The Bird Ecology Study Group in review: 2005-2010
from Bird Ecology Study Group
A brief look at Seletar shore
from wonderful creation
Saving mangroves at Pulau Tekong continues!
from wild shores of singapore and Work on the Sungei Buloh Masterplan begins
Straits Times Forum 6 Jan 11;
AN INFOBOX ('Rare and endangered species in Singapore'; Dec 25) that accompanied a recent report got me thinking about naturalist Ivan Polunin, who died last month.
One of the species mentioned was the Singapore freshwater crab (Johora singaporensis), found only in Singapore.
A stream that runs past the Polunins' home is one of the few habitats for this crab, a living national treasure.
When modifications to the headwaters of the stream located in a military area cut off the flow of water downstream, a group of volunteers and researchers, together with help from the Polunin family and the Ministry of Defence, tried to salvage this sub-population until water flow could be diverted and restored.
The habitat conservation challenges of this unique crustacean show that maximising the survival of our natural heritage not only involves the efforts of a single statutory board, but also requires changed mindsets about nature across multiple ministries, corporations, and private and public landowners.
While we pay our respects to nature lovers such as the late Mrs Lee Kuan Yew and Dr Polunin, let us translate that respect into action and protect what these pioneers would have loved our children to inherit.
Chong Kwek Yan
Seth Borenstein, Associated Press Yahoo News 7 Jan 11;
WASHINGTON – First, the blackbirds fell out of the sky on New Year's Eve in Arkansas. In recent days, wildlife have mysteriously died in big numbers: 2 million fish in the Chesapeake Bay, 150 tons of red tilapia in Vietnam, 40,000 crabs in Britain and other places across the world.
Blogs connected the deadly dots, joking about the "aflockalypse" while others saw real signs of something sinister, either biblical or environmental.
The reality, say biologists, is that these mass die-offs happen all the time and usually are unrelated.
Federal records show they happen on average every other day somewhere in North America. Usually, we don't notice them and don't try to link them to each other.
"They generally fly under the radar," said ornithologist John Wiens, chief scientist at the California research institution PRBO Conservation Science.
Since the 1970s, the U.S. Geological Survey's National Wildlife Health Center in Wisconsin has tracked mass deaths among birds, fish and other critters, said wildlife disease specialist LeAnn White. At times the sky and the streams just turn deadly. Sometimes it's disease, sometimes pollution. Other times it's just a mystery.
In the past eight months, the USGS has logged 95 mass wildlife die-offs in North America and that's probably a dramatic undercount, White said. The list includes 900 some turkey vultures that seemed to drown and starve in the Florida Keys, 4,300 ducks killed by parasites in Minnesota, 1,500 salamanders done in by a virus in Idaho, 2,000 bats that died of rabies in Texas, and the still mysterious death of 2,750 sea birds in California.
On average, 163 such events are reported to the federal government each year, according to USGS records. And there have been much larger die-offs than the 3,000 blackbirds in Arkansas. Twice in the summer of 1996, more than 100,000 ducks died of botulism in Canada.
"Depending on the species, these things don't even get reported," White said.
Weather — cold and wet weather like in Arkansas New Year's Eve when the birds fell out of the sky — is often associated with mass bird deaths, ornithologists say. Pollution, parasites and disease also cause mass deaths. Some are even blaming fireworks for the blackbird deaths.
So what's happening this time?
Blame technology, says famed Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson. With the Internet, cell phones and worldwide communications, people are noticing events, connecting the dots more.
"This instant and global communication, it's just a human instinct to read mystery and portents of dangers and wondrous things in events that are unusual," Wilson told The Associated Press on Thursday. "Not to worry, these are not portents that the world is about to come to an end."
Wilson and the others say instant communications — especially when people can whip out smart phones to take pictures of critter carcasses and then post them on the Internet — is giving a skewed view of what is happening in the environment.
The irony is that mass die-offs — usually of animals with large populations — are getting the attention while a larger but slower mass extinction of thousands of species because of human activity is ignored, Wilson said.
AP Researcher Julie Reed Bell contributed to this report.
