‘Big oil field find by Petronas’

The Star 21 Mar 10;

KUALA LUMPUR: Petronas has discovered a huge tract of oil reserves that could significantly reduce oil prices, claimed former Petronas chairman Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah.

“I was told it is the biggest oil field this part of the world, and enough to depress oil prices,’’ he told a forum titled “Oil Royalty: A Constitutional Right?” yesterday.

The forum was organised by the Bar Council to discuss the constitutional aspects of the oil royalty payment.

Razaleigh said it was the prerogative of the Prime Minister to give Petronas the green light to start extracting oil from the newly-discovered field.

He hoped part of the earnings would be channelled to a national heritage trust fund for the future generation and that Petronas would manage the resources well.

“We hope there is no ‘leakage’, and the money goes back to the people,’’ he added.

Razaleigh also hoped misunderstandings over the law pertaining to oil royalty payment to Kelantan would be resolved soon, adding the Government should be advised properly.

Meanwhile, another panellist, Datuk Dr Shad Saleem Faruqi, said parts of the Petroleum Deve­lopment Act were unconstitutional.

“For example, if oil is found inland, it is unconstitutional for the federal government to stake claim on it. But according to the Act, it gets 5%, which is unconstitutional,” he said.

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`Land with one million cows program` in Indonesia should have tangible result

Antara 21 Mar 10;

Mataram, (ANTARA News) - The "Land with One Million Cows Program" (BSS) in West Nusa Tenggara (NTB) should have a tangible result at the end of this year, an official said.

"Such a program has been calculated in its funds and the number of cow population, and therefore it should have a tangible result at the end of this year," NTB provincial administration` public relations chief M Faozal said here on Saturday.

Seeing that the result of the program was still unclear, Governor Zainul Majdi had to suspend a working contract with around 45 Regional Forces Working Units (SKPD), including West Nusa Tenggara Animal Husbandry Service.

"The working contract with around 45 SKPD will be resumed until after all of them improve their performance at the end of this year on in December 1010," Governor Zainul Majdi said.

According to the governor, the BSS program was expected to be able to increase the population of cows in the province and income of cow breeders.

"The program was launched in December 2008 and ever since the cow population in the province increased significantly," the governor said.

Data from NTB Animal Husbandry Service indicated that the cow population in the province in 2008 increased by 546,114 and then rose to 683,347 in 2009, while in 2010 it is expected to rise by 780,772.

Therefore, the Land of One Million Cow program got a serious attention from the central government to be applied in the other provinces in Indonesia.

West Nusa Tenggara is known to have rice stock as well as livestock in abundance, and thus the province sends not less than 35,000 cows every year to Jakarta and West Java to meet the meat demand of the people.

In addition, the province also shipped at least 9,000 cows per year to Kalimantan, Sulawesi, Maluku, East Nusa Tenggara, Papua, and Sumatra.(*)

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Japan celebrates defeat of bluefin tuna trade ban

Kyoko Hasegawa Yahoo News 19 Mar 10;

TOKYO (AFP) – The Japanese government, sushi lovers and seafood traders at Tokyo's massive Tsukiji fish market on Friday cheered the defeat of a proposed ban on trade in endangered Atlantic bluefin tuna.

The proposal for a ban on trade in hauls from Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic was crushed Thursday by a UN wildlife meeting in a move described by the European Commission as threatening the survival of the ocean predator.

"It was good," said Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama. "It means the import of bluefin tuna will continue for the time being and I think it's good that the price of bluefin tuna will not rise further."

But he added that Japan "should be on alert as we still don't know what will happen" until the end next week of the meeting in Doha of the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

Atlantic bluefin tuna: the sushi king

A smiling Finance Minister Naoto Kan said he often enjoys "negi-toro", minced fatty tuna mixed with leek usually served on rice.

"It's good that I will be able to keep eating it," he said.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirofumi Hirano, the top government spokesman, said: "I am relieved that it was voted down last night. I am delighted about that.

"It is important to control natural resources as Japan has argued," he added in a regular news conference.

Environmental group Greenpeace warned the vote "sets the species on a pathway to extinction" although it is unclear exactly how long the worldwide bluefin population has left at current consumption rates.

Japan consumes three-quarters of all bluefin caught in the world's oceans, mainly raw as sushi and sashimi. A piece of "otoro" or fatty underbelly now costs 2,000 yen (22 dollars) at high-end Tokyo restaurants.

Decades of overfishing have seen stocks crash by more than two-thirds in the Mediterranean, from where giant freezer ships have long headed for Japan.

Fish traders and chefs at Tokyo's Tsukiji market, the world's biggest, were heartened that they will be able to keep importing the species, which arrives deep-frozen by the hundreds for daily pre-dawn auctions.

Tuna traders at Tsukiji, the size of more than 40 football pitches, last week staged a protest against the proposed trade ban on the fish, which has fetched as much as 175,000 dollars for a 232-kilogram (511-pound) specimen.

"It's really good that the proposal was voted down. Japanese people love tuna and salmon," said sushi chef Satoshi Suzuki, as he rolled out tuna for the lunchtime crowd at a restaurant on the edge of the market.

