Nature in Singapore: mushrooms, moths and mangrove palm
from Celebrating Singapore's BioDiversity!
Where are Nipah palms found in Singapore?
from wild shores of singapore
Grey Heron in courtship mode
from Bird Ecology Study Group
Underwater blasting next to Labrador shore continues until Aug 10
from wild shores of singapore
Tough love in a troubled climate
from BBC blog by Richard Black
Insight Down South by Seah Chiang Nee, The Star 27 Feb 10;
The public housing crisis has revived the question whether Singapore, with only 700sq km of land, can continue to accommodate the current five million residents, let alone increase it by a further one-third.
HOW is this land-squeezed island coping with housing an enlarged population of five million, including hundreds of thousands of recent foreign arrivals?
The answer gleaned from public comments about the Housing Development Board (HDB), the national icon that builds homes for 80% of the people is: “surprisingly poor”, given its sterling track record.
For 50 years, the HDB has helped to transform this former squatter colony into a global city of fine homes. At early times, it set a world record of building an average of one flat every 45 minutes.
The recent unprecedented intake of foreigners has, however, dealt a blow to its reputation, judging by the widespread complaint of poor anticipation, insufficient flats and spiralling prices.
As a result, resale subsidised apartments, which are still cheaper than private ones, have moved out of reach of many young fresh graduates planning to get married and settle down.
With affluent foreign PRs joining in the rush – some for profits – resale prices of HDB apartments have increased by some 45% in the last few years. The government, which usually plans ahead, is finding itself in hot soup for being under-prepared by the explosive demand. An indication of this: In 2008, HDB built only 3,183 new flats when there were over 90,000 PRs and 20,000 new citizens in the same year, according to official statistics.
Only Singaporeans – not foreigners or PRs – are allowed to buy new government flats, which are generally well designed and planned. Because of the long waiting time, however, many Singaporeans opt to pay more for resale units in the open market, where they run into competition from PR buyers.
Some commentators feel it is unfair just to blame the HDB, since the problem covers a wide range of population, immigration as well as manpower policies that involves the entire government and not just public housing.
The top leadership has drawn up plans and an overall strategy for a 6.5 million population without fixing a time-frame.
But with public unhappiness rising over the perceived costs, over-crowdedness, rising prices, the immigration inflow is being slowed down.
“This probably means that if the authorities want to stick to its 6.5 million population, it will have to take a longer time – probably more than 20 years,” one business executive commented.
The public housing crisis has revived a question whether Singapore, with only 700 sq km of land, can continue to accommodate the current five million residents, let alone increase it by a further one-third. The high density may already have affected some quarters overseas.
The Ireland-based International Living magazine recently ranked Singapore, one of Asia’s wealthiest states, a lowly 70th position among top places to live in.
The city scored well on safety and risk, healthcare, leisure and culture, but was penalised for its environment which included considerations of density and population growth.
The demographic change in Singapore has been dramatic. Twenty years ago, it was a more pleasant city of 3.05 million, some two million fewer people than 4.99 million reached last year.
This expansion of 64% (mostly through immigration) in 20 years is a rate matched by few countries in modern history. It succeeded in pushing out Hong Kong as the world’s third densest-populated place.
On average of 7,023 persons live in each square kilometre of this city, compared to 6,349 in Hong Kong. Both are behind Macau (18,534) and Monaco (16,923).
The Minister of National Development, Mah Bow Tan, one of the staunchest advocates of a bigger population, regularly reassuring the people that Singapore has enough land for 6.5 million people. There was no need for a massive across-the-board change in development intensity, he added, as there was sufficient supply to meeting needs for the next 10 to 15 years.
Some government officials say the Government had drawn up plans for future housing, creation and land transport needs for the next 20 years when the population reaches 6.5 million.
In its latest move that shows its determination in carving out more space for a larger population, the Government plans to move much of the city underground. A government strategic committee has called for the creation of more underground space to accommodate shopping malls, train networks, civil defence shelters, pedestrian links as well as ammunition and oil storage. It has been reducing the average size of residential flats, both private and public, as well as stacking them higher.
Matching the government’s enthusiasm for a bigger population, however, is an alternative voice against it.
“Why do we need 6.5 million people?” asked a private doctor and former opposition candidate Dr Wong Wee Nam in an article warning about the consequences for his fellow citizens.
“A city needs to rejuvenate, transform and re-create itself continually in order to stay healthy and alive,” he said.
“How can an over-crowded place with all the ills of high density be able to do that?”
Reclamation could expand the country’s size from 700 to 708 sq km, according to Dr Wong, but it would not reduce density very much.
With a 6.5 million population, Singapore could well become the most densely populated place on earth, with 16,640 persons per sq km.
Another critic of mass immigration is the former top civil servant Mr Ngiam Tong Dow, who feels that Singapore is better served by investing in its own citizens than importing large numbers from abroad.
“We risk having them (talented foreigners) use us as a stepping stone... Singapore will be left with the second tier of average people,” he added.
Student campaign has 'Mother Earth' scaring people caught in the act
Victoria Vaughan, Straits Times 27 Feb 10;
SURPRISED by the amount of energy wasted in Singapore, a group of five business school students have launched an online campaign to raise awareness about the issue.
The campaign, run by MBA students at the Nanyang Technological University, directs members of the public to a website (www.energyoffences.com) which features video clips of unsuspecting people caught in the act of wasting energy.
In each clip, a mystery Mother Earth character appears and roars at the culprit, who is usually in the midst of wasting energy. This results in sometimes amusing reactions.
'The principle behind the campaign is that Mother Earth is scared by the global energy consumption, so now she's come to scare you,' said Miss Jenny Costelloe, 34, who is from Britain.
'We are all international students and we are struck by how efficient Singapore is. Yet, it blasts out air-conditioning from malls and leaves the doors open, and its energy consumption is inefficient. We are hoping to get people to think about that.'
The group said the website was a 'social experiment to see if confronting people in a (hopefully) funny way will make them think twice about what they're doing. By sharing the clips of people's reactions, we aim to make people laugh, to make people think and, most importantly, to get people to change their behaviour'.
The students are hoping that people will start posting their own videos of energy being wasted.
So far, the website, which went live last month, has had more than 600 visitors and the Facebook group has more than 230 members.
Another student, Mr Noah Gunzinger from Switzerland, said: 'What we've found is that most people know that they're wasting energy in some simple way, but they always feel that they have an excuse. This is what we're trying to change; we can't always have an excuse!'
All 'victims' of the Mother Earth scare tactics received a thank you gift for allowing their video to be used on the website.
Smart Car Rental will offer eco-friendly cars for hire later this year
Christopher Tan, Straits Times 27 Feb 10;
WANT to drive an electric car without blowing a small fortune on buying one?
Such eco-friendly cars, which cost twice as much as petrol equivalents, will be available for rent later this year from Smart Car Rental, a sister company of taxi operator Smart Taxis.
Smart will start this new business with three electric Mitsubishi hatchbacks and charge a rental of $150 a day - about twice the rate for an equivalent petrol model. It will add at least two more cars, possibly of other makes, later on.
The first electric cars will arrive in Singapore for test-bedding later this year. The Government will grant buyers a tax waiver under a research scheme open to corporations and institutions, but not individuals.
Smart Car Rental owner Johnny Harjantho said his battery-powered fleet 'will give us a unique selling point', as the average motorist without deep pockets is unlikely to be able to afford one.
He is also partly motivated by his pro-environment beliefs, he added. Three in 10 of Smart Taxi's fleet of 750 cabs run on compressed natural gas (CNG), deemed more environmentally friendly than diesels.
Of the electric cars, Mr Harjantho said: 'If we can rent them out more than 15 days a month, we'll make money.' His current rental fleet is made up of 10 CNG cars and more than 50 petrol cars.
The new battery-powered Mitsubishis cost around $90,000 each after the Government's tax exemption. When operational expenses such as maintenance, insurance and financing are factored in, each car will cost Smart about $160,000.
Meanwhile, other parties are also looking at leasing electric vehicles, as they can benefit from the revised tax incentive announced in this week's Budget for experimental green vehicles.
Multi-brand motor group Wearnes, for example, is working on a leasing scheme for Renault electric cars.
Nissan Asia Pacific's senior manager for marketing and sales Chuya Hara said: 'We hope to bring in our electric vehicle by next year.'
Mitsubishi agent Cycle & Carriage (C&C) said the tax break extension, from two years to six, makes ownership more viable. Users have a longer period for depreciation of the cars, explained Mr Alvyn Ang, director of operations of C&C, which will supply Smart Car Rental with its first electric cars.
To qualify for the tax break, Prime Taxi plans to convert its petrol-electric hybrid taxis into plug-in hybrids, which run like electric cars but have petrol engines as a back-up.
Mr Zafar Momin, a lecturer at Nanyang Business School and a former automotive specialist with the Boston Consulting Group, said: 'I believe electric cars will get off to a very strong start here... The key issue really will be the economics of ownership.� This is where government subsidies, in whatever form, can make a big difference.'
Michael Mccarthy, The Independent 26 Feb 19;
Why are we asking this now?
Because a female trainer, Dawn Brancheau, was killed this week by a captive killer whale which dragged her into its tank at the SeaWorld centre in Orlando, Florida.
Isn't that just a killer whale living up to its name?
Well, yes and no. The name killer whale originally came from the fact that these striking, large and fierce animals had been seen to be "killers of whales" – and they do indeed sometimes hunt other whale species in the open ocean (The name biologists increasingly prefer to use is orca, the second half of its scientific name, Orcinus orca).
Yet even though they were feared for centuries – the first known reference is in the Elder Pliny's Natural History in the 1st century AD – there is no established record of orcas killing human beings in the wild, although there have been a few cases of what seem to have been accidental or mistaken attacks.