USGS: http://www.nwhc.usgs.gov/mortality_events/ongoing.jsp
Mass bird and fish deaths stoke curiosity
Kerry Sheridan Yahoo News 6 Jan 11;
WASHINGTON (AFP) – Five thousand dead blackbirds rained from the sky on the first day of the New Year in Arkansas. Then more dead birds fell in other states. Then huge fish kills were discovered in multiple US waterways.
And suddenly it became a worldwide phenomenon, with reports of mass die-offs of birds and fish in Sweden, Britain, Japan, Thailand, Brazil and beyond.
Doves, jellyfish, snapper, jackdaws... it seemed no species was immune.
Conspiracy theorists, doomsdayers and religious extremists warned that the end was nigh.
Could it be astronauts testing a potent sound beam to ward off aliens? The US military experimenting with satellite-powered energy weapons?
What about chemical sprays, meteor showers, or earthquakes activating pollutants from the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico?
"Birds" surged to the most searched term on The New York Times website.
Religious bloggers loaded their sites with Bible verse, Hosea 4:1-3: "The land dries up, and all who live in it waste away; the beasts of the field, the birds in the sky and the fish in the sea are swept away."
But as speculation roiled the blogosphere, wildlife experts rolled their eyes.
"It is not that unusual," said Kristen Schuler, a scientist at the US Geological Survey's National Wildlife Health Center.
"There is nothing apocalyptic or anything that is necessarily out of the ordinary for what we would see in any given week."
Indeed, the USGS keeps a log on its website with reports of groups of birds dying each week, averaging from dozens to thousands.
Regarding the bird deaths in Arkansas, where the local custom is to set off fireworks to mark New Year's Eve, officials determined it was likely that the noise set off a deadly bird panic.
"It appears unusually loud noises, reported shortly before the birds began to fall, caused the birds to flush from a roost," the USGS National Wildlife Health Center said in a statement posted on the Arkansas Fish and Game Commission website.
"Additional fireworks in the area may have forced the birds to fly at a lower altitude than normal and hit houses, vehicles, trees and other objects. Blackbirds have poor night vision and typically do not fly at night."
In Louisiana, Schuler said it looked like cold weather might have killed off about 500 birds.
Meanwhile in Maryland, locals were spooked by reports of some two million dead fish in the Chesapeake Bay.
But officials were quick to assuage those concerns, saying the deaths were a result of an unusual cold snap, combined with an overpopulation of a species known as spot fish.
"Natural causes appear to be the reason for the deaths of the fish," said a statement by the Maryland Department of the Environment.
"Spot may have difficulty surviving in colder temperatures, and the species? susceptibility to winter kills is well-documented," it said, noting that surface water temperatures last month were the coldest in 25 years.
As for the bird and fish deaths elsewhere in the world, many were still under investigation.
According to the National Wildlife Federation's Doug Inkley, the most frequent cause of mass death in birds is disease, though pollution and "just plain accidents" can also trigger large scale die-offs. Often, people just are not aware of them.
"Most of the time these areas are not near human habitation such as in forests or in the woods," he said on CNN.
But in today's Internet Age, when hardly anything remains secret, word of mass bird deaths has spread with unparalleled speed.
"In 1960 if a bunch of birds started falling from the sky it may have been noticed by some people. It may have gotten reported in the local paper, but it may never have gotten any further than that," said Robert Thompson, professor of pop culture at Syracuse University.
"Now some of these kinds of stories, because they get out there on the Internet, if they are compelling enough they can immediately make this jump to national news," he said.
"Let's face it, big quantities of birds falling from the sky or fish going belly up is a pretty compelling story."
Certification granted to controversial fisheries has prompted severe criticism of the sustainable fisheries organisation
Lewis Smith guardian.co.uk 6 Jan 11;
The body which certifies that fish have been caught sustainably has been accused of "duping" consumers by giving its eco-label to fisheries where stocks are tumbling.
The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) manages the labelling system that tells consumers which species of fish they can buy safe in the knowledge they aren't destroying stocks.
It recently celebrated the 100th award of its eco-label – to the Barents Sea cod fishery – but a series of decisions allowing controversial fisheries to be granted the prized MSC label has prompted severe criticism of the organisation.
