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

Channel NewsAsia 25 Feb 08;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Singapore food prices: House brands fly off shelves

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more!

Rising costs may force UN to ration food aid

Straits Times 25 Feb 08;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more!

Watching Peru's Warming Oceans for Cholera Cues

Joanne Silberner, NPR 26 Feb 08;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keeping Close Watch on Plankton

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

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

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

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

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

A Reprieve For Now

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

It takes a few hours to filter out the plankton.

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

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

It's a quiet but momentous discovery.

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

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

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

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

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

Produced by Jane Greenhalgh

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

Vince Chong, Straits Times 26 Feb 08;

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

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

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

'This is a cause for concern.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Malaria Can Be Beaten In Many Places, Map Shows

Ben Hirschler, PlanetArk 26 Feb 08;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Editing by Jon Boyle)

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India emerges as solar hub

Siddarth Srivastava, Business Times 26 Feb 08;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The UK house building industry faces a serious challenge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tools for the job

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Went the wind blows

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Testing times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Is farmed fish the new battery chicken?

Alex Renton, The Observer 24 Feb 08;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ice cream crisis as bees buzz off

John Sterlicchi, guardian.co.uk 25 Feb 08;

The collapse of US honeybee colonies this year is set to devastate America's multibillion dollar agriculture and food industries.

Last year about 750,000 of the 2.5m hives in the US were wiped out in mysterious circumstances, and already this year the American Beekeeping Federation says there is evidence from its members that losses will be even greater this year.

For the first time individual businesses have stepped forward to give money to try to speed up the process of finding out, first of all, what causes colony collapse disease (CCD) and then eradicating it.

Häagen-Dazs, the ice cream making subsidiary of General Mills, gave a total of $250,000 (£127,000) to two university research teams and Burt's Bees, the personal care products maker, made a undisclosed grant to create the Honeybee Health Improvement Project, a research task force.

Burt's Bees also launched a public service announcement to run in cinemas showing Bee Movie. In the announcement co-founder Burt Shavitz talked about the important role bees play in agriculture.

He then urged audiences to visit the company's website (www.burtsbees.com ) to sign up to receive a free packet of wildflower seeds to help create a bee-friendly environment.

Honeybees are said to be critical to the production of $15bn worth of crops in the US and Häagen-Dazs says around 25 of its 60 flavours depend on fruits and nuts pollinated by bees.

The ice cream maker is also aiming to raise consumer awareness about CCD by launching a new flavour this spring called Vanilla Honey Bee.

Flying off

Diana Cox-Foster, professor of entomology at Pennsylvania State University College of Agricultural Sciences, which received $150,000 from Häagen-Dazs, believes researchers have identified a major cause of CCD.

Her team has recently given the mite-transmitted Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV) to healthy bee colonies and has seen rapid die-off??. As it is winter those tests took place in greenhouses so the researchers are waiting for the weather to improve to verify the results with bees in their normal environments.

The mysterious and unique aspect of CCD is that the bees are not being found dead near their colonies. They are flying off; just abandoning their life's work, leaving behind the queen and a few younger bees.

Professor Cox-Foster believes that there are other factors together with IAPV are the cause of CCD, such as other viruses, the use of chemicals near colonies and whether the bees are receiving enough nutrition.

To beekeepers pesticides are definitely part of the problem, says Troy Fore, executive director of the American Beekeeping Federation. "A lot of beekeepers blame neonicotinoid insecticides. These are safer for humans and other mammals but they affect the neurological systems of bees. They don't kill the bees outright but they cause to act in ways different to the norm."

The beekeepers believe these insecticides, which in fact have been partially banned in France, weaken the immune system of the bees thereby allowing viruses such as IAPV to strike.

Beekeepers that have their hives in the forest or grasslands and not near cultivated crops are doing well, so there is anecdotal evidence that the pesticides and insecticides are part of the problem, said Fore.

Australia on the attack

But not everyone agrees that IAPV is a cause of CCD. Australian government scientists miffed that the Penn State team suggested in a paper published in Science that IAPV arrived in the US in imports of live bees from Australia pointed out in a follow-up letter that there were several CCD colonies free of IAPV and the "shivering phenotype", and the death of bees close to the hive associated with IAPV in Israel.

The assertion that IAPV came from Australian bees was also refuted by the US Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service, which said that IAPV was found in the country back in 2002, two years before the importation of Australian bees was instituted to replenish colonies.

The Australians, which see their $5m a year live bee exporting industry endangered by such allegations, have demanded that Penn State withdraw its conclusions. They also point out that neither CCD nor large-scale, unexplained mortality events have occurred in the Australian bee industry.

The first description of IAPV came from Israel in 2002 and since then there have been die-outs of bees across the globe, some definitely attributable to the virus.

British beekeepers too are worried that CCD may come to these shores and they have called on the government to back a five-year, £8m research programme designed to save the insect.

Back in America all eyes are nowadays on California's almond trees, which represent a $2.5bn industry. The pink and white blossoms have started to appear and the concern is whether there are the tens of thousands bees needed to pollinate the crop.

"The almonds are in bloom right now in California and we are hearing there are some significant die-offs. It's worrisome," said professor Cox-Foster.

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Rainforest logging threatens endangered sea turtles

Rhett A. Butler, mongabay.com 25 Feb 08;

Logging is having an unexpected impact on endangered sea turtles in Central Africa, reports a new study published in Oryx.