During Captain Scott's ill-fated expedition to the South Pole a century ago, a killer whale tried to tip over an ice floe on which a photographer was standing with a dog team, but it is thought that the dogs' barking might have sounded enough like seal calls to trigger the animal's hunting instinct.A surfer was bitten in California in the 1970s and a boy who was bathing was bumped by a killer whale in Alaska several years ago, but there have been very few attacks in the wild, and none fatal. In captivity, however, it's a different story.
How so?
There have been quite a few attacks by captive killer whales on their trainers. The Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS) says: "It happens more than you think." One source suggested yesterday that since the 1970s, killer whales in captivity have attacked 24 people around the world, and some of these encounters have been fatal.
As recently as last December, a trainer at the Loro Parque animal park on the Spanish island of Tenerife, Alexis Martinez Hernandez, was crushed to death when a stunt he was rehearsing with a 14-year-old killer whale named Keto went wrong. And Tilikum, the animal involved in this week's fatal attack, who was captured from the wild in Iceland, was, with two other orcas, involved in the death of a trainer in Canada in 1991, and then of a man who had sneaked into Florida SeaWorld in 1999 and appears to have fallen into Tilikum's pool.
So why do they attack people in captivity when they don't in the wild?
The answer seems to be captivity-related stress. It's not hard to understand. Killer whales are wild animals. They are strong. They are unpredictable. They are very intelligent, with their own complex communications system. They are very social – in the wild, they live in closely co-operating social groups with maybe 10 to 20 members.
If you take one out of the sea and stick it in a concrete swimming pool for the rest of its life, do you think that will have a benign effect on the animal's personality? What, thanks for all the fish? When you consider the thousands of miles of open ocean though which wild killer whales freely roam – they are dolphins, after all, the biggest members of the dolphin family – ending up in SeaWorld is the orca equivalent of you or me being imprisoned by a lunatic in a cupboard under the stairs.
Many zoos have now recognised that close confinement of big mammals – sticking lions and tigers in cages, and elephants in concrete houses – is entirely wrong and counter-productive. In the 1970s, London Zoo, for example, held a polar bear in a concrete pit which used to pace up and down continually all day long in what was clearly mad despair. (The pit has long since been empty).
But the people who hold the 42 orcas currently in captivity around the world have too big a financial interest in keeping them in anything larger than a bare pool in which they can perform cheesy stunts for the benefit of paying tourists. And what happens is – to use the vernacular – that it does their heads in. If you think this is just opinionating, look at the mortality figures.
What do they show?
There is an increasing amount of data on orcas in the wild, especially from western Canada, where they have been studied for decades, and it is clear that in their natural state their lifespan is something similar to that of humans. They tend to live up to 50 years, but there are cases of some of the females surviving much longer, perhaps even to 80 and beyond.
In captivity the picture is very different. The figures are known precisely. According to the WDCS, there have been 136 killer whales captured in the wild and held in captivity since the first one in 1961, of which 123 have now died, and the average survival time is four years.
It is thought that the stress of captivity lowers their resistance to disease. And it clearly also alters their behaviour, leading among other things to unpredictable aggression. (The very first one to be captured, by the way, the 1961 animal, a small female taken in Californian waters, lasted one day. She died after repeatedly swimming around her pool at high speed, ramming into the sides of the tank).
So what should happen now?
Animal welfare campaigners and many biologists think that orcas should simply not be held in captivity. They should be freed, all of them. Unfortunately, it's not a simple business – you can't just chuck them back like a fish you might have caught. You would have to transfer them to pens in the sea, for them to be rehabituated to the wild, and then there is the question of whether or not they could rejoin the family pod from which there are taken.
The experience of Keiko, the orca who starred in the three Free Willy movies, shows how difficult it is – when he eventually was freed in 2002 he was never able to find a pod and only lasted 18 months, before dying off the coast of Norway.
But even if there can only be a halfway house – returning captive orcas to sea pens where they could be cared for – it is very likely preferable to a life of balancing a ball on your nose in front of 5,000 popcorn chewers.
Is freedom for captive killer whales likely?
Well, just so you know, no fewer than 21 of the world total of 42 orcas held in captivity are kept in the three US aquaria run by SeaWorld, which was part of the "entertainment business" of the giant brewing company Anheuser Busch until it was sold for $2.7bn last October to the New York private equity business Blackstone. Big bucks, big bucks. Freedom? What do you think?
Is it right to trap such wildlife in artificial environments?
Yes...
* They can perform a useful educational function for adults and especially for children, who may become supporters of conservation.
* Captive breeding, where it is possible, may be a lifeline for species which are threatened with extinction.
* Modern methods of keeping animals – in some cases –are much better than they were a few years ago
No...
* Many big animals, orcas perhaps above all, are far too large and have too large a range in the wild to be held in narrow confinement.
* They clearly suffer from captivity-related stress which makes them susceptible to disease and shortens their lives.
* They may become aggressive and become a danger to their keepers as recent fatalities have illustrated.
What to do with captive orcas?
Matt Walker, BBC News 25 Feb 10;
The recent attack by a captive orca on its trainer at a SeaWorld facility in Orlando, Florida, has again raised questions about our relationship with these top marine predators.
No-one knows what triggered the latest incident, and experts agree that it is almost impossible to determine why the orca, called Tilikum, reacted as it did.
But it does highlight the tensions that occur when we choose to interact closely with these huge animals.
It is also debatable what to do with those orcas, also known as killer whales, that remain in captivity.
"They are highly social animals that tend to live in cohesive groups, so it's quite an artificial environment to capture them and put them in a small area," says Dr Andrew Foote, an expert on wild orcas from the University of Aberdeen, UK
"The tragic events are a reminder that orcas are wild, strong and often unpredictable animals," says Danny Groves, of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS).
Wild attacks
Reports differ, but there have been up to 24 attacks by captive orcas on people.
Contrary to popular perception, attacks by wild orcas on people have also been recorded, though no-one has been hurt.
Researcher Chris Pierpoint of the Marine Mammal Observer Association was working in Antarctica when he once subjected to a rather sophisticated, planned attack by a group of orcas.
Wild orcas in the region cooperate to hunt by swimming together towards seals resting on ice floes.
As they do so, they create a bow wave that washes the hapless seal from the ice and into the water.
"Chris Pierpoint had that done to him when in a rib in Antarctica," says Dr Foote, though he wasn't thrown overboard.
"A famous incidence occurred in the 1960s when a surfer was knocked off his board, but he was fine, the whale didn't bite."
A couple of years ago in Alaska, a child swimming in the sea also described how an orca made a bee-line toward him, before aborting a supposed attack at the last minute.
One idea is that air bubbles in neoprene wetsuits can confuse the echolocation of orcas, so they do not realise that they are approaching a person.
But the scarcity of such attacks underlines the difficulty in pinpointing their cause.
"It's really isolated incidences. Killer whales live in cold water so they don't overlap with people much," says Dr Foote.
Send them home?
What the latest attack by a captive orca reveals is just how little we still know about the animals, in captivity and in the wild.
For example, we are only just glimpsing how intelligent orcas really are and the
However, few insights come from studying captive whales, though some have helped reveal their acoustic behaviour.
"The science doesn't justify the captivity. One thing I would hope is that this unfortunate incident might lead to a considered discussion on phasing out these marine parks."
So what can or should be done with captive orcas?
One option would be to prevent further deaths by restricting trainers from encroaching too close to the poolside.
Another would be to put down any whale considered too dangerous to be kept in captivity.
The final option, and that which on the surface appears the most palatable from an animals rights perspective, is to release those whales still in captivity back into the wild.
The WDCS has repeatedly called for captive whales to be returned, not least because captivity appears to drastically reduce their life expectancy.
But that is not as simple as it sounds.
A study published by US and Danish scientists last year in the journal Marine Mammal Science documents the
Captured in 1979 as a near two-year-old calf, Keiko found fame as the star of the 1993 family film Free Willy, after which public pressure grew to release him back to the wild.
Training for his reintroduction began in 1996, and after 2000 his trainers began taking him out into the sea on open ocean swims designed to prepare him for a wild life.
But Keiko rarely interacted with wild orcas, and never integrated into a wild pod.
He also struggled to learn how to hunt, making shallower and less frequent dives than wild whales.
Eventually, and despite the best efforts of his trainers, he could not break his need for human contact, and kept following or returning to the trainers' boat.
Keiko eventually died, still semi-captive in 2003.
"The release of Keiko demonstrated that release of long-term captive animals is especially challenging and while we as humans might find it appealing to free a long-term captive animal, the survival and well being of the animal may be severely impacted in doing so," the report's authors write.
ABC, CBS, Good Morning America, Orlando Sentinel 25 Feb 10;
The death of SeaWorld trainer Dawn Brancheau illustrates how eyewitnesses can see a traumatic incident far differently.
First, though, SeaWorld didn’t help matters by suggesting, in a news conference yesterday afternoon, that the trainer had slipped and fallen in the tank. That incorrect information confused matters, and the theme park had to backtrack from it. Why add confusion to the tragedy? (
But what happened between Brancheau and the whale Tilikum? You have a range of accounts.
What did Tilikum do? ABC’s “Good Morning America” said the whale “suddenly lunged at the woman.”
On CBS’ “The Early Show,” a witness said her daughter saw the whale “kind of lashing out. He shook her [Brancheau] violently.”
The Sentinel quoted witnesses who said “the animal suddenly grabbed Brancheau by the upper arm, tossed her around in his mouth and pulled her beneath the water.”
But a husband and a wife shared a less dramatic account on WOFL-Channel 35. The husband said the trainer’s hair must have been in the whale’s teeth when the animal rolled, taking her down with him. (Would that behavior qualify as an attack?)
The wife told WOFL there was a “a sudden jerk” and the whale brought the trainer up once before taking her down for five minutes.