He said he recognised Japan should manage marine resources sustainably but added that ordinary people do not consume the prized fish in large quantities.

"People don't eat bluefin tuna every day unless they are rich," he said.

Japan had fought hard to block the trade ban proposal, arguing that the solution lies with enforcing existing quotas set by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas.

Environmentalists complain that lax enforcement by ICCAT has already driven Atlantic bluefin tuna close to extinction.

Fisheries Minister Hirotaka Akamatsu said Japan would now exercise "leadership" in managing bluefin resources. "It's true that we now have the responsibility to do this," he said.

Not everyone in Japan was happy with the vote.

"We're disappointed by the decision," said Soyo Takahashi, a fisheries expert at the Japan office of Traffic, the wildlife trade monitoring network which cooperates with the CITES secretariat.

"We have not seen meaningful discussion on a recovery plan based on science for Atlantic bluefin tuna at the CITES meeting."

With bluefin and many other fish species in decline in the world's oceans, she said, "Japanese consumers of sushi need to rethink their lifestyle and choose seafood from sustainable fisheries."

Japan lands a death sentence for the bluefin
Charles Clover, Times Online 21 Mar 10;

It was a desperate defeat. The European Union and the United States had come to Doha to save the bluefin tuna, a fish so delicious as sushi and sashimi that large specimens fetch $100,000 on the Japanese market. As a consequence the species is as endangered as the white rhino. But, just like the tunas that return each year to the Mediterranean to spawn and find themselves in a labyrinth of nets, the conservationist nations have swum into a trap.

What followed was not pretty. Japan and the fishing nations inflicted a stunning defeat on the conservationist countries, which had wanted to ban international trade in bluefin tuna. Japan’s victory, against the weight of scientific opinion, not only raises the question of whether the bluefin can survive but also whether rationality can ever prevail in preventing endangered species from being obliterated.

Recriminations have already started among the losers in Doha, where the 175 parties to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) go on meeting until the end of the week. There is anger about the part played by the dithering Spanish presidency of the EU, about French compromises, mutterings about unimaginative British officials and amazement at the failures of EU and US diplomacy.

In theory, these two power blocs had a strong hand. No one could remember a better scientific case to support a temporary ban on trade in any species. Two scientific bodies, the scientific committee of the Atlantic tuna commission, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) and a special panel of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation agreed that the bluefin stock qualified for a ban because it had declined to less than 15% of its historical levels.

Old Cites hands say the mistake that the European Union and United States made is that they thought a robust scientific assessment alone could get a species listed on one of the appendices of Cites (appendix II means regulated trade under quotas; appendix I, a trade ban). That was once true. But Cites has got political. Over the past decade or so, winning has become a matter of building alliances and buying votes. It’s a dirty business and, as far as one can see, the conservation nations failed to get their hands dirty.

While Japan and its allies perceived a threat to their fishing interests from a listing under the Cites treaty six months ago, the EU and the US were preoccupied until a month ago with sorting out their internal divisions. They did not grasp the strength of the alliance ranged against them in Qatar.

Japan appointed as its head of delegation the charming and ruthless Masanori Miyahara, chief of the Fisheries Agency of Japan, a veteran of a successful campaign in 1992 to stop a ban on bluefin fishing.

Everyone knew that the 13 proposals to list marine species, led by sharks and bluefin tuna, were the most controversial this year. There was an early sign of trouble when we heard the Arab League was against all the marine proposals because of the economic impact on north African fishermen. On the morning of the bluefin debate, we learnt that Japan had entertained its allies to a banquet featuring bluefin tuna the night before. When she heard that, Sylvia Earle, one of the most distinguished ocean campaigners in the United States, muttered: “Neanderthals.”

The debate itself was an ambush. Monaco put forward the proposal for a ban, then the EU gave it qualified support. But the Spanish presidency droned on unconvincingly and too long. The EU’s conservation-minded countries — Britain, Germany and Sweden — had to remain silent under daft EU protocol.

Norway, Kenya and the United States spoke for a ban. Then it became open season on the conservationists by the fishing nations. Country after country — Canada, Indonesia, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, Chile and Senegal — said they wanted the Atlantic tuna commission, which has allowed the bluefin to get into its present plight, to carry on managing the fish. The conservationists had no riposte to the fears Japan had stirred up in poor countries that their economies would suffer from a trade ban.

It was clear where things were going long before a ranting Libyan delegate denounced the scientific assessments as “lies” and forced a vote. Monaco’s proposal was voted down by 68 to 20, with 30 abstentions, a defeat so dire that it is unlikely to be reopened this week. Monaco’s ambassador warned that ICCAT had “a very serious responsibility” to tackle the problem of illegal fishing and set scientific quotas.

This is a disaster for the credibility of Cites. On the plus side America and Europe now back a trade ban and the pressure is on ICCAT, a fishery management body with a lamentable record, to do a better job. But that organisation’s record has led to it being called the International Conspiracy to Catch All Tuna.

The question now is whether Japan can live up to its promise last week to crack down on illegal fishing and whether the bluefin can survive three more years until the conservation countries can organise a rematch. You have to say that the precedents are not encouraging.