Richard Page, a Greenpeace oceans campaigner, said decisions to certify some fisheries "seriously undermine" the MSC's credibility.
"I will go as far as to say consumers are being duped. They think they are buying fish that are sustainable and can eat them with a clean conscience."
Among the most controversial rulings is the award of an MSC label to the Ross Sea Antarctic toothfish fishery which is still regarded by scientists and the industry as an exploratory fishery. The species is so little understood that researchers still do not know even basics such as where the fish spawns.
Others include krill in the Antarctic, , tuna and swordfish off the US coast, pollock in the Eastern Bering Sea where stock levels fell 64% between 2004 and 2009, and Pacific hake which suffered an 89% fall in biomass since 1989.
Chris Pincetich, a marine biologist with the Turtle Island Restoration Network, said: "The MSC has rushed to accept applications from hundreds of fisheries around the globe in order to grow their business and network. Many of those are actually viewed by scientists as unsustainable. They should really take a closer look before they even engage with those fisheries."
Page said of the toothfish decision: "It should never have been up for certification in the first place. There just isn't sufficient information to say whether it's sustainable or not."
James Simpson, of the MSC, insisted all assessments were "scientifically robust" and said they are designed to ensure the "biological and ecological" components of each fishery are not compromised. Moreover, it introduces better levels of protection to stock levels than might otherwise be found in fisheries.
He recognised, however, that "for some of our critics, the MSC test of sustainability is not high enough" and said: "Behind the controversies there is evidence of real environmental benefits occurring – many of them driven by fisheries' desire to attain and keep their MSC certificates.
Fidelis E. Satriastanti Jakarta Globe 6 Jan 11;
With a moratorium on new forestry concessions facing delays, an activist said on Thursday that even when in place it would have little impact on helping to preserve the environment.
The country’s forests have been in the spotlight since Indonesia signed a $1 billion funding agreement with Norway last year on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, known as REDD Plus, a UN- backed mechanism on carbon trading.
The key part of the agreement is Indonesia’s commitment to implement a moratorium on new concessions in natural forests and peatland for two years, starting on Jan. 1 this year.
However, the government is still struggling to provide the legal basis for the agreement, with at least two different drafts currently being studied by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
The two drafts were submitted by the Forestry Ministry and the REDD Task Force, established by Yudhoyono to prepare institutions to implement REDD projects.
But Nordin, director of Save Our Borneo, a nongovernmental organization based in Kalimantan, said he doubted that either draft would prove effective.
“This moratorium will not be enough to improve the issuance of permits in the country or to reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation in the way they want to because, if it’s only applicable to primary forests, then what is the use?” he said.
“Primary or virgin forests only account for around 3 percent [of all forests]. The rest is what we call ‘logged areas,’ or forest areas that have been managed before.”
While the Forestry Ministry draft only covers conversion permits for primary forests and peatland, the draft from the REDD Task Force is much more specific about the types of permits that should no longer be issued, including those for logging, land lease, plantations and mining. It also includes secondary forests.
“You could say that this [REDD Task Force] draft is trying to solve the problem,” Nordin said.
“But this is a massive issue when you’re talking about forestry permits in Indonesia. We are talking about a mafia here, a mafia that involves almost everyone here. If one gets hit, everyone gets hit too, and that’s why they will try to protect one another.”
Hadi Daryanto, the Forestry Ministry’s director general of forestry management, said in an earlier interview with the Jakarta Globe that the ministry was already in the process of implementing a moratorium.
“It’s not something new to us, in fact, we had already taken steps before the draft was signed,” Hadi said.
He cited nine companies — seven in Papua and two in Gorontalo, on Sulawesi Island — that had been given principal permits to open forest areas for palm oil plantations last year.
These companies have since been told that their forest areas are to become High Conservation Value Forest areas, which are conservation areas within managed lands.
“Of the at least 380,000 hectares accorded to those nine companies, around 20 to 60 percent of that should be allocated for HCVF where they will not be allowed to cut down any trees,” Hadi said.
“That means that we have put a moratorium on primary forests in the converted forest areas.”
Nordin praised the ministry’s move but pointed out that trees could be cut down without the need of a permit from the central government.