Was the whale agitated? WESH-Channel 2 reported that it was.
On “Good Morming America,” George Stephanopoulos asked, “What pushed this whale over the edge?”
Yet a husband and a wife told “GMA” that the whale didn’t seem agitated while being patted by the trainer.
What was the whale’s manner?
WKMG-Channel 6 quoted the daughter of a former SeaWorld worker, who described Tilikum as “difficult, depressed and usually temperamental.”
On “GMA,” Chuck Tompkins, curator of zoological operations at SeaWorld, disagreed.
“I think that information is extremely inaccurate. I’ve worked with Tilikum his entire career here at SeaWorld,” Tompkins said. “I can tell you right now he is not a depressed animal. He is a very good animal.”
CBS’ “The Early Show” noted that the whale had many safe interactions with humans.
If Tilikum had a hard day yesterday, the killer whale was hardly alone. A witness told “The Early Show” that trainers had said three other whales did not want to perform and were not cooperating.
As for the late Brancheau, WESH had touching footage of her from 2000, when she said she had a lot of fun working with the whales.
From the reporting, we learned Brancheau knew the dangers and thought of the whales as her children.
I wonder what she would make of stories about a “killer whale attack.”
This is one of those stories that we’ll probably never know exactly what happened. Of course, that won’t stop anyone from talking about it. But when the human race deals with such magnificent creatures, mysterious things are bound to happen.
Death of Sea World trainer: Do 'killer whales' belong in theme parks?
Daniel B. Wood Christian Science Monitor Yahoo News 24 Feb 10;
Los Angeles – The death of a veteran Sea World trainer in Orlando, Fla., Wednesday has spotlighted the campaign of several major animal rights groups to keep marine mammals out of theme parks altogether.
Dawn Brancheau was killed when a 12,300-lb. male orca “killer whale” grabbed her in front of an audience at the Orlando theme park.
Now, animal rights activists say that many questions should be asked in the wake of Ms. Brancheau's death. Sea World has said that the very same orca is responsible for human deaths in 1991 and again in 1999. The Humane Society of the United States has long campaigned for marine mammals to be removed from theme parks.
“These behemoths are denied all of their natural, instinctual inclinations, and we humans tend to think, ‘Well, this is just a bad animal.’ But it is a wild animal, used to running free in an entire ocean, but now confined to a very small space,” says Joyce Tischler, founder of and general counsel for Animal Legal Defense Fund. She compares an orca’s life in captivity in a tank to keeping a human being in a bathtub for his entire life. She says most Americans have romanticized notions of sea life perpetuated by such TV series as “Flipper.” But even dolphins are known to aggressively run their teeth down the backs of humans in hundreds of incidents that are not reported outside the conservation community press, she says.
SeaWorld closed its Orlando park immediately after the tragedy, and suspended its orca show in San Diego. “We've initiated an investigation to determine, to the extent possible, what occurred,” SeaWorld President Dan Brown said in a brief statement to reporters. Ms. Brancheau had worked at the park since 1994. Mr. Brown said no SeaWorld park had ever before experienced a similar incident and pledged a thorough review of all of the park's standard operating procedures. “This is an extraordinarily difficult time for the SeaWorld parks and our team members. Nothing is more important than the safety of our employees, guests, and the animals entrusted to our care," Brown said. “We extend our deepest sympathies to the family and friends of the trainer and will do everything possible to assist them in this difficult time.”
The orca is the largest member of the dolphin family and is known as a favorite at Sea World. Killer whales are a highly social species.
But “the vast majority of the orca whales in captivity would be far better off to be returned to the wild. Orcas are unbelievably ill-suited to life in theme parks and can be successfully returned to the wild. We know, because we have done it,” says David Phillips, director of the International Marine Mammal Project for the Earth Island Institute, who led the effort to rescue, rehabilitate, and release the killer whale Keiko, made famous in the movie “Free Willy.” “Orcas deserve a better fate than living in cramped pools.
Mr. Phillips recalls that Keiko went from languishing in small pool in Mexico City all the way to swimming with wild whales in his native waters in Iceland. He ended up swimming to Norway and living there in a bay with some human care until he died. Phillips says the public would be better served by seeing orcas in the wild and ensuring their protection there.
“This isn’t the first time that stressed-out orca whales have injured or killed people, and unfortunately, it is not likely to be the last,” says Phillips. “It is high time that the marine park industry get out of the captive orca business.”
Tischler takes on the argument most often given by defenders of such captivity: That it is educational and spotlights the need for conservation and protection of such creatures: “The people who run these theme parks are not interested in conservation or protection, they are interested in making money,” Tischler says. “I would be asking, ‘Why was this animal kept after the first death?’ ”
“This is a giant warning sign that society needs to rethink this question of holding large predators in captivity,” says Chris Palmer, author of “Shooting in the Wild,” a book about wild animals in captivity, who also teaches at American University. “Having a trainer killed this way can’t justify whatever benefits we get from conservation or protection.”
SeaWorld Won't Euthanize Whale, Feds Investigate Trainer Death
Park Has No Plans to Euthanize Killer Whale Linked to Deaths of 3 People
Russell Goldman, ABC News 25 Feb 10;
SeaWorld has no plans to euthanize the killer whale that dragged a trainer to her death Wednesday, and will allow trainers to continue to work with the animal, a park official said today.
As two federal agencies launched investigations into Dawn Brancheau's death, the park said it will review its safety policies and determine whether Tillikum, a 12,000-pound bull killer whale, will be used in shows and publicly displayed.
Brancheau, 40, an experienced trainer, was snatched by the whale in front of a stadium of horrified onlookers, thrashed and ultimately held under water to drown.
SeaWorld has for years banned trainers from swimming with Tillikum, who was linked to the death of a Canadian trainer in 1991 and another man who snuck into a holding area in 1999. The whale has, however, been used in public shows and is given commands from trainers from the sides of the tank.
Environment News Service 25 Feb 10;
DUBAI, February 25, 2010 (ENS) - The world's largest shopping mall was partially evacuated today as a crack opened in an enormous aquarium full of sharks, frightening shoppers and gushing water onto the floors.
Maintenance crews at the Dubai Mall rushed to the scene to contain the leak, which was captured in an amateur video taken by a shopper.
According to a spokesperson for Emaar Retail, which manages the Dubai Mall and the aquarium, "A leakage was noticed at one of the panel joints of the Dubai Aquarium at the Dubai Mall and was immediately fixed by the aquarium's maintenance team."
"The leakage did not impact the aquarium environment or the safety of the aquatic animals," said the spokesperson in a statement. "The Dubai Aquarium works with international experts in aquarium management and upholds the highest safety standards in its management."
The ground floor and basement around the aquarium was evacuated and the area has been cordoned off. The aquarium is closed to the public indefinitely.
A spokesman for the civil defense force in the Persian Gulf city-state told reporters that "the situation is under control and a team is working on fixing the problem." As many as 300 cleaners were deployed to mop the water off the floors.
Open since November 2008, the Dubai Aquarium & Underwater Zoo has over 33,000 aquatic animals and holds the Guinness World Record for the world's largest acrylic viewing panel - 32.88 meters wide by 8.3 meters high by 750 mm thick and weighing 245,614 kilograms.
The thick acrylic viewing panel must withstand the pressure of the 10 million liters of water used in the aquarium, but its transparency gives visitors clear views of over 33,000 marine animals on display.
More than one million visitors have attended the aquarium, located in the mall adjacent to the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, which opened in January.
The 270-degree walkthrough tunnel leads viewers through the aquarium and Underwater Zoo, which features 36 aquatic displays in three ecological zones: rainforest, rocky shore, and living ocean.
Aquatic animals featured include: penguins, crocodiles, octopus, piranhas, spider crabs, water rats, giant catfish, lizards and tiger fish. An attraction at the aquarium is the Shark Dive, introduced in May 2009 as a first in the region within a mall environment.
Straits Times 27 Feb 10;
Evidence of last August's Montara oil spill may be nearly gone from the Timor Sea, but the effects of one of Australia's worst environmental disasters will be seen for years to come, affecting the feeding and breeding of marine life and vital fisheries and coral spawning. Here's a look at how oil spills affect marine life.
Charles Haviland, BBC News 26 Feb 10;
The Sri Lankan government says that it is concerned about the welfare of sea turtles which live and breed on the island's southern coastline.
The authorities say turtle hatcheries are operating there which contravene conservation laws and that they will prosecute those people involved.
Sri Lanka is a vital habitat for sea turtles as five of the seven species come ashore here to lay their eggs.
Watching adult and newly-hatched turtles is also popular with tourists.
That seems to be contributing to the problems faced by these endearing reptiles.
The Sri Lankan Daily Mirror Online website says in a new report that hatcheries which use them for commercial or leisure purposes are harming the species.
Dead hatchling
Environment Minister Champika Ranawaka says that wildlife officers have informed all hatcheries that selling the turtles or using them as meat or for any other commercial purpose is illegal.
"They can only be used for educational purposes," he said. "We've investigated the illegal places and given them warnings not to do that."
Senior wildlife official Sarath Dissanayake told the BBC that turtle hatchlings should have the freedom to walk over the beach to the sea, but hatcheries were illegally putting walls and barriers in their way.
A tourist said he had recently been at a facility where guests were encouraged to pick up baby turtles and "set them free" into the ocean.
He said the place was like a zoo and that at least one hatchling appeared to be dead.
But one hatchery owner told the Daily Mirror Online he is protecting the animals, not profiting from them.
"They have asked us to hatch them on the beaches," he said, "but we can't do that.
"If we wanted to do that, we'd need at least 20,000 soldiers guarding these turtles, because people are hungry for them, most use them as meat."
But the authorities are not convinced. They are preparing new guidelines on how turtle hatcheries should be maintained and say that those who violate them will be prosecuted.
