MP Teo calls for more incentives to promote 'green' culture

Channel NewsAsia 25 Feb 08;

SINGAPORE: The government should provide more green incentives to encourage businesses and individuals to adopt environmentally-friendly practices.

This call was made by the MP for Bukit Panjang, Dr Teo Ho Pin, in Parliament on Monday.

Dr Teo suggested that the incentives target three key areas - transportation, building and construction, and energy efficient products.

Noting there are currently only 1,000 hybrid and 500 Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) cars in Singapore, he said it is evident that the 'green' vehicle rebate has failed to persuade car owners to go green.

But more incentives, or tax rebates on vehicle registration fee and road tax of 'green' vehicles could help.

Dr Teo also noted that the take-up rate for the Green Mark Building Scheme has been slow, as only 100 buildings built after 2005 have been certified ‘green’.

To address this, he recommended a Green Property Tax rebate for Green Mark buildings, and to expand the scheme to include buildings undergoing renovation.

On the issue of energy efficient products, Dr Teo suggested tax and import duty rebates for such appliances to encourage consumers to purchase them.

And to inculcate a green culture among youths, he called for government grants to incorporate green technology and practices at the upcoming Youth Olympic Games Village. - CNA/vm


Budget Shorts
Straits Times 26 Feb 08;

HOW TO HELP 'GREEN' PUSH?
MORE INCENTIVES NEEDED, SAY MPs

THE Budget should have been more 'green', said some MPs yesterday.

Nominated MP Gautam Banerjee was among those who said the Budget lacked environmentally friendly, or 'green' tax incentives. He said Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam had 'missed an opportunity to provide fiscal incentives for eco-friendly business measures'.

To address this, Mr Banerjee suggested setting up a national fund to promote and finance 'green' initiatives, with tax deductions given to donors. He also suggested that the Government zero-rate goods and services tax (GST) for companies that buy energy-saving devices.

Dr Teo Ho Pin (Bukit Panjang) echoed his views, suggesting that tax incentives be given to companies to construct more eco-friendly buildings and install 'green' fixtures.

For individuals, Dr Teo pointed out that energy-saving appliances such as air-conditioners or refrigerators are not popular among consumers as they tend to be more expensive. To counter this, he advocated tax and import duty rebates on such appliances to make their prices more competitive with regular products.

Dr Teo also asked for more attractive rebates on the purchase of hybrid, clean energy cars.

CALL TO BROADEN R&D TAX REBATES

MEMBERS of Parliament yesterday lauded the Government's new tax schemes to spur research and development (R&D) efforts by Singapore businesses.

But they also called for a clearer and broader definition of such incentives.

Ms Penny Low (Pasir Ris-Punggol GRC) asked Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam to clarify what constituted innovation, and whether it was just restricted to the for-profit world.

Nominated MP Gautam Banerjee noted that the current definition of R&D was rather 'restrictive'. In effect, it generally applies to 'only companies that employ teams of technicians and scientists in white coats, such as pharmaceutical or oil companies, to carry on R&D'.

But small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) which have less formal ways of churning out innovative solutions may not qualify for the tax rebates. Food and beverage makers and service companies which come up with processes to enhance quality and productivity could also miss out, said Mr Banerjee.

He called for the use of a more 'liberal approach' to offer R&D rebates to such companies, in line with Singapore's more broad-based and increasingly knowledge-intensive economy.

MP'S IDEA: REVERSE MEDISHIELD PREMIUMS SO THE OLDER PAY LESS

THE premiums for MediShield, the national health insurance plan, should be reversed - so that people pay more when they are younger and working, and less in their later years, suggested Madam Cynthia Phua (Aljunied GRC).

It would overcome the problem of rising premiums as a person gets older, she said yesterday in Parliament.

For example, the amount ranged from $160 for those aged between 51 and 60, to $600 for those aged 80, with further increments due every two years.

Madam Phua also proposed that a portion of a younger person's premium goes into an investment fund to generate income to pay for the higher premium rates when the insured gets older.

Read more!

Haze is back...sooner than expected

Tania Tan in Singapore & Salim Osman in Indonesia
Straits Times 26 Feb 08;

ILL winds are blowing the haze towards Singapore again, as farmers in the Sumatran province of Riau have begun clearing undergrowth by setting it alight earlier than usual.

Singapore's Pollutant Standards Index (PSI) readings hovered in the 'moderate' range last week, and hit 56 on Sunday, the year's highest so far.

The weekend's slightly hazy conditions are expected to last over the next few days, said the National Environment Agency (NEA).

But yesterday's afternoon showers helped clear the air and put it back in the 'good' range.

At 4pm, western Singapore registered 44 on the PSI, followed by the south with 35. The central, northern and eastern parts of Singapore clocked readings of between 23 and 33.

Readings varied through the day. A check by this newspaper found Ang Mo Kio and Bukit Timah hazy at 3pm, and the Central Business District largely clear during the lunch hour.

Last week and through the weekend, however, dry weather and variable wind conditions over Indonesia worked together to send over haze particles from the fires set by the farmers, said the NEA.

But it expects stronger winds to pick up and push the smoke haze away, so better air quality can be expected 'in the coming days'.

Rain also fell in central and southern Sumatra yesterday, which helped douse some of the fires.

Provincial officials told The Straits Times that they were confident the fires could be controlled if rain continued over the next few days.

The head of the Riau government's environmental impact committee, Mrs Arbaini, said: 'We have mobilised all our resources to fight the fires. We don't want smoke from forest fires here to travel to neighbouring countries.'

Riau provincial government spokesman Surya Maulana, calling the rain 'a godsend', noted that the meteorological station had not predicted a wet day for the area.

The slash-and-burn clearing of forests usually starts in late March, but north-easterly winds often blow the haze away from Singapore. In September 2006, Singapore became enshrouded in a choking haze as a result of dry weather and winds that blew the smoke in this direction.

NEA says haze situation set to improve
Channel NewsAsia 25 Feb 08;

SINGAPORE: Over the past three days, air quality had been affected by an increase in land and forest fires in Indonesia's Riau province, due to a dry spell in the region.

However, the situation improved on Monday with visibly clearer skies. The National Environment Agency's pollutant standards index (PSI) also showed that the air quality was back in the 'good' range.

At 4pm, the PSI stood at 44 after days of ‘moderate’ air quality. On Sunday, the PSI had risen to 56.

Most school officials said they are keeping an eye on the pollutant standards index. If the situation worsens, they have alternatives such as substituting outdoor activities with indoor ones.

According to the National Environment Agency, rain over the past two days in central and Southern Sumatra helped to alleviate the haze.