“The permit to convert forest areas starts with a location permit issued by district heads,” he said.
“Then they must ask for a permit to release the forest areas for conversion from the Forestry Ministry. In addition, they also need also to obtain land ownership and business permits.”
But in practice, he said, companies could begin exploiting the forests with only the permit from the district head in hand.
“Or worse, they could just not apply for land ownership, which would mean they don’t have to pay taxes,” he said.
Norway Agreement in Limbo, Waiting for SBY to Sign
Fidelis E. Satriastanti Jakarta Globe 7 Jan 11;
Environmental groups have lambasted the government for failing to enact a much-hyped moratorium on granting logging concessions due to start on Jan. 1.
The two-year moratorium on granting new concessions in peatland and primary forests is part of a bilateral agreement with Norway, in exchange for which Indonesia will receive $1 billion in funding for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD-Plus) schemes.
In order for the moratorium to be legally binding, it must be backed by a presidential decree, which has still not been signed. Joko Arif, a forest campaigner for Greenpeace Southeast Asia, criticized President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s lack of leadership in deciding which of the draft decrees drawn up by various government bodies should be signed.
“The REDD task force is under his command, as are the ministries, so how is it that they’re competing with each other and causing confusion by proposing several different drafts?” Joko said on Friday.
“The president’s leadership here must be questioned because these are all institutions under his command. He should take a firm decision on this moratorium if he’s serious about it,” he added.
Bernadinus Steni, program coordinator for climate change and REDD from the Association for Community and Ecology-Based Law Reform (HuMa), said that while a presidential decree was necessary for domestic enforcement of the moratorium, there would be no international legal ramifications for Indonesia if the decree was not signed.
“We’ve basically already broken the agreement by failing to obey the deadline for the moratorium, but there won’t be any legal consequences for us because international law doesn’t really consider a letter of intent to be binding,” he said.
However, he said failure to act on the agreement could affect the disbursement of funding from the Norwegian government.
“That’s what happened with Brazil,” Bernadinus said, referring to the $1 billion Amazon Trust Fund, also set up by Norway, to protect the South American rainforest.
“That’s the strongest penalty Indonesia could face, which would mean we’d have to renegotiate the deal,” he added.
Heru Prasetyo, secretary of the government’s REDD task force, said his office was going ahead with preparations to implement the moratorium.
“Everyone knows we’re still waiting for the president’s decision,” he said.
Reuters AlertNet 5 Jan 11;
LOS ANGELES, Jan 5 (Reuters Life!) - U.S. customs officials said on Wednesday they had intercepted a shipment of rice at Los Angeles International Airport containing a beetle considered one of the world's most dangerous pests.
Agents found live adult and larvae of khapra beetle in a shipment of Indian rice arriving in a shipment of personal effects from Saudi Arabia last week, U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Jaime Ruiz said in a written statement.
Entomologists from the U.S. Department of Agriculture identified the insects as the khapra beetle, one of the world's most destructive pests of grain products and seeds.
Ruiz said established infections of the insect were difficult to control because of its ability to live without food for long periods of time and relative tolerance to surface insecticides and fumigants.
The shipment was quarantined and safeguarded according to USDA guidelines, Ruiz said, and destroyed under U.S. Customs and Border Patrol supervision. (Reporting by Dan Whitcomb)
Yahoo News 6 Jan 11;
WASHINGTON (AFP) – The huge quantity of methane released in the Gulf of Mexico last year during the worst oil spill in US history was ingested by bacteria in four months, according to a scientific study published Thursday.
Methane made up 20 percent of the huge plume of crude oil that escaped from a broken pipeline nearly one mile (1,600 meters) below the Gulf surface, after the BP-operated Deepwater Horizon platform exploded on April 20, killing 11 workers.
The leak, the worst oil spill in US history, was finally plugged on July 15, after spewing millions of gallons of crude into the Gulf.
"The methane was completely consumed by early September... it happened very quickly and it was a surprise to us," University of California Santa Barbara geochemistry professor David Valentine told AFP.