FECYT - Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology
EurekAlert 26 Feb 10;
Spanish scientists have studied interactions between the loggerhead turtle (Caretta caretta) and fishing gear such as longline hooks used at the water surface, mass beachings, and the effects of climate change on these animals.
In order to reduce captures of this marine species without causing economic losses for fishermen, the scientists are proposing that fishing in the summer should only be carried out by night and in areas more than 35 nautical miles from land.
Populations of loggerhead turtles (Caretta caretta) are in decline all over the world, and particularly in the Mediterranean Sea, where more than 20,000 animals are accidentally caught each year. Finding responsible and sustainable fisheries solutions was one of the prime objectives of this research study, published in the latest issue of the Journal of Applied Ichthyology.
Researchers from the Spanish Institute of Oceanography (IEO) in Malaga, the University of Malaga (UMA) and the Sea Classroom, also in Malaga, tested whether using different kinds of animal bait would reduce captures of loggerhead turtles, and how these changes could impact on fishing yields.
The scientists used real commercial fisheries data taken by scientific observers on board fishing boats. The results were clear. "Using fish as bait could greatly reduce incidental catches of loggerhead turtles, but could also severely affect catches of swordfish", José Carlos Báez, lead author and a researcher at the IEO, tells SINC.
The research team also showed that stopping using small molluscs such as squid as bait could not ensure that incidental catches of loggerhead turtles would be prevented, since "as an opportunistic predator it also preys on hooks baited with fish, and can find these more easily when molluscs are used", explains the expert.
The study proposes other measures that, the researchers say, would not involve modifying the equipment used in any way that "could result in low economic yields because of a decline in fish catches", says Báez. These techniques would reduce the number of turtles caught while maintaining fishermen's profits.
"Most accidental catches happen during the day, more than 35 nautical miles from the coast, and in the summer, meaning that it would be enough to limit longline fishing at these times and places in order to drastically reduce captures of this species", says Báez, who adds that these measures should be tested before being adopted.
Longline fishing is practised by 356 vessels in Spanish waters, and provides employment for many coastal towns. However, accidental captures of species such as the loggerhead turtle are also damaging to fishermen's interests, because of the economic losses caused and the time spent in freeing the turtles.
###
References:
Báez, J.C.; Real, R.; Macias, D.; de la Serna, J.M.; Bellido, J.J.; Caminas, J.A. "Captures of swordfish Xiphias gladius Linnaeus 1758 and loggerhead sea turtles Caretta caretta (Linnaeus 1758) associated with different bait combinations in the Western Mediterranean surface longline fishery" Journal of Applied Ichthyology 26(1): 126-127, febrero de 2010.
WWF 26 Feb 10;
Koror, Palau. Eight Pacific nations yesterday announced they would seek sustainable seafood certification for up to 40 percent of their skipjack tuna fishery, potentially bringing a significant source of canned tuna into the range of sustainable seafood choices available to global consumers.
The announcement that Marine Stewardship Council Certification would be sought for the fishery exploiting free swimming schools of skipjack came from the first Presidential Summit of Parties to the Nauru Agreement, a joint fisheries agreement between Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Palau, Nauru and Tuvalu.
The size of the potentially certifiable skipjack catch is about 330,000 tonnes. With much of the fishery overlapping with the ecologically significant Coral Triangle area, WWF expects to be significantly involved with the assessment.
“This step by the ministers of PNA countries to improve their skipjack tuna fisheries and promote responsible fishing through MSC is an important development for the conservation and responsible management of tuna stocks in the Coral Triangle region,” said Dr. Jose Ingles, leader of WWF’s Coral Triangle Tuna Initiative.
“WWF will press for issues to be addressed throughout the assessment process and by the Western Central Pacific Fisheries Commission, the regional fisheries management organization that manages fisheries in the area.”
Certification is not being sought for any fishing involving the use of fish aggregating devices (FADs).
The MSC evaluation will only assess skipjack tuna caught in purse seine fisheries in unassociated sets, a fishing technique with the lowest likelihood of catching other overfished species such as juvenile yellowfin and bigeye tunas. This distinct section of the fishery catches approximately 364,000 tons of skipjack tuna per year in the Western and Central Pacific.
“If successful, this certification also brings new hope for heavily exploited juvenile yellowfin and bigeye tuna in the Coral Triangle, which are mostly caught in skipjack tuna fisheries and hopefully encourage other fisheries, not only tuna, to shift to unassociated sets or perhaps find better solutions to address the juvenile bycatch issue ” Ingles added.
The bycatch of juvenile yellowfin and bigeye tuna has plagued the Coral Triangle for decades, contributing to the decline of tuna populations in this resource-rich region and on which the food security and livelihoods of millions depend. Other important issues WWF will press for include the need for rigorous traceability ensuring the fish sold is traceable to the particular fisheries.
“Certification of tuna products reflects the growing demand for responsibly-caught seafood by consumers willing to pay a premium. This impels players from the supply chain to step up their efforts and get in on the act of responsible fishing,” Ingles said. “WWF will ensure that sound conservation and management principles are taken into account at every step of this third party auditing process.”
The Coral Triangle—sometimes known as the nursery of the seas—is the most diverse marine region on the planet, matched in its importance to life on Earth only by the Amazon rainforest and the Congo basin.
Defined by marine areas containing more than 500 species of reef-building coral, it covers around 2.3 million square miles of ocean across six countries in the Indo-Pacific – Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Solomon Islands, and Timor-Leste. It is home to 3,000 species of reef fish and commercially-valuable species such as tuna, whales, dolphins, rays, sharks, and 6 of the 7 known species of marine turtles.
The Coral Triangle also directly sustains the lives of more than 120 million people and contains key spawning and nursery grounds for tuna, while healthy reef and coastal systems underpin a growing tourism sector. WWF is working with other NGOs, multilateral agencies and governments around the world to support conservation efforts in the Coral Triangle for the benefit of all.
Victoria Gill, BBC News 26 Feb 10;
A century of whaling may have released more than 100 million tonnes - or a large forest's worth - of carbon into the atmosphere, scientists say.
Whales store carbon within their huge bodies and when they are killed, much of this carbon can be released.
US scientists revealed their estimate of carbon released by whaling at a major ocean sciences meeting in the US.
Dr Andrew Pershing from the University of Maine described whales as the "forests of the ocean".
Dr Pershing and his colleagues from the Gulf of Maine Research Institute calculated the annual carbon-storing capacity of whales as they grew.
"Whales, like any animal or plant on the planet, are made out of a lot of carbon," he said.
"And when you kill and remove a whale from the ocean, that's removing carbon from this storage system and possibly sending it into the atmosphere."
He pointed out that, particularly in the early days of whaling, the animals were a source of lamp oil, which was burned, releasing the carbon directly into the air.
"And this marine system is unique because when whales die [naturally], their bodies sink, so they take that carbon down to the bottom of the ocean.
"If they die where it's deep enough, it will be [stored] out of the atmosphere perhaps for hundreds of years."
Ocean trees
In their initial calculations, the team worked out that 100 years of whaling had released an amount of carbon equivalent to burning 130,000 sq km of temperate forests, or to driving 128,000 Humvees continuously for 100 years.
Dr Pershing stressed that this was still a relatively tiny amount when compared to the billions of tonnes produced by human activity every year.
But he said that whales played an important role in storing and transporting carbon in the marine ecosystem.
Simply leaving large groups of whales to grow, he said, could "sequester" the greenhouse gas, in amounts that were comparable to some of the reforestation schemes that earn and sell carbon credits.
He suggested that a similar system of carbon credits could be applied to whales in order to protect and rebuild their stocks.
"The idea would be to do a full accounting of how much carbon you could store in a fully populated stock of fish or whales, and allow countries to sell their fish quota as carbon credits," he explained.
"You could use those credits as an incentive to reduce the fishing pressure or to promote the conservation of some of these species."
Is bigger better?
Other scientists said that he had raised an exciting and interesting problem.
Professor Daniel Costa, a marine animal researcher from the University of California, Santa Cruz, told BBC News: "So many more groups are looking at the importance of these large animals in the carbon cycle.
"And it's one of those things that, when you look at it, you think: ' This is so obvious, why didn't we think of this before?'."
Dr Pershing pointed out that whales, with their huge size, were more efficient than smaller animals at storing carbon.
He used the analogy of a small dog compared to a large dog.
"My wife's 6lb (2.7kg) toy poodle eats one cup of food per day and my dog - a 60lb standard poodle - eats five cups of food per day," he said.
"That's only five times as much food but my dog weighs ten times as much."
He said that the marine carbon credit idea could be applied to other very large marine animals, including endangered bluefin tuna and white sharks.
Dr Pershing said: "These are huge and they are top predators, so unless they're fished they would be likely to take their biomass to the bottom of the ocean [when they die]."
The American Geophysical Union's Ocean Sciences meeting has been taking place this week in Portland, Oregon.
New Straits Times 27 Feb 10;
IPOH: The Wildlife Protection and National Parks Department said that nine Orang Asli were expected to be charged soon for allegedly poaching and killing a tiger in the Bukit Tapah Forest Reserve in Sungkai, near Bidor, on Feb 7.
The department's director for the state of Perak, Shabrina Shariff said statements had been taken from the nine and that the investigation papers would be handed over to the public prosecutor soon for further action.
The Orang Asli, aged between 20 and 40, two of them Rela members, were suspected of being involved in poaching protected animals using shotguns, traps, spears and blowpipes, Shabrina added. -- Bernama
Jakarta Globe 27 Feb 10;
Officials say a population of 53 extremely endangered leopards has been found in Java’s Gunung Halimun Salak National Park.
“We have rediscovered a population of leopards which were on the brink of extinction in the Gunung Endut area" in Banten province, park director Pepen Efendi told kompas.com.