Aerial surveys in Gabon reveal that logs lost during transport are clogging beaches, preventing critically endangered leatherback turtles (Dermochelys coriacea) from nesting.

The researchers — an international team that included William F. Laurance from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and Michael Fay from the Wildlife Conservation Society — found that logs blocked nearly 30.5 percent of Pongara Beach, one of the world's most important turtle nesting areas, during the 2002-2003 and 2003-2004 breeding seasons.

The logs caused multiple problems for sea turtles, including trapping and disorienting turtles, causing them to die; physically blocking access to nesting areas, forcing turtles to abandon nesting altogether or establish nests dangerously close to the waterline (seawater inundation kills sea turtle eggs); and altering the structure of the beach so that turtles were unable to climb steps caused by sand erosion.

Overall 8-14 percent of 2,163 observed nesting attempts were "disturbed or thwarted by lost logs, sometimes with fatal effects for the nesting female".

Given the low survival rate to maturity of marine turtles, the researchers say that displaced logs may be a significant threat to endangered populations. They further note that logs likely impact survival of hatchlings, by impeding their path to the ocean and increasing their vulnerability to predators.

To reduce risk of escaped logs to sea turtle, the researchers recommend establishing a log-removal program supervised by conservation organizations. The salvage program would benefit both turtles and the local communities involved — the 11,000 logs counted in Gabon's beaches during the survey were worth $11.1 million.

Taking a broader look, Laurance and colleagues write that the lost logs "typifies a wider problem of excessive waste and inefficiency in the tropical timber industry... such inefficiency exacerbates pressures on remaining forests, many of which are being rapidly overharvested."

The authors say that better forest management could help reduce waste from timber operations.

Linkages between land and sea

The authors suggest that the impact of deforestation on sea turtles is only one example of the ties between degradation of land and sea ecosystems.

"Our findings bolster the notion that important linkages exist between terrestrial and marine ecosystems," they write. "Coral reefs, for example, can be seriously degraded by sedimentation from nearby deforestation... and by algal blooms caused by phosphate and nitrogen pollution."

"In coastal West Africa depletion of marine fisheries has led to increased hunting pressure on terrestrial wildlife," they continue. "The rapid destruction of mangrove forests, which provide nurseries for many fish and shrimp species, is having serious impacts on coastal fisheries... Plastic waste is pervasive in the world's oceans and is a particular threat to leatherback turtles, which can choke to death on plastic debris they mistake for jellyfish, their principle food."

Marine turtles, like many other species, face a multitude of threats, both on land and at sea.

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South Africa to resume elephant culling after 13 years

Fran Blandy, Yahoo News 25 Feb 08;

South Africa is to resume elephant culling for the first time in 13 years, lifting a moratorium on the practice to bring ballooning populations under control, the government said on Monday.

After months of emotive public debate over government plans to reduce elephant numbers, Environment Minister Marthinus Van Schalkwyk announced culling would be an option from May 1, but only as a last resort.

"Our department has recognised the need to maintain culling as a management option, but has taken steps to ensure that this will be the option of last resort that is acceptable only under strict conditions," the minister said in a statement.

Since domestic and international pressure led the government to introduce a moratorium on culling in 1995, the number of elephants rose from about 8,000 to 18,000, saddling many game parks with unsustainable populations.

"The issue of population management has been devilishly complex and we would like to think that we have come up with a framework that is acceptable to the majority of South Africans," said Van Schalkwyk.

His spokesman, Riaan Aucamp, could not put a number on the elephants to be killed.

"There is no estimation. Everything will depend on the management plan of each park," he told AFP.

The World Wildlife Fund's Rob Little said elephants had no natural predators after the age of 15, and with populations growing at six percent a year they become a hazard to their habitat.

"We are not pleased with the thought of culling elephant, but we do recognise it as a management tool," he told AFP.

"Historically they would have vast areas to migrate and move in, whereas today we confine them by artificial boundaries. We call elephants habitat engineers, because they consume such vast amounts of vegetation that they have the potential to change the landscape."

Announcing norms and standards for elephant management, the minister said contraception and translocation would continue to be the preferred population control measures.

Culling may be undertaken only when recommended by an elephant management specialist, and on approval by authorities.

"It was to be expected that strong emotions would be part of this debate. There are few other creatures on earth that have the ability of elephants to 'connect' with humans in a very special way," said van Schalkwyk.

Added Little: "We all love our elephants, they are the most charismatic icon of Africa. But we don't have the luxury to allow one species to dominate and alter the composition of our natural assets."

The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), which opposes culling, said legislation should be strict enough to ensure it is truly done only as a last resort.

"In no way do we condone culling as an option, if it is to be then it really must be with only the most careful management," said Christina Pretorius of IFAW Southern Africa.

Most of southern Africa is struggling to contain elephant numbers, with some 300,000 individuals estimated to roam the region today, according to Pretorius.

"In all likelihood a few of our neighbouring elephant range states are watching South Africa to get guidance," added Little.

Van Schalkwyk also announced a prohibition from May 1 on the capture of wild elephants for use in commercial exhibition, such as circuses.

This was welcomed by IFAW, with Pretorius saying: "Elephant back safaris in particular, it's an industry out of control".

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