Valentine, one of the lead authors of the study in Thursday's edition of the journal Science, said the rapid "digestion" of the methane by bacteria showed the vital role microorganisms likely play in preventing greenhouse gases at the bottom of the ocean from entering the earth's atmosphere and contributing to global warming.
"They do serve an important function, and as we see here under certain conditions these bacteria can be very effective at preventing the methane from reaching the atmosphere," he added.
Valentine said research he published in September-October showed that other species of bacteria also consumed the ethane and propane released by the blast.
Bacteria also consumed some of the crude oil that was spilled in the Gulf, but researchers have yet to determine the quantities, he said, adding that chemical dispersants facilitated its absorption by the microorganisms.
In contrast to crude oil, methane and other gases naturally dissolve in ocean water before they are ingested by bacteria.
Gulf of Mexico oil leak may give Arctic climate clues
Richard Black BBC News 6 Jan 11;
Almost all of the methane released in the Gulf of Mexico oil leak was quickly swallowed by bacteria - which may give clues to climate change in the Arctic.
Writing in journal Science, US researchers report that methane-absorbing bacteria multiplied in the Gulf following the April accident.
The Arctic contains vast stores of methane, and its release could quickly accelerate warming around the world.
But scientists caution that the regions are very different.
The research ship Pisces, operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), made several voyages into the Gulf in the months following the leak.
"There were thousands of different types of molecule coming out of the well, and by far the most abundant was methane," said research leader John Kessler, from Texas A and M University.
"In fact, by weight, 30% of it was methane.
"Normally we have to go around and study what's seeping naturally out of the sea floor; but this release was massive and localised."
Virtually all of the methane remained suspended and dissolved in sea water at depths of around one kilometre.
Bacteria in the water that have evolved to process naturally-seeping methane apparently increased in number, taking oxygen from the water as they did so, and mopping up the Deepwater Horizon's cargo.
The team's calculations indicate that less than one hundred thousandth of the gas released made it into the atmosphere.
Warming warning
Methane is the second most important gaseous component of the man-made portion of the greenhouse effect.
And vast quantities of it - no-one knows how much, though some estimates put it as 3,000 times the current amount in the atmosphere - lie trapped in the sea bed around the Arctic. There are other deposits around the world as well.
Some see this methane hydrate as a potential future energy source.
Others fear that if it escapes as the seas warm, it will act to amplify global warming.
In principle, the Deepwater Horizon research could help inform scientists about how serious methane releases could be - how much would be processed in sea water, and how much would make it into the atmosphere.
"In the Arctic, there definitely would be some sort of microbial response; and in most places on the sea floor that have the capacity for massive release, there will be some seepage that will help to populate the water with microbes that could respond," Dr Kessler told BBC News.
However, he cautioned, there are big differences between the Gulf of Mexico leak and potential methane sources in the Arctic.
Ed Dlugokencky, who runs Noaa's global registry of methane concentrations but was not involved in the Gulf research, agreed.
"The implications of this work for release of methane from hydrates likely only applies to deep waters, not areas where hydrates exist on shallow continental shelves such as the East Siberian Arctic shelf," he said.
"There, water is only about 40m deep, and bubbling is an important mechanism for transport of methane from the sediments to the atmosphere."
The shallower the water, the less time methane would spend in it, making absorption less likely. Temperature, currents and the types of bacteria present could be other factors important in determining how much makes it into the atmosphere.
However, Dr Dlugokencky noted that evidence of vast, rapid releases of methane from the sea floor has not been seen in ice-core records, which now trace Earth history back about 800,000 years.
Research ships make regular cruises to the Arctic and have regularly found evidence of methane bubbling into the atmopshere.
But, said Professor Graham Westbrook from the UK's University of Birmingham, there is still a lot of basic science to be done.
"We don't know the distribution of the methane hydrates - we don't know how pervasive they are in the region," he said.
"And in places like the shelf areas north of Siberia, where releases have been found, it's not clear how much of this is coming from the sea bed and how much is brought into the sea by rivers.
"Also, we don't know how much of the releases we see are down to anthropogenic warming in the last couple of centuries, and how much relates to the natural warming we've seen since the end of the last Ice Age."