Pepen said the park will increase its security patrols, and warned that poachers would face criminal charges.
“I think if the patrols in the park are not intensified, other endangered animals could become extinct, too,” he said. “It will be our loss and our children and grandchildren’s loss, too, if they go extinct.”
Park employers are encouraging local residents to take part in protecting the endangered animals. Pepen said people living near the park should preserve the forest, since disturbing the habitat might cause the leopards to roam into the villages.
He noted that there are still plenty of deer and boars at Gunung Endut to support the leopard population.
The population of Javan leopards is unknown, but is “certainly less than 250 mature individuals (possibly even less than 100)” according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species. They are categorized as Critically Threatened due to habitat loss.
There are scattered populations of leopards in several national parks on Java, from Ujung Kulon on the tip of West Java to Alas Purwo on the tip of East Java.
Michael Casey Associated Press Washington Post 25 Feb 10;
BANGKOK -- Thailand has seized two tons of elephant tusks from Africa hidden in pallets labeled as mobile phone parts in the country's largest ivory seizure.
Thai Customs officials valued Wednesday night's haul at Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi Airport at 120 million baht ($3.6 million). It is further sign that Thailand is emerging as a hub for the illicit trade.
Poaching of elephants in central and eastern Africa has intensified in recent years, with much of the illegal ivory exported to Asia.
Seree Thaijongrak, director of the investigation and suppression bureau for the Customs Department, said that acting on a tip, officials seized two pallets containing 239 tusks of African elephants.
The consignment, which originated in South Africa, was labeled as mobile phone parts destined for Laos - apparently to confuse customs officials, as Laos has an agreement with neighboring Thailand not to check cargo in transit.
A Thai national, however, attempted to pick up the cargo and was detained, Seree said. Customs officials suspect the tusks would have been crafted into trinkets and jewelry in Thailand.
"This is the biggest seizure we have ever had," Seree said. "This is a real accomplishment for Thailand. Normally, this would have gone right through but we got the tip-off."
Seree said smuggling of ivory from Africa is on the rise in Thailand as in much of Southeast Asia.
Ivory shipped to Thailand typically goes to carvers who fashion it into Buddhist statues, bangles and jewelry for sale to tourists or sale in other countries. Thailand is also a transit point for ivory forwarded to other markets like China.
Last month, Thailand arrested two Thai women accused of dealing in illegal African ivory, a day after an American and a Thai national were indicted in California on charges of smuggling ivory into the United States. Police believe the women supplied ivory to the Thai national whom prosecutors say sold several pieces of ivory on eBay, disguising shipments as gifts and toys.
The U.N. Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species banned all international ivory trade in 1989. Traders in Thailand have thrived in part because the 1989 ban did not address domestic trade. That loophole allows them to deceive authorities by claiming their African ivory came from domestic sources - a tactic that is effective because it can be difficult without DNA testing to tell the difference between African and Asian ivory.
Authorities say 10 tons of African ivory was seized in Southeast Asia last year, including three seizures in Thailand.
Radio Australia 26 Feb 10;
Experts in sustainable fishing are warning that much of our favourite seafood may soon become unavailable if over-fishing continues. They say supplies are dwindling fast and, if the current situation continues, we may have to make do with less popular replacements like jellyfish.
Presenter: Sarah Dingle
Speakers: Professor Jessica Meeuwig, Centre for Marine Futures, University of Western Australia; Darren Kindleysides, Director, Australian Marine Conservation Society; Guy Leyland, Spokesman, National Seafood Industry Alliance.
SARAH DINGLE: Early morning at the Sydney Fish Market and business is brisk. The daily auction has drawn fishmongers from across the city. But there's one item which isn't on the floor.
SEAFOOD BUYER: I could buy a 10 kilo box of jellyfish and watch it rot because I don't know if there's too many people standing in line to buy one.
SARAH DINGLE: The director of the Australian Marine Conservation Society, Darren Kindleysides, says that may change.
DARREN KINDLEYSIDES: Seafood itself is at a crossroads, global fisheries are largely overfished catches are declining and fisheries face real challenges through climate change.
And we've heard that if we don't change how we manage our fisheries that the future for seafood could be jellyfish burgers or jellyfish and chips, an ocean that is warmer, has less fish in it and is actually a better habitat for jellyfish and already we're seeing around the world blooms of jellyfish increases in the numbers of jellyfish.
GUY LEYLAND: I'm aware of those sorts of claims but I think world's a big place you can't really generalise, you need to look at country by country and ocean by ocean and in regard to Australian fisheries our oceans are in good shape.
SARAH DINGLE: Guy Leyland is a spokesman for the National Seafood Industry Alliance. He says Australians at least won't have to change their eating habits in the slightest, the only difference may be the impact on their hip pocket.
GUY LEYLAND: Fish that are being supplied by the Australian seafood industry, they are being sustainably harvested. I suppose the only concern is that there's a cap or a limit in terms of the amount of fish the industry can supply and as a consequence it's likely that with greater consumption the price of those species can go up.
I think the fish-consuming public is increasing, we can only supply so much fish, there's a gap and the gap will probably be filled by imports.
SARAH DINGLE: Professor Jessica Meeuwig, from UWA's Centre for Marine Futures says imports are not the solution
PROFESSOR JESSICA MEEUWIG: We know that most of the fish stocks around world are overexploited quite heavily, in some cases for some species particularly the open ocean fisheries, the estimates are that only 10 to 20 per cent of their pre fishing biomass remain. So we've really moved to a place where hunger for seafood has led to an emptying of the oceans globally.
Perhaps compared to the Philippines where there's a huge populations and a lot of poverty Australia's in a better situation, but I don't think there's any room for complacency about the state of our fish stocks.
And if you take Western Australia for example, we have a very large coast here and not a very big population, and that I think has led people to believe it would be difficult to overfish, but what we've seen in the last few years is significant declines in western rock lobster, which is the world's best managed fishery and we've also seen significant declines in species like dhufish, baldchin groper, pink snapper.
(Sound of fish market auction)
SARAH DINGLE: Back at the fish market huge yellowfin tuna, mud crabs and John Dory are all going under the hammer but Professor Meeuwig says there may be less variety in the future and we won't like their replacement.
PROFESSOR MEEUWIG: As we're fishing out the oceans we start at the top of the food chain, we deplete those species then we move further down and at the end of the process you end up with not much other than jellyfish. And we do have areas where jellyfish have become a plague problem such as the Black Sea.
I see no reason why with care we can't keep eating seafood, I think the lesson is to say that we do actually need to act and make sure that we're not overfishing and make sure that we create opportunities for stocks to recover.
2010 is the deadline set for reversing declines in biodiversity, but little has been accomplished
Susan Milius Science News March 13th, 2010; Vol.177 #6 (p. 20)
No silly hats or shouted countdowns. But entomologist Scott Miller is hosting a small event to mark the beginning of 2010, which the United Nations has declared the International Year of Biodiversity. Miller’s occasion is low-key, on a weekday, before noon even, and there’s no bubbly in sight. But there are other reasons for not quite calling this a celebration.
This is a poignant year for anyone who cares about the rich diversity of life on planet Earth. 2010 was supposed to be a milestone. The 193 nations participating in a treaty called the Convention on Biological Diversity had agreed to “achieve by 2010 a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss at the global, regional and national level as a contribution to poverty alleviation and to the benefit of all life on Earth.”
Fat chance. The official document assessing the 2010 global outlook for biodiversity won’t be released until May, but conservationists and trend watchers predict at best a few bright points among worsening losses. Even a preview statement from the treaty secretariat says that, as of late January, “all the indications are that the 2010 target has not been met.”
Policy has achieved little for bio-diversity, but scientists have fared better in coming to understand just what biodiversity means for the fundamental workings of an ecosystem. From grasslands to oceans, ecologists are finding that greater diversity tends to boost an ecosystem’s productivity and reinforce its stability.
Biologists around the world are thus bootstrapping themselves out of despair and seizing the occasion to explain biodiversity and why it matters.
Earth’s vast diversity
Miller’s mini–New Year’s event may be low on champagne, but it’s a world-class demonstration of what biodiversity is. He’s using insects to convey the variety of life by giving a little tour of his workplace, which happens to be the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. As the Smithsonian’s deputy under secretary for science, he has a lab that looks out on part of the research collection of insect specimens — there are 35 million of them.
Leading the way through the public exhibit halls toward the stored collections, Miller strides past dramatic fossil displays: half-billion-year-old remains of weird, spiky creatures from Canada’s Burgess Shale, an Irish elk with antlers that loom like roof-mounted satellite dishes and other vanished marvels.
Though things have been disappearing for a long time, humanity has revved up extinction rates in the past few centuries to as much as a thousand times the rates during much of Earth’s history, according to the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. That status report, the work of some 1,360 scientists, names habitat change, climate change, introduction of invasive species, overexploitation and pollution as the big causes of this anthropogenic extinction. And the report calls for urgent action.
Not far from the elk, Miller opens an inconspicuous security door into the museum’s private world. The “nation’s attic” has wide, well-lit corridors, and when Miller reaches the giant room storing much of the pinned insect collection, he pauses to let the sight sink in.
It’s not attic-y at all, but has the super-clean, bright feel of movie sets for secret, high-tech installations. Ranks of some 1,800 cabinets, almost ceiling-high, near-white and identical, march into the distance.
Miller starts with a few shallow wooden drawers topped with glass. The collection’s 135,000 drawers hold specimens from just about every kind of place an insect has ever been: tiny leaf miners that excavate within a single mangrove leaf and harvester ants that scurry over desert sands, for example.
All these insect habitats — the whole range of ecosystems on the planet — rank as a form of biodiversity, Miller says. He lifts trays holding insects grown from larvae picked out of fruits in Papua New Guinea. The assembled rows appear to contain duplicates of a tiny brown-winged thingy, but his trained eye recognizes dozens of species.