The latest satellite pictures also showed two hotspots in Sumatra, a significant drop from the hotspot count of 100 on February 21.

Impending showers and strong winds are expected to ease the situation further, improving the air quality in the coming days. - CNA/vm

Read more!

Singapore's inflation hits 25-year high of 6.6%

Channel NewsAsia 25 Feb 08;

SINGAPORE - Singapore's annual inflation rate hit a 25-year high of 6.6 percent in January, according to Department of Statistics (DOS) data released on Monday.

The inflation rate, as indicated by the consumer price index (CPI), was the highest since the 7.5 percent hit in March 1982.

From a month earlier, consumer prices in January rose 1.5 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis, the DOS said.

The Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI) issued a statement along with the DOS data,
saying the year-on-year jump in inflation in January was due to one-off factors such as a housing value revision and that it was in line with the official inflation forecast of 4.5-5.5 percent for 2008.

The MTI said inflation would start to ease in the second half of the year. In December, the annual rate was 4.4 percent.

"The 6.6 percent year-on-year increase in the CPI in January 2008 was consistent with the official inflation forecast of 4.5 to 5.5 percent for 2008 as a whole," the MTI said in a statement.

The DOS said the jump in inflation was due largely to an 11.1 percent spike in housing costs recorded after a revision to values of public housing.

Housing costs, which account for 21 percent of the consumer price index, have the third-largest weighting after food and transport/communication.

Food prices, which carry the largest weighting in the CPI, rose 5.8 percent in January from a year earlier.

Transport and communication costs rose 6.9 percent between January 2007 and January 2008, driven by soaring global fuel prices and higher taxi fares.

Higher petrol prices also contributed to a rise in transport costs for food. This, coupled with higher global food prices, means more expensive grocery bills.

But one Singapore supermarket chain has extended a discount scheme to help shoppers cope with rising costs.

NTUC FairPrice has given customers 5 per cent off 500 of its housebrand products since mid-December 2007.

The discounts, originally due to finish at the end of February, has now been extended until the end of April.

The extension is costing FairPrice $1 million and is part of the company's "Stretch Your Dollar" programme.

In the heart of Singapore's financial district, many were not surprised to hear the latest inflation figure. Many have already tightened their belts.

"I have a family, so I have to plan our expenses and cut out unnecessary spending and then maybe make some investment to cover the shortfall," said a member of the public.

"Shop around a bit more, do a bit of homework (before buying anything). It's a bit tedious but at the end of the day it's your pocket," said another. - CNA/ac/ir


What's behind that balloon?
One-off factors led to 6.6% inflation figure; may moderate by mid-'08: MTI
Christie Loh, Today Online 26 Feb 08;

EVEN as parliamentarians queried the Government yesterday on inflation controls, the GST hike and more help for Singaporeans to cope with the rising cost of living, fresh data showed that inflation has remained sticky at a 26-year high.

In January, overall consumer prices jumped by 6.6 per cent compared to the same month a year ago, fuelled by costlier transport, healthcare, food and clothing.

This marks the third straight month that inflation is at levels not seen since 1982, a time when Singapore was similarly enjoying an economic boom.

It might also appear that inflation is picking up because the increases for November and December were slower at 4.2 per cent and 4.4 per cent respectively.

However, several one-off factors are behind the latest high, said the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI) yesterday in a rare statement — it does not normally respond to monthly inflation figures released by the Department of Statistics.

MTI listed two reasons. First, it said, the jump has much to do with the upward revision in the Annual Value of housing flats, which took effect in January. The taxman revises the Annual Value, which is the estimated rental income if a property were to be leased out, to reflect buoyant market conditions.

While this pushed up the consumer price index — as housing makes up one-fifth of the basket of goods and services measured — "this does not actually affect the expenditures of most Singaporeans, who own the homes they live in".

The second factor is similarly technical. The inflation figure for last January is much lower than that of January 2008 due to the timing of rebates for service and conservancy charges. Last year, such rebates were given out in January but this time around they were distributed earlier, in December.

"As the effects of the low base and one-off factors wear off in the second half of 2008, year-on-year inflation is expected to moderate significantly," said MTI, which expects full-year inflation to be between 4.5 and 5.5 per cent.

But meanwhile, the layman feels the pain and needs relief, going by calls from MPs during the Budget debate. Their suggestions included reversing last July's 2-percentage-point hike in Goods and Services Tax — which contributed to inflation — back to 5 per cent.

MP Zainudin Nordin, who is Mayor of the Central District, said if inflation this year does hit the forecast figure of about 4.5 per cent, that would wipe out the wage increases of low-income Singaporeans, who saw a below-4-per-cent growth in salaries last year.

"It is simple primary school math," said Mr Zainudin.

The MTI – which has recently been releasing more data related to the inflationary environment, such as a table showing how food prices here have not risen as much as in Malaysia, America or Hong Kong – yesterday recommended that three types of inflation figures be studied together "to better understand the underlying trend". These are data comparing changes a year ago, month to month, and a three-month moving average that smoothens out volatility to indicate inflation momentum.

It is in examining the three-month moving average of 0.8 per cent in January that MTI concludes: "Inflation momentum has neither accelerated nor abated in January 2008".

The professional number crunchers, meanwhile, see inflation staying high in the coming months.

Citi economist Kit Wei Zheng expects inflation to "hover above the 6-per-cent mark throughout the first half of 2008", before moderating to around 4 per cent in the second half. For the full year, Mr Kit foresees a figure of 5 per cent "but with risks on the upside".

Fears of worsening inflation are burgeoning worldwide, partly because oil prices are trading near US$100 per barrel after skyrocketing to a record US$101 last week.

At the same time, China's stubbornly high inflation has started to trigger concerns that the world's cheap factory will soon 'export' inflation to the rest of the world.

Singapore's central bank has been trying to relieve imported price pressures by allowing the currency to appreciate against the US dollar.

But there are also local factors contributing to inflation, such as the impending increase in Electronic Road Pricing charges and higher school fees, said United Overseas Bank economist Ho Woei Chen.

Singapore January inflation rate rises to hit 6.6%
But economists don't expect further monetary tightening in April
Anna Teo, Business Times 26 Feb 08;

(SINGAPORE) The inflation rate surged to another 25-year high of 6.6 per cent in January - and is not expected to ease for a while yet.

Still, most economists do not expect further monetary tightening in April, citing growing concern on the government's part about the impact of an overly-strong Singapore dollar on exports. Instead, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) is expected to maintain a 'modest and gradual appreciation' of the trade-weighted nominal exchange rate at its next policy review.

Higher costs of not only food but also housing and transport weighed on the consumer price index (CPI) last month, according to figures released yesterday.