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Sharks on the menu at wildlife trade meet

Marlowe Hood Yahoo News 20 Mar 10;

DOHA (AFP) – Four rapidly dwindling shark species prized in Asia for fins and in Europe for meat will be swimming against the current at a UN wildlife trade meet days after an attempt to protect tuna was crushed.

Starting Sunday, the 175-nation Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), will consider separate proposals that would require cross-border trade in these open-water predators be tracked and reported.

The small island nation of Palau, dependent on scuba tourism, along with Sweden and the United States, have sponsored the measures, with backing from Egypt and Rwanda.

Japan, which led the successful drive to keep Atlantic bluefin in its sushi bars, has said they should be voted down.

Tokyo points to a lack of data, and argues that CITES, meeting in Doha through Thursday, is not the right tool to oversee high-value commercial fauna.

Scientists acknowledge a paucity of data.

At the top of the marine food chain, most of these fearsome predators roam the open seas, and there is no global system in place to monitor population levels.

Of the 139 nations that have reported shark catches to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) since 2000, less than half list species, "making it difficult to assess the impacts of fisheries," said Laurence Fauconnet, a shark expert at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California.

But the studies that have been done paint a grim picture, indicating that each year some 70 million sharks of all types are harvested.

Sharks are especially vulnerable to overfishing because most species take many years to mature and have relatively few young.

The scalloped hammerhead, once common in coastal tropical waters, has declined by 75 to 90 percent in the Indian and Pacific Oceans over two decades, said Demian Chapman at the Institute for Ocean Conservation at Stonybrook University in New York.

Listed as "endangered" by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the fish is the top choice of gourmets for shark fin soup, a prestige food consumed by Chinese communities around the globe.

Four other "look-alike" species are covered in the proposal to prevent the scalloped hammerhead from being harvested by mistake.

Also sought for its fins is the oceanic white tip, listed by the IUCN as "critically endangered" in most of the Atlantic and "vulnerable" globally.

Its meat can sell for 100 dollars (74 euros) a kilo, making it one of the most expensive seafoods by weight.

The other two proposals would regulate international trade of the porbeagle, also fished for fins and meat, and the spiny dogfish, a staple of generic "fish fingers" and other prepared foods.

At the last CITES meeting in 2007, spiny dog and porbeagle failed to gain protection.

But delegates and conservationists in Doha point to two factors that could help one or more of the measures pass the CITES threshold of a two-thirds majority this time around.

Unlike the Atlantic bluefin bid for a so-called Appendix I ban on all international commerce, the shark proposals are seeking Appendix II status, which only requires tracking of exports and scientific assessments.

"The problem today is not there is serious mismanagement of trade in sharks, but that there is not management at all," said Sue Lieberman, policy director for the Pew Environment Group in Washington.

Also, the debate over bluefin pitted commercial interests against conservationists, and the result suggests it was a mismatched fight.

In the case of sharks, there is business on both sides of the issue: dozens small island nations, and some bigger ones, reap serious revenue from scuba-related tourism.

"It has been calculated that a live shark is worth 100 times more than dead one," said Ibrahim Didi, environment minister from the Maldives, in Doha as an observer.

Lieberman said: "If hammerheads are gone, people are not going to come to swim with the jellyfish."

All told, a third of the world's 64 species of pelagic, or open water, sharks face extinction, according to report issued last June by the IUCN's Shark Specialist Group.

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The invader that is strangling an ecosystem

Navin Singh Khadka, BBC News 19 Mar 10;

An invasive plant is emerging as a major problem in a Nepalese national park renowned for protecting endangered wildlife species, say scientists.

The Chitwan National Park is listed as a Unesco world heritage site and is a major tourist attraction.

It has been a huge conservation success story, with nearly 100 breeding adult tigers and more than 400 rhinos roaming within its territory.

But a quiet intruder has emerged as a possible threat to the park's ecosystem.

A native plant of Brazil, the weed Mikenia micrantha , has already covered 20% of the national park in southern Nepal.

Most of the affected areas are important to the tigers, rhinos and some endangered bird species - moist places and riversides that are conducive to the growth of the invasive creeper.

"Already 50% of the rhino's habitat is covered by this alien plant," says Naresh Subedi of Nepal's National Trust for Nature Conservation, which has carried out research in the Chitwan national park.

"If uncontrolled, it will spread over half of the park's entire area."

Suffocating creeper

Also known as "mile by a minute" because of its fast spreading rate, the weed can smother anything that gets in its way - from grasses to even large trees.

"As a result, we have seen some trees grow old quickly and die. And grasses [that many animals eat] have simply disappeared," says Narendra Man Babu Pradhan, chief warden of the park.

"We call this vegetation imposition."

Conservationists say that the impacts upon the park's animals.

"For example, there is this tree that bears fruits called 'rhino's apple' that is killed once it is covered by the [weed]. This means a food source for the rhinos becomes scarce," explains Mr Subedi.

Mr Pradhan says that different types of grasses, which form an essential part of the diets of small animals such as deer, are also disappearing from areas of the park invaded by the weed.



"Small animals need good quality food and these grasses are very important for them."

And if the deer are affected, this is likely to have a knock-on effect on the tigers' diet.