Another tray holds dozens of postage-stamp–sized brown moths pinned in evenly spaced rows. The moths also look the same at first glance, and Miller says this drawer holds nothing but a single species of spruce budworm, an infamous pest of eastern forests in North America. Staring closely, though, reveals shades of brown, from mahogany and chocolate to almost beige. And the wings are mottled with yet tinier variations on the theme.
These individual differences count as biodiversity too. Differences at the ecosystem, species and genetic levels all matter, Miller says.
Recent wipeout
Losses at all these levels had roused enough concern by 1992 for an Earth Summit in Brazil to produce the Convention on Biological Diversity treaty. Enough nations had ratified the treaty by 1993 for it to become a binding legal document. By now, all nations have agreed to participate except for Andorra, the Holy See and the United States. Political opposition in 1993 prevented the full U.S. Senate from voting on whether to ratify the treaty, and the issue has lain dormant since.
At a meeting in 2002, the participants adopted the strategic plan that set the date, 2010, for achieving the reduction in losses. Now, like serial New Year’s resolvers pledging to lose 10 pounds, signatory nations have to get on the scale.
The treaty secretariat’s January preview of the reckoning provided only broad trends with arrows and pie charts to indicate whether various goals had been met. (On a global scale, they had not.)
“It’s not looking good,” says Jean-Christophe Vié, deputy coordinator of the species program at the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Gland, Switzerland. The nonprofit maintains the Red List, a registry that ranks the status of various species, from thriving (“least concern”) to extinct.
Though comparing IUCN data over time is difficult because the scope and criteria have changed, the Red List provides a snapshot of where biodiversity is now.
At the end of 2009, an IUCN report found plenty of creatures, mostly animals and plants, still in peril. Of the 44,838 species that the IUCN had evaluated by 2008, 16,928 met at least the criteria for “facing a high risk of extinction in the wild.” Evaluators said some of them met more dire criteria, facing “very high” or “extremely high” extinction risks. That troubled group included one in eight of the bird species, one in five mammals, one in four corals and one in three amphibians. (Scientists have formally described some 1.7 million species, and estimates of total richness run from 3 million to 10 million.)
Another indicator, the Living Planet Index, averages changes in the sizes of populations of 1,686 vertebrate species. The index, put out by the World Wildlife Fund, the Zoological Society of London and their partners, slid almost 30 percent from 1970 to 2005.
In this deadline year, “biodiversity is still declining — there’s no doubt about it,” Vié says.
Though species losses are only one measure of diversity, if a species is crashing, so is any genetic variety within it. And taking more and more species from an ecosystem raises concerns that the swamp, woods or pond will lose its distinctive traits, becoming something else, in a form of system-level extinction. So, as crude as they are, tallies of species’ statuses let conservationists take the pulse of life on the planet.
The meaning of loss
As for the impact of these declines, Vié says, “I don’t think people get it.” Too often biodiversity loss has come to mean extinction of some creature a continent away. “It’s not because one beetle or one frog is going extinct that we are worried,” he says. “It’s that the losses are massive.”
So just what’s going to happen when so much biodiversity disappears has become a pressing question. Plenty of experiments, albeit accidental ones, have already demonstrated that subtracting even one species can change an eco-system. The Millennium Assessment report lists 21 such “experiments,” carried out by fishing fleets, overenthusiastic gardeners or even wildlife managers.
Removing sheep and cattle in an attempt to restore Santa Cruz Island, Calif., for example, let nonnative plants spread over the landscape unchecked. And harvesting of triggerfish in Kenya’s reefs allowed sea urchin populations to boom, leading to increased coral erosion.
Ecologists have also started intentional experiments that explore how biodiversity affects the basic workings of an ecosystem, such as how much life it supports or whether it will repair itself after a disaster such as a drought.
Drought inspired the longest-running of the post-treaty wave of biodiversity experiments, says David Tilman of the University of Minnesota in St. Paul. For reasons that had little to do with biodiversity, he and his colleagues were monitoring grassland plots at the university’s Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve. Then a drought hit.
In looking at the pathetic, shriveled plants, Tilman and his team found that plots with 20 or so species had about half the living matter, or biomass, recorded in the same plots in a normal year. But plots with one or two produced only one-tenth of the biomass of a normal year.
“We actually didn’t believe the results when we first saw them,” Tilman says.
Tweaking the analysis this way and that still produced the same findings. So Tilman set up an experiment as a deliberate test of the effects of species number on biomass. With 168 plots of one to 16 species, the experiment has been running for 16 years. In the early years it led to a paper presenting evidence that yes, under the same conditions, plots with more species of plants eventually tend to yield more biomass than plots with fewer species.
A 2006 paper in Nature by Bradley Cardinale of the University of California, Santa Barbara and his colleagues supports these findings. The team concludes that, overall, tests have shown that greater diversity in systems from grassland plants to rock-hugging marine invertebrates increases the basic productivity of an ecosystem.
What causes that burst of productivity has led to lively debate. Having more species may increase the chances of getting one super-producing plant that plumps up biomass. That scenario, called a sampling effect, could play out in some systems, but Tilman says he thinks his plots are getting an extra boost from the powers of competition. When species crowd into an area, they compete for resources and become efficient at using them.
Experiments so far suggest that sampling effects explain about one-third of this productivity increase, Cardinale and his team reported in 2007 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The other portion, the team says, comes from ways that species in a mix complement each other — by promoting growth and through division of labor.
Plants sprout at the foundation of an ecosystem’s food web, capturing energy from the sun. Diversity, though, also has an effect on the creatures that eat the plants, says marine ecologist Emmett Duffy of the College of William & Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Science in Gloucester Point.
Duffy has worked with flowering plants called seagrasses that grow entirely under water. Much of their success depends on the little arthropods called amphipods and isopods that graze on the seagrass blades and remove algal scum that can dim the light. With more species of grazers at work, over time, algae were cleared off more efficiently and grazers increased in number, Duffy says.
Another underwater experiment supports the notion that biodiversity provides stability. A study published in the December 2009 Ecological Applications shows that keeping more fish in the sea may give an ecosystem some protection against unwanted algae.
Biologists have warned that burgeoning algae, encouraged by excess nutrients in the water, ranks as one of the most serious threats to the Baltic Sea. To see if the region’s declines in perch and other predatory fish also encourage algal outbreaks, Britas Klemens Eriksson of the University of Groningen in Haren, the Netherlands, and his colleagues set up field experiments. Keeping top predators away from study plots began a cascade of changes that eventually led to fewer small creatures grazing on algae.
“Not all species are created exactly equal,” says Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. If a top predator disappears, change can shoot through an ecosystem. “It’s like hitting a node in a power grid — and the lights go out everywhere,” he says.
Worm’s own work suggests that fisheries in the more species-rich of the world’s marine ecosystems appear less likely to collapse and faster to recover than fisheries in species-poor regions. The analysis, based on more than 50 years of data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, was published in Science in 2006.
Even genetic variation within the same species has been shown to affect how well ecosystems pull up their socks and repair themselves. Jay Stachowicz of the University of California, Davis remembers a New Year’s Eve call from his then-student Randall Hughes. Brant geese had found Hughes’ study plots of eelgrass clones, which she had genetically analyzed with great care. And the geese had eaten just about all of the eelgrass.
“I tell my students, you’ve got to make lemonade out of the lemons,” Stachowicz says. Hughes kept monitoring the disaster zone. Eelgrass plots with more genetic diversity tended to regrow to their former density faster, she and Stachowicz reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2004.
But biodiversity doesn’t always show a short-term effect. For eelgrass growing in the wild, only one of the two characteristics that Hughes and Stachowicz measured, shoot density, correlated with genetic diversity, and only in the winter. That’s the time for goose attacks and other miseries, so maybe that’s when bounce-back power really matters,
Stachowicz and Hughes, now of Florida State University Coastal & Marine Laboratory in St. Teresa, speculated in May 2009 in Ecology. Likewise, biodiversity effects showed up in the long run but not the short-term in work on algal-species mixes, Stachowicz and colleagues reported in Ecology in 2008.
Regardless of the technical ecology research, Miller says, preserving biodiversity is just common sense. He makes what’s been called the “intelligent tinkerer” argument: When fiddling with something complicated and not entirely understood, it’s not smart to throw away parts — especially when those systems keep humanity alive on the planet. Miller hands over a printout of a list he’s made of some services: clean water, wild fish, pollinators for crops, protection from erosion, clean air…. Pulling pieces out of ecosystems puts these services at risk.
Also, he points out, biodiversity has aesthetic and spiritual values. Stewardship of the natural world stands as an obligation of certain religious traditions. And some deep urge in humankind, what entomologist Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University has called “biophilia,” may draw people to other living things.
Back among the insects, Miller pulls out a drawer with row after row of ranks of iridescent blue Morpho butterflies to illustrate his point. Most people have at one time or another admired portraits of these beauties, but such images don’t do justice even to museum specimens, which shimmer and glow as the angle of view tilts. Next, Miller displays something less familiar: a drawer of adult Heliodinidae moths, which are bigger than rice grains but not by much. Bending close, he points out blazes of russets and rich browns mixed with white on tiny but lovely wings. There’s inspiration in known diversity and in the variety that has yet to be admired. And that is indeed something to celebrate.
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What to do: Count the costs
Nature is underpriced, says economist Partha Dasgupta. No one pays the mountainside for the trees it grows or the sea for the fish it provides.
Figuring out the economic values of nature’s services and incorporating them into such indicators may be one way to curb destruction of biodiversity. For without a fair accounting, nature looks like a free lunch, and, Dasgupta says, “If you don’t pay for something, you overuse it.”