The latest data prompted the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI) to issue a statement saying that the 6.6 per cent jump in the CPI - up from December's 4.4 per cent, which was also a 25-year high then - is 'consistent' with the official inflation forecast of 4.5 to 5.5 per cent for 2008 as a whole.

The January high not only comes off revised annual values of HDB flats, it also reflects a low base 12 months earlier in January 2007 when the inflation rate was only 0.3 per cent.

According to MTI, the month-on-month CPI numbers - particularly when smoothed out to remove the monthly volatility - give a better picture of the underlying trend.

And the three-month moving average of the month-on-month inflation rates has hovered around 0.8 per cent since picking up sharply last July when the Goods and Services Tax (GST) rate was raised by two percentage points.

January's 0.8 per cent pace by this measure largely reflects the global inflation in food and energy prices that has persisted through the past seven months, MTI says.

Maintaining that there has been no surge in the core rate of inflation since last July, MTI says: 'Inflation momentum has neither accelerated nor abated in January 2008.'

The year-on-year inflation rate should 'moderate significantly' in the second half of 2008 as the effects of the low base and one-off factors wear off, but underlying inflation will likely ease more gradually, pending external price trends, it says.

But economists track the standard year-on-year CPI measure, and most see inflation staying high in the near term.

DBS Bank economist Irvin Seah reckons that even with the GST effect out of the picture from the second half onwards, fundamental price pressures will remain.

Apart from high food and oil prices, domestic price pressures will be kept high by short-term job market tightness and with rising rents, Mr Seah writes in a recent report.

He forecasts: 'Inflation now looks set to average 5 per cent in 2008, with core inflation lifted to 3.7 per cent.'

Despite the uptick, Mr Seah and other economists - taking a cue from Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam's remarks about Singapore's inflation strategy in his recent Budget statement - do not think that MAS will further increase the Sing dollar appreciation slope at the next review.

One exception is Goldman Sachs economist Mark Tan. He thinks that the recent fiscal easing and falling interest rates will provide a buffer to economic growth and has given MAS room to further tighten its policy stance.

6.6% - Housing, transport, food prices fuel Jan inflation
Bryan Lee, Straits Times 26 Feb 08;

INFLATION accelerated last month to a 26-year high of 6.6 per cent with housing, food and transport costs registering steep increases over the past year.

The January figure picks up pace from December's 4.4 per cent jump - itself the biggest rise since April 1982 - as external and local factors added further upward momentum to consumer prices.

The big surge was largely anticipated by economists, who said inflation rates in the coming months are unlikely to rise much more from the current levels.

Still, the spike seems to have prompted an unprecedented move by the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI), which issued a statement on the inflation data as it was published yesterday by the Department of Statistics.

Seemingly looking to quell fears of spiralling living costs, the MTI said that while the jump in consumer prices last month was high, this was consistent with the official full-year inflation forecast of 4.5 to 5.5 per cent.

It said the spike was bumped up by several one-off factors, adding that price pressures should subside later in the year.

The surge in last month's consumer price index (CPI) was driven largely by an 11.1 per cent jump in housing costs.

Much of this came from the Government's one-off revision of the annual values of public flats. The annual value is the theoretical rental income that a house could fetch in a year.

'As has been explained in Parliament, this does not actually affect expenditures of most Singaporeans, who own the homes they live in,' said the MTI statement.

The ministry also pointed out that price levels were especially low in January last year, due in part to service and conservancy rebates given out that month. Such rebates were not given last month as they were already doled out in December.

Less theoretical were the hikes in food and transport costs, the two biggest components of the CPI.

Driven by global prices, costs of raw food such as dairy products, cooking oil and meat surged, which in turn made dining out more expensive, said the Department of Statistics in its monthly statement.

High oil prices made driving more costly, while car prices and taxi fares rose, it added.

Some of the increase would have been the result of last July's goods and services tax hike, which continues to inflate year-on-year CPI figures even though it is no longer raising price levels from one month to the next.

The MTI said looking at price rises between consecutive months would indicate inflation momentum better. Taking three-month averages to smooth out monthly volatility, it said inflation momentum picked up last July but has stayed constant since then.

Still, if headline inflation figures, which use year- on-year comparisons, remain high, inflation expectations may rise, warned Citigroup economist Kit Wei Zheng. This may prompt workers to demand higher wages to compensate for rising living costs.

Experts also said the CPI probably underestimates the pace at which living costs for foreign workers are rising, and hence the rate at which Singapore's edge in the global competition for international talent is being eroded.

CIMB-GK economist Song Seng Wun noted that expatriates are likely to face much higher hikes in private home rentals and international school fees than what the CPI indicates.

Read more!

Singapore food prices: House brands fly off shelves

FairPrice to continue discounts
5% rebate will be on till end of April, costing the chain $4m - but sales up
Lim Wei Chean & Jessica Lim, Straits Times 26 Feb 08;

THE 5 per cent discounts on prices of 500 essential items sold under the NTUC FairPrice house brand will continue for another two months.

The supermarket chain said they will be offered till the end of April in the light of rising food prices here.

The discounts on items ranging from rice to bread and condensed milk were initiated last December and were to have been withdrawn this Friday.

FairPrice will take a $4 million hit for the 41/2 months of discounts, but rising sales of its house brand items are likely to more than make up for this.

Yesterday, the chain's managing director Seah Kian Peng noted that 'many people have kept asking what would happen when discounts end'.

Singaporeans have been grappling with rising food costs for some months now, as suppliers worldwide hike prices in the wake of rising costs of raw materials and production.

Yesterday brought another bit of bad news in this regard: After seasonal adjustment, the latest Consumer Price Index (CPI) was 1.5 per cent higher than last December's. Food prices were cited as one of the top four reasons for the rise.

These went up by 1.1 per cent in January over December, due to increased demand for fresh fish, poultry and pork, as well as more expensive cooked food just before the Chinese New Year period.

Compared with January last year, food prices are up 5.8 per cent.

To cope with rising costs, Singaporeans are turning to cheaper house brands and frozen foods, following Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong's advice earlier this month to buy these to save money, since there is little difference in quality between them and branded goods.

FairPrice's Mr Seah said the demand for house-brand products has been 'overwhelming' in the last two months.

Sales of items like vegetable oil have gone up by 300 per cent and wholemeal bread, by 50 per cent.

Two other supermarket chains, Cold Storage and Giant, also reported rises in the sale of house-brand items of between 10 and 20 per cent last year, compared to 2006.

Carrefour, which offers its house brand for more exotic items like Camembert cheese, gherkins and pate, saw double-digit growth in its house-brand items last year over 2006.

The bestsellers: Bread, rice, toilet tissue, vegetable oil and baby diapers.