"There is a possibility that the food chain in the park is adversely affected," Mr Pradhan says.

Dr Richard Kock, a scientist with the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) says that the weed reduces "suitable cover" for the tiger. He is trying to help park officials to tackle the problem.

"It forces animals to forage more widely and outside of the park in farmland. This increases conflict and the risk of death from poaching or revenge attacks [by farmers whose crops are eaten up by park animals]," he says.

Spreading invasion

Park officials say they have seen some rhinos that have begun to eat Mikenia micrantha because they have "no choice".

"As megaherbivores, they need plenty of food, so we can imagine why some of them have begun to eat this plant," says Mr Pradhan.

And the droppings of these rhinos, and other herbivores that eat the plant, will spread the invasive weed.

The park officials have started to look into how Mikenia micrantha is affecting the rhinos.

They have attached radio collars to two rhinos and they will track six more in the same way in order to monitor their foraging behaviour.

They hope to have the results from this study within two years, but the invasive plant is likely to have spread far more by then.

It has already crept out of the park and is advancing towards the west. Latest findings show it has reached the Dang area in western Nepal.

Conservationists fear that, at this rate, it will soon reach the nearby Bardiya National Park - another protected area that has successfully conserved several endangered species, including tigers.

Out of control

Scientists say that the plant was first seen in the eastern part of Nepal, where it did some ecological damage to the Koshi Tappu wildlife reserve - a bird watcher's paradise.

"The weed covered areas near wetlands, grassland and open places in the forest. [It has caused a reduction in] the number of endangered swamp francolin birds in Koshi Tappu," says Hem Sagar Baral, a noted ornithologist in Nepal.

"The creeper alters the vegetation to such an extent that birds do not get the right natural setting for nesting and laying eggs.

"Species like the reed warbler and some thrushes are also declining there."

Although there is no clear record, conservationists say the plant probably came from India, where it was said to have been imported during World War II.

"It is believed that it was brought into India to camouflage army camps during the war," says Mr Subedi.

Conservationists say that some national parks in the north-eastern part of India have also seen the spread of this invasive creeper.

Hands-on effort

Authorities have tried uprooting the plant from some sections of the Chitwan national park. Even Prime Minister Madhab Kumar Nepal rolled up his sleeves when he recently joined a "weeding" effort.

But this measure has so far proved unsuccessful because the plant has already covered wide areas. It continues to regrow, stimulated to spread by the movement of people and animals within the park.

Authorities do not want to use chemical or biological measures, which they fear could harm the park's ecosystem. So officials are left somewhat helpless.

Mikenia micrantha continues to grip this valuable natural site, stifling its vegetation and threatening its wildlife.

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Conserve water, conserve biodiversity

Press Statement on the Occasion of World Water Day 2010
Rodrigo U. Fuentes, Executive Director
ASEAN Centre for Biodiversity
22 March 2010

Water is life. But did you know that waterborne diseases are causing the death of more than 1.5 million children every year? Statistics from the United Nations are indeed alarming: Two million tons of sewage and other effluents are draining into the world’s waters every day. In developing countries, 70 percent of industrial wastes are dumped untreated into waters where they pollute the usable water supply. More than 894 million people do not have access to safe freshwater.

While the demand for water continues to grow, the supply is getting smaller. Human activities are largely to blame.

Years of abuse and poor management of the world’s natural resources have resulted in the degradation of the global water supply. Deforestation has destroyed watersheds and their capability to retain freshwater. Erosion and siltation have damaged the quality of lakes and rivers. Pesticides and mining residues pollute water sources and affect the health of fish, birds and other animals that drink from these areas. Dams and reservoirs have changed water flow. Industrial processes and domestic waste have polluted our waterways and oceans and threatened the lives of fish, corals, sea grasses and other organisms. These are worsened by the increasing impacts of climate change, which has caused extreme drought in many parts of the world.

As we celebrate World Water Day 2010 with the theme “Clean Water for a Healthy World,” we are reminded of the need for protect our precious water resources – the source of life for all of us.

For us at the ASEAN Centre for Biodiversity, we see the crucial need to remind people about the critical link between water and biodiversity.

As we know, water is an integral aspect of agriculture and ecosystem. Food production is constrained when the availability of water is reduced, thus exacerbating hunger and poverty. Poor water quality also has serious affects on human health and biodiversity. Clean water is essential for healthy environments.

Some say that the next World War will be over water. Fighting, however, will not solve water scarcity. The key is for each one of us to contribute our share in conserving water.

Saving water is not just simply turning off the tap while brushing teeth, fixing leaks, or recycling water in the household. Governments, concerned communities and individuals need to protect water resources and biodiversity, which contributes to healthy wetland ecosystems.

Healthy forests retain both water and soil resources. When forests are plentiful, watersheds retain ample supply in water basins and prevent soil erosion that may cause siltation of water bodies. Healthy wetlands also recharge underground aquifers, providing ample drinking water to satisfy the needs of the world’s population.