To highlight the economic value of nature on a big scale, Dasgupta, of the University of Cambridge in England, is pushing for a nature-inclusive alternative to the Gross Domestic Product as an economic indicator. The GDP reports the total value of human-made goods and services without deductions to reflect losses of capital, especially natural capital. Gross, as opposed to net, is “the rogue word” in Gross Domestic Product, he says.
Dasgupta is now urging nations and the World Bank to monitor another measure that he and others have been refining in recent years. “Comprehensive wealth per capita” adds human and natural assets to tallies of capital, and should provide a much-needed way to see whether growth is sustainable, he argues in the January 12 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
Dasgupta compared GDP to his new measure of wealth per capita for five countries and for sub-Saharan Africa from 1970 to 2000 (see table). All the nations averaged annual increases in GDP, and sub-Saharan Africa was slipping only 0.1 percent a year. But when Dasgupta used his wealth indicator, the figures looked different. He incorporated natural resources and human resources. With this measure, sub-Saharan Africa looked even worse than it had based on GDP, and the nations, except China, slipped from the positive into the negative column.
What’s still missing from the new indicator, Dasgupta says, is a calculation for the complete range of services that ecosystems perform. Many more ecosystems need assessment before there’s enough data to include these factors in a wealth analysis.
Edward Barbier of the University of Wyoming in Laramie, who has studied Thailand’s coastal mangroves, is building up some of the information on ecosystem damage and services. Since 1975 an estimated 50 percent or more of the country’s mangroves have been destroyed to make way for shrimp farms along the coast. The tsunami that bashed the coast in December 2004 raised interest in one of the mangroves’ previously underappreciated services — their ability to soften the wallop of incoming waves.
Barbier factored storm protection into a 2007 economic analysis that speaks to land use and restoration choices. He estimated the net returns for shrimp farms at $1,078 to $1,220 per hectare (in 1996 dollars, based on investing for five years and then abandoning the farm). If farmers were required to restore the farms with their acidified, compacted soil so that the mangrove ecosystem could thrive again, shrimp farming wouldn’t be worthwhile. Restoration costs at least $8,812 per hectare, the researchers calculate.
But, Barbier found, a fully functioning mangrove ecosystem would be worth the restoration cost. The value of the mangroves — including the protection they give to larvae in fisheries, products harvested directly from the mangroves and storm protection — added up to at least $10,158 per hectare.
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What to do: Prioritize wild spaces
Reversing the downward spiral of biodiversity will take more than protecting wild places, but that’s where scientists are starting. Declaring protected zones across a range of terrestrial ecosystems is the one area where clear progress toward saving biodiversity has been made, says an upcoming United Nations report. Now researchers are making strategic picks for sheltered zones to fill in the gaps on land and in the sea.
Just documenting diversity doesn’t guarantee that a place becomes a park. Selecting good bits requires understanding how critters use space and weighing competing claims for it.
One recent approach looks to double the punch of the case for setting aside land by identifying biodiverse places that also provide documented ecosystem services, says Taylor Ricketts, who heads the World Wildlife Fund’s Conservation Science Program, based in Washington, D.C. Though the two don’t match tidily, Ricketts has found a few natural sweet spots important for their variety of living things and for such boons as storing abundant carbon or collecting water.
The Natural Capital Project, based at Stanford University, is refining software to allow fine-scale analyses, and Tanzania, the state of Hawaii and others are already using the software.
To pick worthy spots, scientists must also understand how protectees use space, a big puzzle in the seas. Selecting a reef (Papaha_naumokua_kea marine reserve shown), requires knowledge of where the juvenile fish and corals that populate those waters traveled from.
A modeling technique that includes ocean currents can give a broad picture of dispersing sea creatures, says Eric Treml of the University of Queensland in St. Lucia, Australia. The technique predicts that coral larvae in the Pacific travel some 50 to 150 kilometers before settling in. Of particular interest to conservationists, Treml says, might be reefs that serve as stepping-stones for surfing corals and reef clusters that are especially isolated.
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What to do: Tend the not-so-wild
Maintaining biodiversity by protecting wild or lightly inhabited land alone would overlook the realities of this crowded century, says Mark Goddard of the University of Leeds in England. Humankind’s footprints already cover a lot of space.
In 2008, for the first time, more than half the planet’s people lived in cities. So bits of greenery in yards or urban parks need attention, Goddard and his colleagues argue in the February Trends in Ecology and Evolution. Surveys show that remnants of nature in built-up environments can boast impressive populations of some species. Bumblebees of several kinds proved more abundant in San Francisco’s urban parks than in two parks outside the city. In Britain, the density of one bumblebee species’s nests in suburban yards matched the density in hedgerows in the countryside. And the frog Rana temporaria declined in the English countryside but thrived in towns. If biodiversity can be promoted in a city’s crazy quilt of greenery, the areas could add up, Goddard says.
Conservationists are already experimenting with incentives, pledges and certification programs to coax private landowners to make the most of their yards. In the United Kingdom, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has inspired more than 25,000 people to improve their habitats through the Homes for Wildlife plan. And in the United States, the National Wildlife Federation’s Certified Wildlife Habitat program has reached more than 100,000 properties. Yards and urban parks do present harsh challenges, such as bird-unfriendly cats. But early research has started sorting out what factors might soften urbanization’s impacts.
Even the most artificial of landscapes might be rendered at least a little friendlier to biodiversity, say two forest ecologists at the University of Quebec City in Montreal. Tree plantations, usually created as rows of a single species destined for harvest for timber or pulp, “have a bad reputation,” Alain Paquette says. In the February Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, he and Christian Messier argue that plantations need not become biodiversity deserts. Foresters might leave patches of previous stands for animal habitat as the next stand grows, or tighten up soil preparation to reduce erosion. One hefty change would be to trade monocultures for polyculture plantations growing several tree species.
Foresters have resisted the mix, in part because harvesting gets complicated. But Paquette and Messier report that planting fast-growing hybrid poplar as nursemaid species to shelter slower-growing trees shows promising early results. Last year the researchers set out young trees in test plots of up to a dozen species to find out what kinds grow well together. Paquette says he hopes that experiments that have predicted higher biomass in the presence of greater species diversity will apply to practical forestry, too.
Brandon Keim Wired 25 Feb 10;
That biodiversity’s origin needs uncovering is surprising because the word seems to be everywhere. But scientists still don’t quite understand why one place has more species than another, or fewer.
The traditional explanation — every organism has its niche, competing not with other species but its own — sounds nice, but has holes. According to the tree study, that’s because ecologists haven’t looked for the right niches.
“We take this very complex, high-dimensional thing called the environment, and average out all the variation that organisms really require,” said Jim Clark, a Duke University biologist and author of the study, published Feb. 25 in Science. “Biodiversity is very much a niche response, but it’s just not evident at the species level.”
The central tenet of biodiversity science is that animals compete against their own kind, not against other species. Computer models of inter-species competition soon collapse, with rich diversity inevitably replaced by a few dominant species.
In the real world, that’s not what happens. Species seem to be sharing. So ecologists have developed a theory of niches: Every species has a particular specialty, a set of conditions for which it’s best suited. Some plants do well in shade, others in rocky soil, and so on.
This is true. However, it still doesn’t seem to explain biodiversity. Some ecosystems that are very poor in resources, and consequently don’t seem to have many niches, can still have a high species diversity.
“When you have thousands of species, it’s difficult to come up with ways to partition a limited set of resources or conditions,” said John Silander, a University of Connecticut ecologist who studies South Africa’s Cape Floristic region, a rocky scrubland with as much biodiversity as the Amazon rainforest. “People looking at niche differences always seem to come up short.”
Clark may have found the answer. He has spent the last 18 years studying trees in the southeastern United States and has assembled 22,000 detailed individual accounts, spanning 11 forests and three regions. For each tree, Clark has recorded its precise, on-the-ground (and in-the-ground and above-the-ground) exposure to moisture and nutrients and light, its response, and its proximity to other plants.
Ecologists usually aggregate this information, turning it into average. By going tree-by-tree, Clark found that there are, in fact, enough niches to go around. They’re filled when competition in a species drives individuals to fill them. Biodiversity — or, from another perspective, configurations of organisms that don’t need to compete against each other — is the result of this fierce race for resources.
The niches could only be seen at a fine-grained level, not in the coarse analyses typically used by ecologists. “We take environmental variation and project it down to a very small set of indices. Light becomes average light per year. Moisture becomes average moisture per year. It’s not just light and water and nitrogen — it’s variations of each of those things, in different dimensions,” said Clark.
“The approach he’s taken is marvelous. Nobody has looked at biodiversity in this fashion,” said Silander, who was not involved in the study. “He has the data needed to address the different hypotheses.”
Silander said the approach will likely be extended beyond the world of trees. Understanding the essential dynamics of biodiversity could improve ecosystem management, in applications from conservation to farming.
“It’s hard to find a place on Earth that doesn’t have some level of management going on,” said Silander. “We have to understand how species interact.”
“Ecologists spent a lot of time in the 20th century trying to find ways to reduce the complexity of natural systems so that we could understand them,” said Miles Silman, a Wake Forest University ecologist who was not involved in the study. “Clark has shown that the complexity that we were trying to reduce is very likely essential to understanding” biodiversity.
David Stanway, PlanetArk 26 Feb 10;
BEIJING - The United Nations Development Program will pay cash to struggling Mongolian herders to clean up the remains of millions of livestock killed during the country's worst winter in decades, it said on Thursday.
Mongolia's bitter winter, known as the zud, has blanketed much of the country in deep snow and killed at least 2.7 million heads of livestock, posing health risks once the snow melts, the UNDP said.
"Most of these areas don't have running water or access to sanitation anyway and these carcasses need to be cleaned up as quickly as possible so we have less disease," Rana Flowers, UNICEF representative in Ulan Bator, said earlier this month.
She said many starving herders had also been selling the dead animals on local meat markets, causing further hygiene problems.