Yahoo News 6 Jan 11;
NAIROBI (AFP) – Kenya on Thursday outlawed the manufacture and import of plastic bags from March for damaging the environment, the environmental agency said.
"We are telling Kenyans that we need these changes," acting NEMA agency chief Ayub Macharia said.
The ban is on bags up to 0.06 millimetres (60 microns) in thickness which winds often carry hundreds of kilometres (miles) from their source of origin.
"Our country has many colours and when God was creating the world, he only allowed plants to give us flowers, so when our landscape becomes flooded with many artificial flowers of varied colours due to poor management of plastic bags and wrappers, then it becomes a problem," said Macharia.
The Kenya Bureau of Standards has been tasked with overseeing the change "through factory inspection and ports of entry surveillance and monitoring,"
A 2007 attempt at cleaning up the country by banning the manufacture and import of bags of up to 0.03 millimetres (30 microns) widely failed.
Of all five members of the East African Community -- Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda -- only Rwanda has so far successfully banned all plastic bags since 2008, and replaced them with paper bags.
* South African coal diverted from China
* Spot enquiries rise for replacement cargoes
Jackie Cowhig and Fayen Wong Reuters AlertNet 6 Jan 11;
LONDON/SHANGHAI, Jan 6 (Reuters) - Big coal buyers across Asia scrambled to find replacement supplies on Thursday as mines in top producer Australia faced weeks under flood water.
Thermal coal, burned in power stations and the bulk of the world market, is tight. Utilities in Japan and South Korea, among others, have been frantic to keep their plants humming, traders said.
Some have managed to snap up South African coal destined for China.
"The number of phone calls we've had today even compared with yesterday, from buyers looking for replacement cargoes is unbelievable," one Asia-based coal trader said.
Japanese utilities were the most active in the hunt on Thursday, traders said, but they were not alone.
"South Korean utilities are getting quite desperate for spot supplies because they tend to have their inventory very lean and leave very little margin for errors," said a Singapore-based coal trader.
Of all the South Korean utilities, industry sources said Korea Midland Power Co Ltd was the most affected. Its peers were considering leasing coal to KOMIPO, as regulations prohibit utilities from reselling their fuel.
Indian traders affected by force majeure declarations on low energy content thermal coal from Queensland's Dalrymple Bay said they were struggling to find alternative supplies from Indonesia, South Africa or Russia.
Thermal coal has been less affected by the Queensland floods than coking coal, used in making steel, which has brought a seperate set of problems for the region's mills.
Thermal prices have rallied on worldwide disruption and have risen further on the floods.
Neil Fullick and Naveen Thukral Reuters 6 Jan 11;
SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Record high food prices are moving to the top of the agenda for many Asian policymakers as the prospect of higher inflation in 2011 poses a major threat to the region's strong revival from the global financial crisis.
The United Nations' food agency (FAO) said on Wednesday that food prices hit a record high last month, moving beyond levels of 2008, when riots broke out in countries as far afield as Egypt, Cameroon and Haiti.
Food inflation in many Asian countries, including China and India, is already in double digits, raising fears that the price pressures could spread more broadly to other sectors and pose a threat to both economic and social stability as millions of Asians live in poverty.
The FAO said sugar and meat were at their highest since its records began in 1990. Prices were at their highest since 2008 crisis levels for wheat, rice, corn and other cereals.
Benchmark prices solely in Asia for rice suggested a different picture.
The region's staple food now stands at $535 (£346) per tonne -- less than half its 2008 levels of more than $1,000 a tonne that prompted several governments at the time to impose curbs on exports to protect their domestic markets.
However, the fact that rice is far from the lofty levels of the 2007/2008 food crisis should offer no comfort for policymakers.
"I wouldn't be terribly surprised if 2011 resembles in many ways 2008," said Frederic Neumann, regional economist at HSBC in Hong Kong.
"Food price inflation could really go into double digits across the region and rise to such an extent that it undermines the purchasing power of households and as a result then slows consumer demand and overall economic growth," he said.
"And that's a problem for Asian economic growth. But really it's also a problem for the rest of the world because as the Asian consumer increasingly is helping to stabilise world demand, it's actually a challenge of wider global significance."