Conserving biodiversity to support healthy wetlands ensures a richer biodiversity of species. Intact and viable wetlands filter water and make it safe for drinking. Clean lakes, rivers and estuaries ensure the survival and abundance of nursery areas of fish, encouraging higher fish production. Clean water encourages plant growth and support richer marine life, which benefit humans since many freshwater and marine plants are used for a variety of purposes ranging from handicrafts to animal fodder. Healthy wetlands ensure the survival of various animals, especially those in danger of extinction.

Water conservation is a global issue that needs urgent action. Conserve water at home, in school, at the office, and within your community. Prevent unnecessary water use. Encourage industries to recycle water. Conserve biodiversity, protect forests and watersheds, and prevent pollution of freshwater and marine ecosystems. Support action to protect water resources. Help efforts to prevent water scarcity and ensure a world with life-saving water.

Rodrigo U. Fuentes
Executive Director
ASEAN Centre for Biodiversity

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Capitalism's insidious tribal march

The seductive power of Vedanta's development programmes in India is replacing centuries of self-sufficient, egalitarian society
Eric Randolph, guardian.co.uk 20 Mar 10;

An attack on Vedanta staff near its aluminium refinery in India shows us that the clash of capitalism and remote tribes is more complex than James Cameron would have us believe.

The incident happened last month in the state of Orissa. Exact details are unclear but a senior member of Vedanta Aluminium Ltd, the Indian subsidiary of the UK-based Vedanta Resources Plc, confirmed that members of its corporate social responsibility team were attacked by unidentified individuals who set their jeep on fire and hospitalised two employees. As a measure of how well your public relations team is doing, this is not a good sign.

Tensions are growing in the region. The Dongria Kondh tribe strongly oppose Vedanta's plan to mine for bauxite in the Niyamgiri Hills, which is home to their deity. A few days after the attack, they held a puja (religious ceremony) on Niyam Dongar hill in which they vowed to resist the project at all costs.

The initial reaction was therefore to blame the Dongria Kondh for the attack on the PR team. The truth, however, may be less straightforward. Mukesh Kumar, Vedanta's chief operating officer in the region, claims the attackers were men who had moved into the area looking for work, quarrelled with locals and been forced to leave. Evidently, they blamed Vedanta.

If true, this account suggests it is not just the mining itself that can generate anger – it also generates resentment among those who feel excluded from its perceived benefits.

The caricature of Vedanta is of a ruthless conglomerate driving a bulldozer through village communities in its ravenous search for valuable minerals. This caricature was given the three-dimensional technicolour treatment in James Cameron's Avatar, in which the unspoilt purity of the blue-skinned Na'vi tribe faces the rapacious greed of a US mining corporation.

Art seemed so closely to mirror reality that a campaigning group, Survival International, used the film's success to publicise the cause of the Dongria Kondh, with the tribe apparently writing a letter to Cameron asking for his assistance.

If the Dongria Kondh actually made it to their local Imax to watch the movie, one wonders how perturbed they would be at the solution it proposes: that local tribes should band together and have a gigantic, bloody battle against robot-suited humans and helicopter gunships. Perhaps if they believed the lesson of the film – that the fight could be over in a single afternoon after which the mining corporation would skulk off with its tail between its legs – then they might mount their flying dragons and have a go.

Sadly, the reality of capitalism's advance is far more insidious and much harder to resist. The fact is that many villagers in Orissa welcomed Vedanta's refinery when it was built in 2004, taking lucrative compensation packages in exchange for their land. Since then, Vedanta has poured huge amounts of money into a hearts-and-minds campaign, providing schools, medical care and infrastructure in its attempt to win over locals. Many of those who saw little value in free televisions and scooters nonetheless found it difficult to turn down the promise of better education and job opportunities for their children.

This is the true power of capitalism – not the muscle it can flex, but its ability to play on an individual's hopes and fears, often at the expense of the community as a whole.

One of the dangers is that there is no going back. Amnesty International claims many of those compensated in the refinery scheme did not fully understand the terms of the deal, for example thinking they would all get employment rather than just one member from each family. Few seemed to realise they would lose common farming land, forcing them to buy a lot of the food they once produced collectively. Nor did they realise the ecological impact that would result. But the deals are done, and the land is sold. Its findings received strong backing from the government this week, whose investigators decided Vedanta had violated human rights and forestry laws in its Orissa operations.

The subtler but more fundamental danger is what this model of development does to traditional social structures. Vedanta cannot provide development to the whole state. Somewhere the boundary has to end, somewhere a fence has to be erected, and with that comes a new existence of haves and have-nots, replacing centuries of basically self-sufficient and egalitarian society. Last month's attack on Vedanta's PR staff seems to reflect this danger, showing us the tensions that can accompany rapid, top-down development.

Through all this, it is important to remember that the villagers still have the right to choose Vedanta's model of development, as many did in 2004. We might hope they reject it, but we do so having already enjoyed many of the benefits of modern civilisation. It is certainly not wrong to want better opportunities for one's family.

But the key question is whether they make their decision fully appreciating the impact it will have on their community. We should also seriously question whether a mining company is really the best institution to lead people through such profound changes.

Corporate social responsibility couches itself in the positive-sounding watchwords of "progress" and "development", but ultimately it is the art of justifying capitalism's advance, putting a legitimate face on the destruction of older forms of social existence.