The UNDP said the scheme would focus on small herders in remote regions who have been hit particularly badly by the winter.
Another three million animals are expected to die before the cold season ends in June, and the government has already requested $4 million in UN aid in order to dispose of the carcasses.
Mongolia's pastures represent only 20 percent of the country's GDP but support over 40 percent of its population, and the crippling weather has left large numbers of nomads stranded without fuel or food, aid workers have said.
(Editing by Jacqueline Wong)
Countries are rushing to sign food deals to secure future supplies
Reme Ahmad, Straits Times 27 Feb 10;
MANUFACTURING is not the only sector being outsourced in these changing economic times. Farming itself is being farmed out.
China, South Korea, India, and some Gulf states including Saudi Arabia have been busy signing deals to ensure that there is food on the table for generations to come.
They are leasing or planning to lease huge tracts of farm land in Africa, Asia and Latin America to plant rice, wheat and other crops which will be shipped home after they are harvested.
According to estimates by the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute last year, the total value of farmland deals signed in recent years, along with those in the pipeline, ranges from US$20 billion (S$28 billion) to US$30 billion.
These outsourced farms cover a total area of about 20 million ha. That adds up to 20 per cent of the entire amount of arable land in the European Union.
Cash-rich countries say that while they keep their own populations fed, such deals provide billions of dollars of funds for poor governments and create jobs in rural economies.
They also gain from infrastructure projects such as roads and ports.
Mr Abdul Rahim Khan, a farmer and general secretary of the Sarhad Chamber of Agriculture in Pakistan, said Gulf companies have signalled interest in the country's farmland.
'There is no risk in it as we will only lease out our lands we are unable to use,' he was quoted as saying by Pakistan's The News daily recently. 'We are not selling out our precious lands to the foreigners.'
Some governments actually canvass for foreign investments in their farmlands. Indonesia, for example, is targeting one of its most remote regions, Papua, for such deals.
But not everyone, including local farmers, are happy with the idea of foreigners coming in to cultivate their land and then shipping the harvest away.
News that Madagascar had agreed to lease about half of its arable land to grow corn for South Koreans caused a backlash. It led to a coup that overthrew the island nation's president last March. The new Madagascar leader promptly scrapped the deal with Daewoo.
In some parts of Africa and Asia, critics are calling this wave of investments 'neo-colonialism', 'new feudalism' or just plain robbery.
The phenomenon was driven partly by the spiralling prices of food in 2008 that made many nations realise their vulnerability to food shortages.
According to a study by a United Nations body, the world's population is expected to jump to 9.1 billion by 2050 from 6.8 billion today - an increase of 34 per cent.
Food supplies will be strained unless more crops are grown. Then there are the issues of water scarcity and climate change to grapple with.
The looming shortages are expected to be aggravated by the practice in some countries to plant crops for biofuel instead of food. Sugar and corn are two examples.
'The inventories of food are the lowest, not in years but in decades. Supply is going to remain down since we have serious production problems,' Mr Jim Rogers, a global investor, was quoted as saying recently by India's Business Standard newspaper.
'At the same time, people are eating more and we are burning some of our foods as fuels.'
Foreign farmers welcome in Papua
Official cites 2.5 million ha of land ideal for cultivation in Merauke
Wahyudi Soeriaatmadja, Straits Times 27 Feb 10;
JAKARTA: Indonesia is about to try turning some of its vast tracts of fertile land into the colour of money.
The Agricultural Ministry is putting the finishing touches on a programme aimed at getting foreign and local investors to mass-produce crops both for the Indonesian market and for export.
The programme will allow foreign and local investors to lease and manage food estates in Merauke, a regency in the eastern-most province of Papua.
Senior ministry official Hilman Manan was quoted by Agence France-Presse last week as saying that Merauke had 2.5 million ha of land which was ideal for cultivation.
'The area is flat and has a good climate. Its soil is appropriate,' he said.
'Sumatra is already congested with other plantations...and Kalimantan is full of mining areas and many plantations.'
Japan, South Korea and some Middle Eastern countries have expressed interest in the programme, he said.
Large-scale farming by Indonesian and foreign firms has been going on for years. But it has mostly been confined to oil palm. Commodities such as corn and sugar cane are still imported.
In recent years, land-scarce countries have tried to lease Indonesian soil to grow crops for their own people.
Saudi Arabia's Bin Laden group last year reportedly considered developing up to two million ha of farmland in Papua to grow basmati rice. The US$4.3 billion (S$6 billion) plan apparently stalled in October because of land acquisition problems.
Earlier this month, the partly government-owned Minerals Energy Commodities Holdings from the United Arab Emirates said it was keen on renting 100,000ha of land in Kalimantan to produce rice, sugar cane, oil palm and fruit.
On Thursday, a ministry spokesman told The Straits Times that local governments in Merauke, home to only 175,000 people, were eager for foreign investment and for the estate scheme to take off.
'We cannot do this mass farming on Java because we need to protect small farmers,' he added.
He was echoing earlier concerns that the scheme, if launched nationwide, would crush small-scale farmers in Java, Bali and Nusa Tenggara.
There are an estimated 42.6 million small-scale farmers, mostly in heavily populated Java. About 70 per cent of Indonesia's food supply comes from the island.
Ministry officials say the Merauke food estate will have a mix of crops - from rice padi, maize, soya bean and sugar cane to oil palm. Indonesia is now the world's top producer of palm oil.
To make sure that the estates are not seen by residents of the areas as a form of 'land grab', investors will be given only up to 100,000ha each to develop, with a 35-year land-use lease. This can be extended later.
Investment firms will be given tax and custom duty breaks but they have to be joint ventures, with foreigners holding a 49 per cent stake at most.
'We will also mandate the amount of produce that can be exported and what has to stay in the domestic market,' said the Agricultural Ministry spokesman.
Businesses such as the PT Bangun Tjipta Saran conglomerate have said that they are raring to grow corn and sugar cane. But they say they desperately need the government's help to develop infrastructure such as roads, a port and new airport runways.
Food production to stay largely domestic
Concern in Russia and Africa over Chinese farming in their lands
Grace Ng, Straits Times 27 Feb 10;
BEIJING: While food security may be a looming problem, the key is still to plant more at home, a top Chinese official said this week.
China is struggling to feed its 1.3 billion people - who make up about 22 per cent of the world's population - on just one-tenth of the earth's arable land.
As pollution and overuse of chemicals like pesticides erode the soil's fertility, the country is facing growing threats to its food security.
China's solution to resolving the issue of food security is to focus on domestic production, said Mr Han Jun, a top rural policy adviser to Beijing, at a press briefing on China's rural policy on Tuesday.
'The basic policy (of the central government) is to balance supply and demand of agricultural production,' he said.
'We do not feel that going to rent and farm land in other countries... is a reliable policy option. It is not right.'
Last December, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev caused a furore when he publicly said that China was interested in renting one million hectares of farmland in his country.
This sparked two days of demonstrations by locals in the commercial capital of Almaty ahead of Chinese President Hu Jintao's visit to the country. The protesters waved placards saying 'Mr Hu Jintao, we will not give up Kazakh land'.
Similar fears about Beijing's intentions in securing food from overseas have also sprouted in Brazil - where more than 6,600ha of soya beans are being farmed by Chinese - as well as in African countries like Uganda where some 350 Chinese are cultivating 4,000ha of land.
Among the most famous groups of Chinese farmers are the 'Baoding villagers' from northern Hebei province. Over the past decade, more than 13,000 of them have settled in Africa and even married locals and raised families there.
Indeed, concerns are rising among China's neighbours like Russia, as well as in Africa, about the influx of Chinese farmers on their land.
That has prompted speculation that Beijing is dispatching an army of farmers to harvest food on foreign soil.
Mr Han acknowledged that some local governments such as Hebei and Chongqing have encouraged rural Chinese to migrate overseas to farm.
But he insisted that this trend does not stem from official policy.
'Chinese rural workers are the world's most hard-working and most able to endure hardship,' he said. 'As long as there is money to be earned, they will do the work - no matter how difficult, how dirty, how dangerous.'
Mr Han was responding to a question from a Belarus journalist about Beijing's policy on overseas farming amid growing concerns from neighbours like Russia and Kazakhstan where thousands of Chinese farmers have rented land to plant crops.
These Chinese farmers are planting vegetables for local consumption, and not to feed Chinese mouths, Mr Han noted.
Mr Han, a top researcher at a rural economy think-tank advising China's State Council, insisted that Beijing did not have a policy of encouraging people to become landlords in other countries or to rent land on a large scale.
'We have also taken concerns of neighbours seriously,' he said, noting that the government has told companies dispatching Chinese workers abroad to improve their skills and to remind them to abide strictly by the laws and regulations in the host country.
Land for hire
Straits Times 27 Feb 10;
# Egypt runs farms growing corn in Zambia, rice in Niger, and vegetables in Tanzania. Now it plans to grow wheat in Uganda.
# Pakistan's Board of Investment plans to put about 9.1 million ha of farmland up for lease to foreign countries and companies.
# An Australian investment group, BKK Partners, says its client is targeting 100,000ha of Cambodian land to grow rice, bananas, sugar cane, palm oil and teak. Investments worth US$600 million (S$847 million) planned.
# Jordan is planning a joint grain venture with Kazakhstan, involving US$50 million in investments.
# Investment group Saudi Star is eyeing 350,000ha in Ethiopia to plant rice, maize, sugar cane and oilseeds.
# Indonesia is targeting 1.6 million ha on Papua island for agriculture projects.
# Libya is planning farmland projects worth US$500 million in Brazil.
# United Arab Emirates' Minerals Energy Commodities Holdings is in talks to lease 100,000ha of farmland in Kalimantan, where the company has a railway and coal project worth about US$1 billion.
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