Going forward, Mr Seah said he did not expect the pressure on prices to ease.

He also hinted that the prices of house-brand items might go up, although they would always be 10 to 15 per cent cheaper than their branded counterparts.

He assured consumers that the chain was also looking at other ways for Singaporeans to save a buck, such as by opening a 'no frills' store which stocks basic essentials at rock-bottom prices.

Other supermarkets are expanding their range of house-brand products.

Giant hypermarket, which has about 1,000 types of house-brand products, launched another 25 in the last three months.

FairPrice, which has 2,000 now, plans to introduce another 1,000 in five years.

In the meantime, manufacturers of branded items, feeling the competition, are broadening their offerings.

Mr Jason Ng, 33, who owns Swee Heng Bakery, said: 'Our sales are affected. Now we are producing wholemeal and corn bread to try to win our customers back. It can't be helped, we cannot compete with large supermarkets when it comes to price.'

Read more!

Rising costs may force UN to ration food aid

Straits Times 25 Feb 08;

Crisis talks held as more nations are hit by hunger due to spiralling prices
LONDON - SPIRALLING costs of agricultural commodities and shortages of new donations have forced the United Nations food programme to draw up plans to ration food aid.

The UN's World Food Programme (WFP), responsible for relieving hunger, is holding crisis talks to decide what aid to halt if new donations do not arrive in the short term, according to the Financial Times.

'Our ability to reach people is going down just as the needs go up,' said WFP executive director Josette Sheeran.

She said the agency would look at 'cutting the food rations or even the number of people reached' if donors did not provide more money.

The WFP crisis talks come as the agency sees the emergence of a 'new area of hunger' in developing countries, where even middle-class, urban people are being 'priced out of the food market' because of rising food prices.

While hoping that the cuts can be avoided, WFP officials warned that the agency's budget requirements were rising by several million dollars a week because of rising food prices.

The warning suggests that the price jump in wheat, corn, rice and soya beans is having a wider impact than thought, hitting countries that have previously largely escaped hunger.

Hunger is now 'affecting a wide range of countries', Ms Sheeran said, pointing to Indonesia, Yemen and Mexico. 'Situations that were previously not urgent - they are now.'

The main focus of the WFP to date has been to provide aid in areas where food was unavailable. But it now faces having to help countries where the price of food, rather than shortages, is the problem.

Ms Sheeran said that families in developing countries, hit by rising costs, were moving from three meals a day to just one, or dropping a diverse diet to rely on one staple food.

Food prices are rising on a mix of strong demand from developing countries, a growing global population, more frequent floods and droughts caused by climate change and the biofuel industry's appetite for grains.

In response to increasing prices, Pakistan has reintroduced a ration card system that was abandoned in the mid-1980s.

Countries such as China and Russia are imposing price controls, while Argentina and Vietnam are enforcing foreign sales taxes or export bans on food items. Importing countries are lowering their tariffs.

Rice and wheat prices have doubled in the past year, while freight costs have increased sharply on the back of fuel price hikes.

The world's poor countries will have to pay 35 per cent more for their cereals imports, taking the total cost for the year to July to a record US$33.1 billion (S$46.5 billion), even as their food purchases fall 2 per cent, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation.

The United States Department of Agriculture has also warned that high food prices would continue for the next two to three years.

Read more!

Watching Peru's Warming Oceans for Cholera Cues

Joanne Silberner, NPR 26 Feb 08;

Before 1991, no one in Peru could remember a cholera outbreak. Then, in a single day, it hit hard up and down the coast and took off from there, eventually killing thousands. That outbreak was fueled by a change in ocean temperatures. Now some people worry that climate change could bring the scourge back to Peru.

Two scientists in Lima are trying to be ready before the disease strikes. Ana Gil and her husband Claudio Lanata, researchers at the International Institute of Nutrition, are watching out for the earliest hints of cholera. In the epidemic of the 1990s, Lanata says, people panicked.

"When cholera hit us, nobody knew what to do," he says. "They were thinking that people were going to die like flies."

Cholera causes diarrhea so bad that a person can die within a few hours. Lanata estimates that about 14 million people in Peru were infected, and 350,000 ended up in the hospital.

"It's a very nasty disease," Lanata says. "It's like you've opened a faucet in your system. Water just comes out of you in large amounts — liters and liters."

He saw it firsthand when he studied in the United States. American volunteers allowed themselves to be infected to test the efficacy of a vaccine. The vaccine didn't work well, but cholera is easily treated if resources are available — clean water for rehydration and salts to replace the salts that are lost.

In Peru's 1991 epidemic, doctors quickly turned to that effective and inexpensive therapy. There were enough health clinics around, and people got the message to come in quickly, so the death rate was relatively low: 3,500 people. A smaller epidemic occurred in 1998. Both were linked to El Nino, the periodic and unpredictable weather disruption that leads to warmer ocean currents. Warm ocean currents encourage the growth and spread of cholera bacteria.

Keeping Close Watch on Plankton

Lanata and Gil, a microbiologist, are worried that global warming will bring cholera back. Gil has scrounged up money left over from other projects to set up a rough surveillance system to find cholera before an epidemic takes hold.

Lanata and Gil have both worked with microbiologist Rita Colwell at the University of Maryland. Colwell has shown that the bacteria that cause cholera often live on plankton — microscopic plants and animals that drift in the ocean. These organisms are sensitive to heat. Warmer waters promote their growth, thus increasing the chance of a cholera epidemic. And water that gets warmer earlier in the spring or stays warmer later in the fall can change the local ocean ecology.

What likely happened during the El Nino cholera epidemics in the 1990s was this: There were more plankton, and more infected plankton. Fish and shellfish ate the infected plankton. Some people ate raw, infected seafood — the raw seafood dish ceviche is very popular in Peru. The people who ate the infected seafood got sick, and then poor hygiene spread their infection to others.

To test the plankton at the root of this chain, Gil hires a creaky wooden fishing boat to take her and her assistant off the coast of Lima. A few hundred meters offshore, Gil's assistant, William Lopez, gets into the little rowboat. He throws a long, conical net overboard and circles the big fishing boat, again and again. He collects ocean water as well.

"He will transfer that water into that flask," Gil explains. "The water is very clear; it looks like there's not much plankton." Gil is also monitoring seawater temperature. It is 17.8 degrees Centigrade.

A Reprieve For Now

It's Gil's first time checking water and plankton since the 1998 El Nino. She hurries back to the lab, across town, past the gated campus of an agriculture university, past a potato research institute, and, at last, to the International Institute of Nutrition. Gil's assistant Carmen Maria Barreno carefully pours the precious sample into a beaker.