In the past fortnight, in another corner of India, a different tribe is winning its battle to shield its culture and society from the outside world. The Jarawa, who live on one of the Andaman and Nicobar islands, won a supreme court ruling to have tourism operations around their land shut down.

The Jarawa saw what development meant and rejected it. They fought a powerful tourism lobby without resorting to war. The Dongria Kondh appear to be making the same choice on the hills of Niyamgiri, but faced with the mining industry and the seductive power of its million-dollar development programmes, their final decision may not be their own.

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WWF hopes to find $60 billion growing on trees

The carbon credits scheme would make WWF and its partners much richer, but with no lowering of overall CO2 emissions, writes Christopher Booker .
Christopher Booker, The Telegraph 20 Mar 10;

If the world’s largest, richest environmental campaigning group, the WWF – formerly the World Wildlife Fund – announced that it was playing a leading role in a scheme to preserve an area of the Amazon rainforest twice the size of Switzerland, many people might applaud, thinking this was just the kind of cause the WWF was set up to promote.

Amazonia has long been near the top of the list of the world’s environmental cconcerns, not just because it includes easily the largest and most bio-diverse area of rainforest on the planet, but because its billions of trees contain the world’s largest land-based store of CO2 – so any serious threat to the forest can be portrayed as a major contributor to global warming.

If it then emerged, however, that a hidden agenda of the scheme to preserve this chunk of the forest was to allow the WWF and its partners to share the selling of carbon credits worth $60 billion, to enable firms in the industrial world to carry on emitting CO2 just as before, more than a few eyebrows might be raised. The idea is that credits representing the CO2 locked into this particular area of jungle – so remote that it is not under any threat – should be sold on the international market, allowing thousands of companies in the developed world to buy their way out of having to restrict their carbon emissions. The net effect would simply be to make the WWF and its partners much richer while making no contribution to lowering overall CO2 emissions.

WWF, which already earns £400 million yearly, much of it contributed by governments and taxpayers, has long been at the centre of efforts to talk up the threat to the Amazon rainforest – as shown recently by the furore over a much-publicised passage in the 2007 report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC’s claim that 40 per cent of the forest is threatened by global warming, it turned out, was not based on any scientific evidence, but simply on WWF propaganda, which had wholly distorted the findings of an earlier study on the threat posed to the forest, not by climate change but by logging.

This curious saga goes back to 1997, when the UN’s Kyoto treaty set up what is known as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). This allowed businesses in the developing world that could claim to have reduced their greenhouse gas emissions to make billions of pounds by selling their resulting carbon credits to those firms in the developed world which, under the treaty, would be obliged to cut their emissions. In 2001 the parties to Kyoto agreed in principle that trees in the southern hemisphere could be counted as “carbon sinks” for the benefit of CO2 emitting firms in the northern hemisphere. In 2002, after lengthy negotiations with WWF and other NGOs, the Brazilian government set up its Amazon Region Protected Areas (Arpa) project, supported by nearly $80 million of funding. Of this, $18 million was given to the WWF by the US’s Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, $18 million to its Brazilian NGO partner by the Brazilian government, plus $30 million from the World Bank.

The aim was that the NGOs, led by the WWF, should administer chunks of the Brazilian rainforest to ensure either that they were left alone or managed “sustainably”. Added to them, as the largest area of all, was 31,000 square miles on Brazil’s all but inaccessible northern frontier; half designated as the Tumucumaque National Park, the world’s largest nature reserve, the other half to be left largely untouched but allowing for sustainable development. This is remote from any part of the Amazonian forest likely to be damaged by loggers, mining or agriculture.

So far all this might have seemed admirably idealistic. Despite the international agreement that forests could be counted as carbon sinks, there was as yet no system in place whereby the CO2 thus “saved” could be turned into a saleable commodity. In 2007, however, the WWF and its allies in the World Bank launched the Global Forest Alliance, with start-up funding of $250 million from the Bank, to work for what they called “avoided deforestation”. A conference in Bali, under the auspices of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which administers the CDM, agreed to a scheme called REDD (reducing emissions for deforestation in developing countries). Hailed as “the big new idea to save the planet from runaway climate change”, this set up a global fund to save vast areas of rainforest from the deforestation which accounts for nearly a fifth of all man-made CO2 emissions.

But still there was no mechanism for turning all this “saved” CO2 into a money-making commodity. The WWF now, however, found a key ally in the Woods Hole Research Center, based in Massachusetts. Not to be confused with the nearby Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, a bona fide scientific body, this is in fact a global warming advocacy group, headed by a board which includes fund managers responsible for billions of dollars of private investments.

In 2008, funded by $7 million from the Moore Foundation and working in partnership with the WWF on the Tumucumaque project, Woods Hole came up with the formula required: a way of valuing all that carbon stored in Brazil’s protected rainforests, so that it could be traded under the CDM. The CO2 to be “saved” by the Arpa programme, it calculated, amounted to 5.1 billion tons. Based on the UNFCCC’s valuation of CO2 at $12.50 per ton, this valued the trees in Brazil’s protected areas at over $60 billion. Endorsed by the World Bank, this projection was presented to the UNFCCC.