Surging food prices have proved a trigger for social protests in the past, forcing governments to cave in to demands for action. They were a factor in the fall from power of Indonesia's long-term autocrat Suharto in 1998.
Last year, wheat futures prices rose 47 percent, buoyed by a series of weather events including drought in Russia and its Black Sea neighbours. U.S. corn rose more than 50 percent and U.S. soybeans jumped 34 percent.
PRICES TO KEEP RISING
Luke Matthews, a commodity strategist at Commonwealth Bank of Australia, said there was little reason to expect any let up in the global rally in food prices.
"We do believe that the structural drivers behind high food prices are likely to persist for some time," he said. "We have tight stocks in the corn and sugar markets, we have world wheat stocks susceptible to turn lower with forecasts of La Nina to persist for the next 3 months or so."
La Nina is a weather pattern that brings cooling temperatures, resulting in higher rainfall in Australia, a major wheat and sugar exporter, and parts of Southeast Asia.
The structural drivers make food commodities and the stocks of food companies hot investment sectors this year, said Terence Wong, an analyst at brokerage DMG in Singapore.
He cited vegetable grower and processor China Minzhong and animal drug maker China Animal Healthcare as his top tips in the local market.
Fan Cheuk Wan, head of Asia Pacific research at the private banking division of Credit Suisse, favours Indonesian palm oil firm Indofood Agri Resources and suggested investors avoid companies that could get hit by price controls.
World Bank President Robert Zoellick urged governments in a newspaper opinion column to avoid protectionist measures as food prices rise and called upon the Group of 20 leading economies to take steps to make sure the poor get adequate food supply.
Still, Asia's rapidly rising consumption as developing economies such as India, China and Indonesia emerge on the world stage is a major factor behind the rise in food prices.
China, for example, is expected to buy 60 percent of internationally traded soybeans in 2010/11, double its purchases of four years earlier.
Several countries have implemented measures to try to keep food prices under control, worried about a repeat of the 2007/2008 crisis, when surging commodity prices prompted a jump in inflation and left many countries with a deep trade deficit.
India's food prices rose to a one-year high of more than 18 percent in the year to the end of December, data on Thursday showed. That, along with rising fuel prices, is the main reason analysts expect the central bank to raise rates this month.
The Indian government has operated a range of measures for years to ensure stable food prices, but since last year has boosted the release of national stocks of grains and has pledged to continue with duty-free imports of crude vegetable oils.
In China, several cities have implemented direct controls to limit food price increases and the central government has vowed to eliminate speculation in the country's commodities markets.
The cost of food rose 11.7 percent in the year to November, while non-food items were up just 1.9 percent. But, reflecting concerns that inflation is creeping beyond food to the wider economy, consumer goods prices and housing costs showed clear jumps.
Fu Bingtao, an economist with the Agricultural Bank of China in Beijing, said in a report that grains, the country's most important food, would rise in price in 2011 by 10 percent, adding to an 11.7 percent rise in 2010.
"Speculative trading and hoarding of specific agricultural products may continue," he said.
Indonesia's president called on Thursday for households to plant food to help combat inflation. Chillies, used widely in Indonesian cooking, have risen fivefold in the past year.
POLICY RESPONSE
Higher interest rates do little to ease pressure on food prices. Demand is inelastic because people have to eat, but current price pressures are largely supply-led, so tighter monetary policy would not directly help.
The danger, however, is that food inflation spreads to the wider economy.
"I think there's an urgent need to be more pre-emptive in tightening monetary policy to prevent some of these inflation pressures from erupting," said Neumann.
Neumann said some central banks had taken some action in terms of monetary tightening, but more needed to be done.
"On average, interest rates in Asia are about 150 basis points below the neutral level, that is, even if we see marginal rate hikes coming through, this wouldn't necessarily amount to a tightening of monetary policy, rather an easing of the stimulus.
"Therefore much more aggressive action would be warranted at this stage."
South Korea, like other Asian countries that run trade and current account surpluses, could give more room to its currency to rise to offset rising import costs on food.
But that presents another dilemma for policymakers trying to curb a flood of portfolio capital from investors turning away from the sluggish growth in developed economies.