It takes a few hours to filter out the plankton.

In mid-afternoon, Barreno takes a petri dish filled with jade green growth medium and dabs on some plankton. Now Gil holds that petri dish up to the light.

"The reaction has to happen in the first 2 or 3 seconds," she says. "It's very fast." She looks anxiously at the dish. "So, it's clean. … No cholera in our seawater yet."

It's a quiet but momentous discovery.

Cholera isn't the first disease that climate change has brought to Peru. Lanata says dengue is back — a mosquito-borne infection that causes high fever and great pain.

"You're now having these diseases you didn't expect to have at all," Lanata says. "Dengue last summer hit us in Lima, and the mosquito is moving south because the weather allows them to move."

Gil suspects that, for cholera, it's just a matter of time.

"If the sea temperature is increasing, it will be the chance for the bacteria to grow faster, and it will be the beginnings of a new epidemic," she says. "We have to be alert."

If Gil and Lanata find cholera bacteria before an epidemic takes hold, they can at least warn people to cook fish thoroughly, boil drinking water, and keep their hands clean — or maybe even try a new vaccine.

Produced by Jane Greenhalgh

Read more!

Bird flu risk for humans 'on the rise in south China'

Vince Chong, Straits Times 26 Feb 08;

THE risk of humans catching the deadly bird flu virus is rising in southern China, an expert warned after a third person died of the infection yesterday.

This is due to the presence of a 'heavy viral load' among 'tens of thousands' of infected birds, government consultant Lo Wing Lok said yesterday.

'A bird or two with the virus will not be enough to infect a human being, but when we are talking about three deaths within the year - and it's only February - it means a lot more birds are involved,' he told The Straits Times.

'This is a cause for concern.'

A 44-year-old woman who died in the southern province of Guangdong yesterday tested positive for the H5N1 bird flu virus, making her the latest avian flu casualty, Hong Kong health officials confirmed.

The migrant worker, identified only by her surname Zhang, developed a fever and cough following contact with sick poultry, Guangdong's health officials said.

The case follows two confirmed avian flu deaths in China this year, one on Feb 20 and the other on Jan 24.

The three cases occurred in different provinces across southern China - Hunan, Guangxi and Guangdong.

The Guangdong death has rattled nerves in Hong Kong, which borders the province.

Hong Kong imports most of its food from across the border, and is worried that a potential avian flu outbreak might spook investors and harm its status as a financial hub.

The city was the scene of the world's first reported major bird flu outbreak among humans in 1997, when six people died.

Although it has yet to impose a ban on poultry imports from Guangdong, the Hong Kong government has sent officials to the province to conduct checks on chicken farms.

There are hundreds of farms licensed to export poultry to Hong Kong. All of them are required to maintain bird vaccinations and avoid overcrowding in poultry cages, among other things.

However, Dr Lo pointed out that the sheer size of the industry makes it difficult to keep tabs on every farm, even though every truckload of poultry entering Hong Kong is monitored for avian flu.

'We have limited manpower, and even fewer medical professionals like veterinarians,' the former lawmaker added. 'So we have to rely heavily on mainland security.'

The deadly H5N1 strain has killed more than 200 people worldwide since 2003, according to the World Health Organisation.

Some 20 people in China, including Ms Zhang, have died of bird flu so far.

Read more!

Malaria Can Be Beaten In Many Places, Map Shows

Ben Hirschler, PlanetArk 26 Feb 08;

LONDON - Malaria kills one child every 30 seconds, yet in many parts of the world the disease is hanging on by a thread and could be wiped out by concerted action, researchers said on Tuesday.

The first new global malaria map in 40 years shows nearly half the 2.37 billion people at risk from the mosquito-borne killer live in areas where the chance of actually catching the disease is less than 0.01 percent a year.

Simon Hay of the University of Oxford said he was "very surprised" by the finding, which suggests swathes of Latin America and Asia -- and even parts of Africa -- face a significantly lower risk than previously thought.

"The situation isn't quite as dire for large parts of the planet as people had imagined and, with some concerted effort, we could make very big inroads with the tools that we've got," he said in an interview.

Simply using insecticide-treated bed nets more extensively could be enough to stamp out malaria in regions inhabited by almost 1 billion people.

"If mosquitoes don't get enough chances to bite, the transmission cycle wanes and disappears. In these very low transmission areas, you just need to push the disease a little bit and it should collapse," he said.

Eliminating malaria in marginal areas would provide a major boost to campaigns in sub-Saharan Africa, the region worst hit by the disease, where most of the world's more than 1 million malaria deaths occur each year.

Africa is home to almost all the places in the world where prevalence of Plasmodium falciparum, the most deadly malaria parasite, is above 50 percent. Yet even in Africa, significant areas are more amenable to control than previously thought.

Hay and colleagues worked with the Kenya Medical Research Institute on the Malaria Atlas Project, which was funded by the Wellcome Trust medical charity. Their findings were published in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Medicine.

They compiled their map over two years by analysing nationally reported malaria statistics, medical intelligence reports, climate variations, travel advisories and surveys of thousands of communities across 87 countries.

The research can be seen online at http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0050038

(Editing by Jon Boyle)

Read more!

India emerges as solar hub

Siddarth Srivastava, Business Times 26 Feb 08;

INDIA'S move to offer tax breaks and capital subsidies to semiconductor makers is having an impact, especially in the area of solar cells that convert sunlight into electricity.

Junior federal Minister of Commerce Jairam Ramesh has announced that Reliance Industries will set up a US$5 billion-plus solar cell manufacturing plant in the western industrial state of Gujarat.

He also said India's first Fab City in Hyderabad has received confirmed investments of US$7 billion over 10 years, the bulk of which are for solar cell manufacture.

Eight more investments totalling US$6 billion are likely to be approved soon, Mr Ramesh said.

The assured projects are SemIndia (US$3 billion), Nano Tech Silicon India (US$2 billion), Solar Semiconductor (US$1 billion), Titan Energy Systems (US$750 million), XL Telecom & Energy (US$75 million), KSK Energy (US$70 million) and Embedded IT Solutions.

Other big proposals lined up are by Videocon, HSMC and Moser Baer.

According to Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International, solar cells are a US$13 billion global industry that will grow to US$40 billion by 2012.

Last year, California- based Signet Solar announced plans to invest US$2 billion over the next 10 years to set up three plants in India to make solar cells.

And a consortium of players from South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, in a tie-up with the Kolkata-based Synergy Renewable Energy, is setting up a unit to make silicon wafers for solar cells in West Bengal - the first involvement of Korean and Taiwanese majors in solar energy in India.

Tata BP Solar, a US$260 million venture between Tata and British energy giant BP, has identified a vast market for affordable solar power to villages outside India's national grid.