But two more obstacles had still to be overcome. The first was that the scheme needed to be adopted as part of REDD by the UNFCCC’s 2009 Copenhagen conference, which was supposed to agree a new global treaty to follow Kyoto. This would allow all that “saved” Brazilian CO2 to be turned into hard cash under the CDM scheme.

The other was that the US should adopt a “cap and trade” scheme, imposing severe curbs on the CO2 emitted by US industry. This would boost the international carbon market, sending the price soaring as US firms flocked to buy the credits that would allow them to continue emitting the CO2 they needed to survive.

As we know, the story hasn’t turned out as planned. Amid the shambles at Copenhagen in December, all that could be saved of the REDD proposals was an agreement in principle, with the hope of reaching detailed agreement in Mexico later this year. Also lost in the scramble to save something from the wreckage was the small print that guaranteed the rights of indigenous peoples in rainforests, whose way of life – to the concern of groups such as Survival International and the Forest Peoples Programme – has already been severely damaged by REDD-inspired schemes elsewhere, such as in Kenya and Papua New Guinea.

Just as alarming to the WWF and its allies, who were hoping to make billions from Brazilian forests, has been the failure of the US Senate to approve the cap and trade bill championed by President Obama. Since the EU has excluded the rainforests from its own cap and trade scheme, bringing the US into the net is vital for the WWF’s hopes of finding “money growing on trees”. The price of carbon on the Chicago Climate Exchange has just plummeted to its lowest-ever level, 10 cents a ton.

The WWF’s dream has been thwarted – but the revelation that it could even be party to such a scheme may have considerable influence on the way this richest of all environmental campaigning groups is viewed by the world at large.

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Sandstorms blanket Beijing in yellow dust

Yahoo News 20 Mar 10;

BEIJING (AFP) – Beijingers woke up Saturday to find the Chinese capital blanketed in yellow dust, as a sandstorm caused by a severe drought in the north and in Mongolia swept into the city.

The storm, which earlier buffeted parts of northeastern China, brought strong winds and cut visibility in the capital.

Authorities issued a rare level five pollution warning, signalling hazardous conditions, and urged residents to stay indoors.

Sandstorms frequently hit the arid north of China in the spring, when temperatures start to rise, stirring up clouds of dust that can travel across China, to South Korea and Japan and even as far as the United States.

Scientists blame a combination of deforestation and prolonged drought in northern China for the phenomenon.

Saturday's storm was expected to last until Monday, the meteorological agency said in a statement on its website.

"I was amazed to see the ground had turned yellow overnight," Beijing salesman Li Ming told the official Xinhua news agency. "It reminds me of the dirt road of my rural hometown."

Another resident said the storm was worse than those in recent years.

"Severe sandstorms like this happened very often in the 1980s and 1990s," Beijing retiree Song Xiurong told Xinhua. "It hasn't been that serious in the recent two or three years, as far as I remember."

Xinhua reported that the storm, which came after an unusually humid winter and numerous blizzards, caught residents of the capital by surprise.

"The snow has certainly curbed local dust from flowing but sandstorms cannot disappear altogether as long as their origins still exist," meteorological agency chief Guo Hu told the agency, adding that the vast deserts of China's Inner Mongolia region were just 800 kilometres (500 miles) from Beijing.

A sandstorm four years ago dumped at least 300,000 tonnes of sand on the capital.

China has 2.6 million square kilometres (one million square miles) of desert, an area nearly 2.5 times the country's total farmland, according to government statistics released at the time.

In the southwest of the country, drought has left 16 million people with a shortage of drinking water, according to a statement issued by the State Commission of Disaster Relief.

Since late last year, the provinces of Yunnan, Sichuan and Guizhou, have received only half their annual average rainfall, leaving water supplies severely depleted.

More than four million hectares (10 million acres) of land were affected and 4,000 troops have been deployed to help distribute emergency water supplies, Xinhua said.

South Korea warned residents of the capital Seoul as well as central and western regions to stay indoors, Yonhap news agency reported.

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Canada reports mildest winter on record

Yahoo News 19 Mar 10;

MONTREAL (AFP) – Canada jumps into spring after having recorded the mildest and driest winter on record, Environment Canada reported Friday.

The agency, which has compiled data from 1948, determined the average temperature throughout the country was four degrees Celsius (seven degrees Fahrenheit) above normal, said meteorologist Andre Cantin.

Cantin said the country also saw 20 percent less precipitation than normal, also a record.

El Nino, the climate pattern in the Pacific Ocean that influences global weather, was likely responsible for the freakish weather, according to Cantin, who noted that changes in climate may also have played a role.

The unusual winter wreaked havoc at the Winter Olympics at venues near Vancouver, where a shortage of snow delayed many events.

Some Arctic areas were warmer and the north of Quebec province was six degrees Celsius (10 Fahrenheit) above the norm.

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Bolivia creates a new opportunity for climate talks that failed at Copenhagen

Bolivia will host an international meeting on climate change next month because it is not prepared to 'betray its people'
Pablo Solón Romero, guardian.co.uk 19 Mar 10;

In the aftermath of the Copenhagen climate conference, those who defended the widely condemned outcome tended to talk about it as a "step in the right direction". This was always a tendentious argument, given that tackling climate change can not be addressed by half measures. We can't make compromises with nature.