Higher interest rates or the likelihood of a rising currency would just encourage further inflows, analysts say. Policymakers will also be worried that a rising currency will hurt exports, the major pillar of many economies.
(Reporting by Reuters bureaux; Writing by Neil Fullick, Editing by Ron Popeski)
NPR 6 Jan 11;
Earth's population stands at nearly 7 billion, and demographers project we may reach 9 billion by the middle of this century.
In the past 50 years, population has grown at a rate never before seen in human history. Pastures have become towns, cities have sprawled across the landscape, and humans now live in places once considered remote. The change is so dramatic that some scientists now refer to this as "the age of man."
But as humanity's reach expands, forests are vanishing, glaciers are melting and almost 1 billion people go hungry each day.
Robert Kunzig is a senior editor for National Geographic and author of this month's cover story, "7 Billion," which considers the possibility of the global population overwhelming the planet.
He tells NPR's Neal Conan that he believes India is emblematic of where current population growth is taking us.
"I spent a few weeks there," he says, "and there's really no place like India to get the experience of being immersed in a crowd." Kunzig describes the heat hitting Western visitors "like a brick," and dust swirling.
He says he visited two very different places in India — the South, where populations have stabilized, and Delhi, which is still growing.
"It's a typical developing-country megacity ... people streaming in every day," Kunzig says.
But it still lacks the infrastructure to handle the influx.
"The government tries to plan, but it's really just sort of overwhelmed by events, so people make their own way," Kunzig says. He adds that while there are "outright slums and shanty towns," there are also neighborhoods where people are building their own apartment buildings and making their way, stealing power from the electric company. Kunzig calls those neighborhoods "a hodgepodge of worlds — cows in the streets, satellite dishes on the roofs."
Because of that hodgepodge, Kunzig says he was optimistic when he left India.
"There's a tremendous energy there," he says. "I met people ... that have come in from the countryside, have built their own homes and are now devoting themselves to the education of their children."
Richard Harris, a science correspondent for NPR, notes another kind of energy related to this growth: the energy being used by these growing populations, and the impact that has on the Earth's atmosphere.
"It's not just body counts, it's our lifestyles and how much resources we consume," he says.
Because of that, some think population trends are less important than energy use and lifestyle trends when it comes to the planet's future health. Consider that as populations grow, so does demand for food, and an expansion of agriculture leads to increased emissions.
"It works both directions," Harris says. "Population feeds energy needs; energy needs make the planet more uncomfortable and, in some places, more difficult to grow crops."
Water is another stress point for population growth. Upmanu Lall, director of the Water Center at Columbia University, grew up in India at a time when developing the infrastructure to deliver water was a major concern.
"Today, the situation has changed dramatically," he says. "The question today is one where the resource itself has become significantly depleted in many parts of the country."
Consider Delhi, which has a population of around 22 million. One of India's largest rivers, the Yamuna, flows by it.
"This river is now essentially a sewer over most of the year," Lall says. So today, agricultural pumping, mining and Delhi's water consumption have depleted the groundwater resources of surrounding areas.
But it isn't all bad: Kunzig says the predicted population boom could help boost countries previously classified as part of the developing world, such as India and China.
"We tend to think of countries as locked in certain categories," he says. "The population boom has, if anything, been helpful to evening out the stratification."
Countries like India and China also have young populations with lots of workers, few kids and elderly people to support.
"They're catching up fairly rapidly in terms of income, also in terms of energy use and resource use," Kunzig says.
But Lall is less hopeful, and fears for India's ability to meet the food needs of its population.
"When I was young," Lall remembers, "if there was a drought, we stood in lines for days on end to get food at controlled prices from government shops."
These days, India periodically exports food, but Lall says it comes at a cost: "dramatic extraction of water and dramatic utilization of land and the degradation of the soil."
Still, Lall's not entirely pessimistic about India's future.
"India is an enigma," he says. "Despite all the chaos, somehow things actually work. So the fact that the population has nearly tripled since I was a kid and things are better, gives the hope for optimism."
Innovation has helped humans squirm out of projected crises in the past, and it remains to be seen, Harris says, whether we can keep doing that in the future.
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