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Zero-carbon homes in the UK: "poor technology use as bad as doing nothing at all"

Zero carbon goal needs firm foundation
Imtiaz Farookhi, BBC The Green Room 25 Feb 08;

There is no "magic bullet" solution when it comes to meeting the UK government's ambitious target of making new homes "zero-carbon" by 2016, says Imtiaz Farookhi. In this week's Green Room, he argues that poor use of technology will be just as bad as doing nothing at all.

The UK house building industry faces a serious challenge.

With about 27% of the nation's energy used in homes, the sector has turned to cutting-edge innovations to meet government targets for all new homes to be zero carbon by 2016.

The target is clearly ambitious, but there is no "magic bullet" solution when it comes to domestic renewable energy.

Therefore, our message is one of caution; the last thing we can afford to do is create homes that are not fit for purpose.

The successful implementation of microgeneration and renewable energy technologies is vital if we are to ensure that the work of the housing industry matches the government's aspirations.

Obviously, communities and homes of the future that we design and build today must deliver on the environmental promise to reduce carbon emissions.

But we must ensure that consumers of the future do not suffer from short-sighted decisions and the failure to use technology in the right place and for the right reasons.

We cannot risk a situation where one, two, or three generations of consumers will have to live with the legacy of poor decisions made today.

The NHBC Foundation is committed to ensuring that the industry has the tools it needs and the research data it requires to be able to make sound, well thought-out decisions which meet the aspirations of both homeowners and the government.

Tools for the job

The purpose of our new report, A Review of Microgeneration and Renewable Energy Technologies, is to ensure that builders and developers understand that not all options that are currently available will be suited for every development.

Our research has made it clear that much more thought and planning is required in order to gain the maximum benefits from the technologies that, although currently in their infancy, are likely to be incorporated into future zero-carbon homes.

The report evaluates eleven types that can help us cut carbon emissions on the domestic front.

These are: biomass, solar photovoltaic, solar hot water, wind power, ground source heating pumps, air source heating pumps, absorption heat pumps, small-scale hydroelectric, micro-combined heat-and-power, renewable combined heat-and-power and fuel cells.

In order to understand the effectiveness of the various technologies, it is necessary to evaluate issues such as payback periods, seasonal variation, location, as well as local planning requirements.

Our findings showed that whilst renewable energy can provide a cost-effective supply in many circumstances, it needs to be understood that the performance of a particular system will be very dependent on local conditions.

For example, too much shade on a solar system will limit the potential output, in the same way that lower average wind speeds could reduce a turbine's efficiency.

Biomass boilers are a good example of a system which offers strong potential for carbon savings. Using wood fuel in the domestic sector holds the promise of being a truly renewable energy - provided the fuel comes from sustainable sources.

Biomass systems can have high levels of efficiency, typically 60%-80% in ranges, pellet stoves, log stoves and log boilers.

But they require careful installation, maintenance, and also require a sufficient amount of space to store the fuel which generally has to be bought in bulk.

In areas that are designated as smokeless zones, some systems will not be suitable, although modern systems generate considerably less smoke than their older counterparts.

Went the wind blows

Wind power is often seen as a panacea for renewable energy delivery. However, in the domestic sector, these systems may generate more carbon than they save when the turbines' manufacture and delivery is taken into account.

They require uniform wind speeds of 5m/s or more in order to work efficiently, but obstructions such as trees and other buildings can have a significant impact on this.

In addition, wind energy is not uniform across the country so these systems are not suitable for every region.

This means that a site-by-site assessment must be undertaken to discover where their use will gain maximum benefits.

The fact that there is no one-size-fits-all solution is further demonstrated by small-scale hydroelectricity.

Relying on a constant flow of water to generate electricity, the power outputs of these systems will vary seasonally with flow rates.

Also, the cost of installation may be prohibitive when set against the amount of power these generate in certain circumstances.

The capability to generate electricity is increased by the size of the vertical distance the water falls, known as the "head". Greater heads tend to generate more electricity.

Planning issues are significant because it is not always possible to obtain permission.

Testing times

The challenge presented to the housing industry is clear. We are facing some of the toughest tests seen for decades, given these zero-carbon and housing-growth targets that have been set by government.

NHBC has been working closely with government and industry to ensure that the needs of customers are taken into account in the drive to zero-carbon housing.

We welcome the opportunity to work with the new Housing Minister, Caroline Flint, because failing to plan and appropriately implement new measures will be just as bad as doing nothing at all.

We must work hard to deliver on the zero-carbon agenda but without ignoring the realities and issues surrounding the various technologies on offer.

The industry needs time to plan and to manage the implementation of the ambitious 2016 target to ensure that there is a cohesive approach.

It is important that the sector is allowed to make informed choices, based on sound science and safe technologies, backed up by effective testing and accreditation systems.

Imtiaz Farookhi is chief executive of the UK National House Building Council (NHBC)

The Green Room is a series of opinion articles on environmental topics running weekly on the BBC News website

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Is farmed fish the new battery chicken?

Alex Renton, The Observer 24 Feb 08;

With natural food supplies under threat from climate change, we could soon be relying on farmed fish to feed the world. But that's only part of the problem. Alex Renton reports on the fishing industry's latest can of worms

People say the internet is changing the world, but I'll tell you this: aquaculture is going to be far more important to far more people.'

It is nearly 50 years since Hagen Stehr arrived in Australia to earn a living as a tuna fisherman, but his gruff German accent is still strong. 'Look at agriculture - we're running out of land, we're running out of water. Look how the prices of food are going up. In the future, people's protein is going to have to come out of the sea - it's all we have left.'

If money talks, then Stehr deserves to be taken seriously. Every Thursday he and his fishing friends meet in a café in Port Lincoln, the small fishing community near Adelaide on Australia's south coast that they have made the country's richest town. When the four members of Stehr's 'Cappuccino Club' gather, he says, there's more than a billion Australian dollars (nearly half a billion pounds) at the café table.

They made the money from killing and selling bluefin tuna. A single one of these beasts can cost as much as a Volvo (in January a 276kg bluefin sold for £28,000 in Tokyo) because its belly meat provides the sweetest sashimi of all. The bluefin is, as a result, one of the world's most endangered food animals - not that that's stopping the fishing. Stehr and his friends, who own the majority of Australia's tuna fishing licences, made their first fortunes catching tuna in the normal way, by hook and net. But in the early Nineties, worried by ever tighter quotas on the disappearing bluefins, the Cappuccino Club pioneered the 'ranching' of the fish.