Bolivia, however, believed that Copenhagen marked a backwards step, undoing the work built on since the climate talks in Kyoto. That is why, against strong pressure from industrialised countries, we and other developing nations refused to sign the Copenhagen accord and why we are hosting an international meeting on climate change next month. In the words of the Tuvalu negotiator, we were not prepared to "betray our people for 30 pieces of silver".

Our position was strongly criticised by several industrialised countries, who did their brazen best to blame the victims of climate change for their own unwillingness to act. However, recent communications by the European Commission have confirmed why we were right to oppose the Copenhagen accord.

In a report called International climate policy post-Copenhagen (pdf), the commission confirmed that the pledges by developed countries are equal to between 13.2% and 17.8% in emissions reductions by 2020 – far below the required 40%-plus reductions needed to keep global temperature rise to less than 2C degrees.

The situation is even worse once you take into account what are called "banking of surplus emission budgets" and "accounting rules for land use, land use change and forestry". The Copenhagen accord would actually allow for an increase in developed country emissions of 2.6% above 1990 levels. This is hardly a forward step.

This is not just about gravely inadequate commitments, it is also about process. Whereas before, under the Kyoto protocol, developed countries were legally bound to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by a certain percentage, now countries can submit whatever targets they want without a binding commitment.

This dangerous approach to climate negotiations is like building a dam where everyone contributes as many bricks as they want regardless of whether it stops the river.

The Copenhagen accord opens the dam and condemns millions. Various estimates suggest that the commitments made under the accord would lead to increases of between three to four degrees celsius – a level that many scientists consider disastrous for human life and our ecosystems.

For Bolivia, the disastrous outcome of Copenhagen was further proof that climate change is not the central issue in negotiations. For rich countries, the key issues in negotiations were finance, carbon markets, competitiveness of countries and corporations, business opportunities along with discussions about the political makeup of the US Senate. There was surprisingly little focus on effective solutions for reducing carbon emissions.

President Evo Morales of Bolivia observed that the best way to put climate change solutions at the heart of the talks was to involve the people. In contrast to much of the official talks, the hundreds of civil society organisations, communities, scientists and faith leaders present in Copenhagen clearly prioritised the search for effective, just solutions to climate change against narrow economic interests.

To advance an agenda based on effective just solutions, Bolivia is therefore hosting a Peoples' Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth on 19-22 April, and inviting everyone to participate. Unlike Copenhagen, there will be no secret discussions behind closed doors. Moreover the debate and proposals will be led by communities on the frontlines of climate change and by organisations and individuals dedicated to tackling the climate crisis. All 192 governments in the UN have also been invited to attend and encouraged to listen to the voices of civil society and together develop common proposals.

We hope that this unique format will help shift power back to the people, which is where it needs to be on this critical issue for all humanity. We don't expect agreement on everything, but at least we can start to discuss openly and sincerely in a way that didn't happen in Copenhagen.

• Pablo Solón is Ambassador to the UN for the Plurinational State of Bolivia. He is a sociologist and economist, was active in Bolivia's social movements before entering government, and is an expert on issues of trade, integration, natural resources and water.

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Top climate officials urge progress at Mexico summit

Yahoo News 20 Mar 10;

CANCUN, Mexico (AFP) – The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has listened to and learned from recent criticism, but the threat of global warming is real and must be tackled, the group's head said Saturday.

Rajendra Pachauri, the embattled head of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning panel of experts, has been criticized for endorsing climate projections based on faulty or inaccurate evidence.

"There's been a lot of talking about climate change. It's an area under strict scrutiny," he acknowledged at a panel discussion at the annual meeting of the Inter-American Development Bank.

"We at the IPCC, we've listened, we've learnt, we've done something about it."

He defended the panel's much-criticized fourth assessment report, which he said "has a great deal of robust material and findings."

The report has been pilloried for claiming erroneously that the Himalayan glaciers were in imminent danger of melting and the group has also been forced onto the offensive by a series of email exchanges made public by a hacker that appear to show climate experts seeking to hide or misrepresent evidence.

Joining Pachauri was Yvo de Boer, the United Nations official who headed efforts to secure a new international agreement on climate change, but announced his resignation after a major summit on a new deal in Copenhagen last year.

De Boer urged progress in the follow-up summit to Copenhagen, to be held in Cancun in November.

He said funding for the fight against climate change would be a major hurdle to address, and warned that a proposed 100-billion-dollar fund to help developing nations tackle global warming would be difficult to fund solely through contributions from rich nations.

"There's a large perception, especially in the developing world, that the entire 100 billion, it's going to come from public financing. I think that extremely unlikely, I don't see industrialized countries... mobilizing another 100 billion a year for climate change," he said.

He also said the Cancun conference would need to address the challenge of managing and distributing funds.

"If in Mexico we can make a significant advance in terms of addressing the resources mobilization, the resources management and the resources disbursement challenges in a way that effectively blends public and private finance towards the development priorities of developing countries, we'll probably have resolved the most difficult issue in this entire process."

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