This was one of the most brilliant ideas in the history of industrial fishing, and it has now spread all over the world. What Stehr and his friends do is catch young bluefin. Since quotas limit the tonnage of fish caught, this allows them to take more. They then corral them in vast purse-shaped nets that are hauled by tugboat around the southern ocean at less than one mile an hour for eight months. The ranchers, marine cowboys, battle storms and fend off sharks, and all the time they feed the growing tuna.

Ranching tuna is, of course, bonkers: one of the most scarily inefficient and unsustainable factory farming methods known to mankind. For a start, it can take up to 25 kilos of feed fish - sardine and pilchard is the captive bluefin's preferred diet - to produce one extra kilo of tuna. But that kilo of bluefin can sell for £100 wholesale, and during those months in their sea-borne fat-farm the tuna double in size.

From his house above Arno Bay outside Port Lincoln, Stehr can enjoy a fine view of the ocean where his tuna are ranched like cattle on the plains. He can also see his fleet of 22 support vessels and the array of laboratories and holding tanks built for his new big idea. This is even more revolutionary. 'Seven or eight years ago I was watching the fish in the ocean rings, I was worrying about the quotas (Australia and Japan are both allowed to catch between 5,000 and 6,000 tonnes of southern bluefin a year) and I thought - hey, what about we breed them?'

At least £15 million later Stehr says he is almost there. 'We've been up the north-east face and the glaciers. Now we're on the Hillary Step and I can see the top of Everest.' His scientists have controlled the sunshine, mimicked the temperature and the oxygen content of the waters from the Antarctic to the southern Indian Ocean through which the fish migrate. They've persuaded the male bluefins to produce sperm and, with added hormones, they've coaxed the females to grow eggs. Soon they will anaesthetise the female fish and strip out the eggs for fertilisation.

'We've closed the life cycle of the fish. It's now not a question of if, but when we produce young. It could even be in the next couple of weeks,' he told me this month. Stehr knows that Japanese companies are after the secrets of his breeding techniques, so his facilities are surrounded by 24-hour guards and barbed wire. 'It's like Stalag Luft 13', he laughs.

There are those who doubt that Hagen Stehr can lay his hands on what all fish farmers agree is the industry's Holy Grail. But his company CleanSeas has already managed to breed and establish a commercial market for another tuna-like predator fish, the kingfish. Waitrose is expected to start stocking it this year.

Think farmed fish, and you'll probably picture cheap salmon chunks with an oily orange hue and dubious flavour. But farmed fish is increasingly varied, and increasingly impressive in quality - in a well-stocked supermarket now you can find farmed trout, sea bass, bream, turbot, cod, halibut, mussels, scallops, crayfish, tropical prawn and mud-crab as well as exotic new breeds like catfish, tilapia, carp and barramundi (funny how the celebrity chefs are pushing those, isn't it?). They're farmed in pens and tanks, and, around the equator, in muddy ponds made from flooded rice paddies and former mangrove swamps. Farmed cod, under the No Catch brand, comes from the Shetland firm Johnson Sea Farms, and it's considerably better than the wild fish - and considerably more expensive. At the moment, shops have no duty to tell you if your fish is farmed - but if it's salmon, sea bass or tiger prawns, you can be pretty sure it never saw the wide blue seas.

You had better get used to eating fish from cages. By 2010, half of all the fish and sea-vegetables the world eats will be farmed, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. Much of that will be in Asia, especially China, where fish consumption has doubled in 15 years - they now eat more in kilos per head than the British. Both technology and demand are speeding up the shift. With many wild stocks in steep decline, and most international agreements to conserve them proven as useless as a straight fish hook, farmed fish may in a few decades be the only way anyone but the very rich can get their Omega-3.

So what's wrong with that? The one great global resource - as Hagen Stehr points out - that humanity has not pushed to the point of exhaustion is the sea. But we're running that one down - last year the journal Science predicted that, at current rates, 90 per cent of the world's fisheries will be finished before this century is half gone. It may well be that if we change our habits to eat farmed fish, rather than beef or chicken, we will avert the crisis in global food supply that every authority says faces us in the 21st century. Thousands of years ago human beings domesticated cattle and pigs to use them more efficiently - why not fish? Could aquaculture not only save the bluefin tuna from extinction, but feed the world too?

If only things were so simple. At the World Seafood Summit - a gathering of fish industry bosses, fishermen, retailers and green groups in Barcelona this January - I saw the early tremors of what may turn out to be an upheaval of international protest against fish farming. At a packed side-meeting Greenpeace unveiled a long-awaited report, 'Challenging the aquaculture industry on sustainability'. There was a frisson in the crowd as the presentation kicked off with a photo of a graffiti made of buoys that spelt out 'No fish farms' beside a salmon fishing pen in a Chilean fjord. In the water bobbed crucifixes to denote farmers and local fishermen bullied out of their rights to accommodate industrial aquaculture.

Greenpeace's Nina Thuellen, head of seafood markets, was at pains to stress that the organisation was not against all fish farming. 'So long as it's done in a sustainable manner. There is a need for aquaculture where fish is a key protein for people.' It was quickly pointed out to her that, essentially, this meant the organisation was against any fish farming for or in the rich world (because fish is not crucial to our protein source) and against farming of salmon, trout, cod and indeed any fish that has to be fed on other fish, because of its inefficiencies.

'The feeding of fish to fish in order to feed humans can never be sustainable,' said one audience member, and the Greenpeace scientific researcher Cat Dorey nodded. It was hard to disagree - salmon need three kilos of fish to produce a one kilo weight gain, and all too often they are fed on fish-derived oils or fish - like sand eels - that are crucial to sea birds and other fish. Another major issue is the greenhouse gas emitted by fish farming, the production of feed meal and the transport of the fish to the customer. Projects like the farming of tropical fish in the northern hemisphere - there's a barramundi farm in the New Forest - demand massive resources in heat as well.

There were grumbles in Barcelona at Greenpeace's rigid laying down of the law. One salmon-farming insider called it 'kindergarten stuff'. But bodies that try to straddle the concerns of industry and consumers, like the Soil Association, are more pragmatic. It is driven primarily by the perception that fish farming is here to stay. 'Aquaculture is increasingly going to supply the world's fish needs - we have to accept that, and work to make it sustainable,' says the director of the Association's Scottish arm, Hugh Raven. He was key in the organisation's controversial move two years ago into certifying salmon farms as organic.

This was done to the furious disapproval of some of the Association's more fundamentalist supporters, who say that such an unnatural way of treating a wild animal can never be in accord with the tenets of the organic movement. And there is indeed a price to pay for all fish farming. Escaped farmed fish harm wild stock, and can contaminate them with a variety of ugly diseases that they develop from being kept in such unnatural and close confinement. (I've got a spectacularly horrible picture of the nodules that farmed cod in Norway have been developing on their eyes and other organs.)

A major objection comes from the Americans - where, legally, organic farmed salmon is an impossibility. The US authorities understandably insist that the water in which the fish swim and everything they ingest cannot be guaranteed to be organic. (To US producers' annoyance, Scottish organic salmon farmers have thus found a lucrative new market in the States.) Other issues that are exciting the campaigners include the environmental abuse that fish farming, with its chemicals and toxic run-offs, can do to their neighbourhoods.

Weathering this storm, the Soil Association is now insisting that by 2010 all its certified fish farms feed 100 per cent sustainable fish to their salmon, either as off-cuts from fish processing, or as fish certified as sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC). This is the non-profit making body, whose blue tick logo is used by Tesco, M&S, Sainsbury's and fish suppliers in 35 countries to brand fish as sustainably caught. But here as MSC chief executive Rupert Howes told me, there is a problem. 'We assess fisheries on the scientific evidence of sustainability. We don't enter the ethical debate around what that fish is used for.' And the morality of feed-fish is currently a big, thorny problem.

In the Chilean fish-farms marked out by Greenpeace, the salmon - destined for tables in North America - are fed sardines or anchovies, fish humans could very happily eat. The MSC has certified the Mexican sardine fishery as worthy of its blue tick - even though most of its production will go to fish farms. Meanwhile, the tuna of Australian ranches eat pilchard caught off the shores of West Africa. This is what Charles Clover, the environmental journalist and author of an influential book on the decline of fish, The End of the Line, calls an 'obscenity on an Imperial Roman scale...the diversion of low-value fish from the mouths of people in developing countries into the mouths of well-fed fish in the developed world'.

Another fish-farm sceptic at the Summit was Professor Callum Roberts, who has recently published a fascinating survey of marine exploitation over the years, The Unnatural History of the Sea. He states that the destruction of 50 per cent of the world's coastal mangrove forest in recent years is due, in part, to make way for tropical fish farming - that's those 'fresh' tiger prawns from Ecuador or Thailand you can buy in all supermarkets. From Bangladesh to Indonesia, the loss of mangrove, which should protect low coastlines and the people who live there, has been directly linked to the rising annual death tolls in tropical storms, and indeed some of the hundreds of thousands of deaths in the 2005 tsunami.

Not all good, then, fish farming. So will we soon see celebrity chefs weeping over caged fish, as is now fashionable with battery chicks? One of the first to shed a tear would be the Michelin-starred Tom Aikens, not known in the catering trade as a softie, but a true militant on the subject of fish stocks and sustainability. Aikens was at the Barcelona Summit to talk about his new restaurant, a fish and chip shop called Tom's Place, which opened this month in west London. At Tom's Place there will be no farmed fish - everything will be wild, and sustainably caught. And a piece of cod in batter will start at £12, scampi at £20.

'There's a strong case both for and against farmed fish. But I don't use it. I just don't think it tastes like the real McCoy,' he told me in Barcelona. 'And I think feeding wild fish like sand eel and whiting to the farmed ones, at a 6:1 ratio, in terms of producing weight, is just morally wrong.

'We're clearly getting things wrong with mass farming on land - Mother Nature told us that: we got foot and mouth, we got mad cow disease. What's going to happen in aquaculture? What I'd like to see is standards, accreditation, and so on, so as farmed fish grows, the public can understand properly what they're getting.'

Aikens is not alone. Nigel Edwards of the Grimsby processing firm SeaChill was just one of many pleading in Barcelona for the NGOs and lobby groups to get their act together, to end the 'logofest' of competing labels that judge, from a vast number of viewpoints, whether a fish farm or aquaculture method is good or bad. Melanie Sachdeva, fish and poultry manager of Tesco said, 'Customers are just not going to pay a premium for sustainable fish until they understand it better'. The danger is that the huge growth of the market in 'sustainable' fish and the lack of a universal standard - as there is for organic and fairtrade - will just confuse the punters more.

But at the Summit no one seemed to be anywhere near getting this crucial gap plugged. The MSC, according to Rupert Howes, has decided to concentrate its efforts on certifying the feed-fish for aquaculture, not fish farms themselves. Instead, some outfits that are trying to go it alone - like the Italy-based Friends of the Sea, were denounced as 'unscientific' at the Summit. And so you can only imagine, as WWF's Meredith Lopuch warns, that without standards the industry will race on towards producing the cheapest fish possible.

Marks & Spencer's fish expert, Andrew Mallison, told the Summit of a visit to a supplier, a tilapia farmer who lived just up road from a massive battery chicken operation. The farmer asked him, 'What's to stop me feeding the chicken off-cuts to my salmon?'. 'I wouldn't want to tell a customer that there's chicken parts in his fish,' said Mallinson, and everyone nodded and laughed. But they all know the answer to the fish farmer's question - there's nothing to stop him feeding chicken guts and ground-up feet or anything else he likes to the fish in his cages.

'It's a young industry, and mistakes have been made,' says Mallison. There are organisations that are trying to right these - the World Wildlife Fund sees aquaculture as so important an issue for the environment that it is putting serious money into working out aquaculture standards that they hope will become global. These will not be ready for at least another year, however.

The Soil Association is tightening its 'organic' standards for fish farming, and has despatched a team to inspect Hagen Stehr's operation in Australia. There are high hopes of new, non-fish feeds for aquaculture - the use of algae or ragworms. Krill and other micro-organisms still abundant in the ocean are another answer. Even Hagen Stehr, through the use of cereals and canola oil, claims he has reduced his fish-to-tuna kilo ratio from 1:25 to 1:3. But this feed is not, of course, 'natural'.

'There's those who say that the best solution to these problems, and particularly the ecological footprint of fish production, is to restore the seas to their natural fecundity. I agree, but that's a long way away. And aquaculture may play its part in bringing that about,' says the Soil Association's Hugh Raven, who is also a member of the Government's Sustainability Commission. 'In any case aquaculture will surpass wild capture fisheries soon. We need to make it sustainable - and I think the most challenging issue is dealing with the greenhouse gas emissions.' While supporting salmon aquaculture, Raven does agree that the central moral problem of carnivorous fish farming must be addressed - 'I do think we must move to where the feed is a waste product - like off-cuts of other fish - than the product of a food fishery.'

So what does a fish-loving fish-eater do? Buy vegetarian or omnivore fish, of course. Bottom-feeders like carp convert their fish food - which no human would ever want to eat - into weight gain just about at a one-to-one ratio. They're pretty close to sustainable, and Jamie Oliver has recipes for them. The problem is, they're just not tuna.

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