Category: Archive

Trend analyst Faith Popcorn believes that many people are shifting away from consumption as the basis of happiness and there will be a trend towards thrift. Here are the actual statements from her web-site

Reactions to Cashing Out:

Lagom: From the Swedish, most commonly translated as “just enough”, it’s an approach to both design and consumption that explains the essence of brands like Ikea and Volvo. We see notions of “minimalism” and “sustainability” taking on significant currency, as even Americans reject hyper-consumption as not just excessive, but actually damaging to themselves, others and to the planet.

KarmaCapitalism:

As “Cashing Out” rises to this level of prominence, we’ll see a basic shift in the identity/mentality of people, as they make the transition from “consumer” to “citizen”—recognizing that every act of consumption has cost and consequence beyond the transaction, and that every transaction is a “vote” in favor of the offering entity, and against the options not chosen. To compete, Companies are going to have to weave “goodness” as a fundamental intent into their corporate culture. Bringing on a dash of “corporate social responsibility”; whether the mere monetary commitment to a cause, or some other symbolic gesture, will not suffice to curry favor with the citizen. In a world of transparency, where every corporate practice is knowable, they will be watching and exercising that all important vote of the purse.

Activism is now the new narcissism. People will go from wearing their ‘cause’ bracelets on their wrists to posting their causes and beliefs on their resumes and business cards. Employers and prospective hires will court their perfect (cause) match.

“India is named for the Indus River, along whose fecund banks a great urban civilisation flourished more than 4,000 years ago,” writes American historian Stanley Wolpert in his well-know book A New History of India. But the 3,000-kilometre-long river that is the lifeline of Pakistan’s economy is dying a slow death due to thinning of Tibetan glaciers and building of dams and barrages upstream.

The glaciers of the Tibetan plateau are vanishing so fast that they will be reduced by 50 per cent every decade, according to The Independent. Citing the leading Chinese scientists, it says the glaciers have been receding over the past four decades, as the world has gradually warmed up, but the process has now accelerated alarmingly. “The melting threatens to disrupt water supplies over much of Asia. Many of the continent’s greatest rivers-including the Yangtze, the Indus, the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the Mekong and the Yellow River rise on the plateau,” the report says.

The Indus also has great heritage value and many fascinating names. In Tibet it is the Lion River issuing from the mouth of the Lion, in the gutter between the Karakoram and the Himalayas people call it ‘The Eastern River’, because it comes to them from the sunrise. It is also called ‘Abasin’, the Father of Rivers. In ancient times, says historian Jean Fairley, it was called ‘Sindhu’, meaning divider, keeper or defender, the name was gradually changed to Indus.

However, the grandiose of the River Indus is melting fast and points to a creeping emergency because it happens to be the main source of water supply to Pakistan’s major cities, including Karachi, besides irrigation. The situation can be gauged from the fact that freshwater availability in Pakistan has fallen from 5,200 cubic metres per capita in 1947 to less than 1,000 cubic metre currently, making it one of the most parched nations in the world.

The damming of the River Indus has further deteriorated the situation. “Before dams and barrages were built in the Indus Valley, the delta area was criss-crossed by the distributaries of the Indus. The discharge from the river was large enough to affect the ocean currents up to over a hundred miles from the shore. Due to this “an enormous quantity of freshwater and silt the river were brought with it and the delta lands became the richest in the area that constitutes Pakistan,” says noted town planner and architect, Arif Hasan.

The gradual but disastrous cut in the flow of freshwater to the Indus Delta has not only affected the lives and livelihood of the inhabitants of the once fertile delta, it has also led to sea intrusion up to 54km (36 miles) upstream along the main river course of the River Indus. “Nearly 1.6 million acres of agricultural land has been destroyed by sea intrusion,” says Mohammad Ali Shah, Chairman, Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum (PFF). As a result, tens of thousands of inhabitants of Indus Delta have been forced to migrate to greener pastures, including Ibrahim Hyderi, a fishing village in the suburbs of Karachi.

The lack of fresh water (down stream Kotri Barrage) has also badly affected the mangrove forests that happen to be the nurseries of shrimp and fish species. This indirectly affects the fishing industry of Pakistan that fetches $200 million per annum in terms of exports. “Studies have shown that some 60 per cent to 80 per cent of world’s commercial fisheries catch are mangrove dependent species,” says Tropical Rainforest Portfolio 1996-2001, a report prepared by the World Wide Fund (WWF) for Nature and the Netherlands government.

The precarious situation has been an outcome of the non-availability of freshwater downstream Kotri Barrage. This is amply demonstrated by the fact that the average annual and seasonal discharge downstream Kotri Barrage was 150 million acre feet (MAF) in 1880-92 but was merely 10MAF in 1992 due to building of dams and barrages upstream.

"The security implications [of the food crisis] should also not be underestimated as food riots are already being reported across the globe," Holmes said. "Current food price trends are likely to increase sharply both the incidence and depth of food insecurity."

He added that the biggest challenge to humanitarian work is climate change, which has doubled the number of disasters from an average of 200 a year to 400 a year in the past two decades.

As well as this week’s violence in Egypt, the rising cost and scarcity of food has been blamed for:

· Riots in Haiti last week that killed four people

· Violent protests in Ivory Coast

· Price riots in Cameroon in February that left 40 people dead

· Heated demonstrations in Mauritania, Mozambique and Senegal

· Protests in Uzbekistan, Yemen, Bolivia and Indonesia

UN staff in Jordan also went on strike for a day this week to demand a pay rise in the face of a 50% hike in prices, while Asian countries such as Cambodia, China, Vietnam, India and Pakistan have curbed rice exports to ensure supplies for their own residents.

Officials in the Philippines have warned that people hoarding rice could face economic sabotage charges. A moratorium is being considered on converting agricultural land for housing or golf courses, while fast-food outlets are being pressed to offer half-portions of rice.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation says rice production should rise by 12m tonnes, or 1.8%, this year, which would help ease the pressure. It expects "sizable" increases in all the major Asian rice producing countries, especially Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Burma, the Philippines and Thailand.

Holmes is the latest senior figure to warn the world is facing a worsening food crisis. Josette Sheeran, director of the UN World Food Programme, said last month: "We are seeing a new face of hunger. We are seeing more urban hunger than ever before. We are seeing food on the shelves but people being unable to afford it."

The programme has launched an appeal to boost its aid budget from $2.9bn to $3.4bn (£1.5bn to £1.7bn) to meet higher prices, which officials say are jeopardising the programme’s ability to continue feeding 73 million people worldwide.

Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, said "many more people will suffer and starve" unless the US, Europe, Japan and other rich countries provide funds. He said prices of all staple food had risen 80% in three years, and that 33 countries faced unrest because of the price rises.

In the UK, Professor John Beddington, the new chief scientific adviser to the government, used his first speech last month to warn the effects of the food crisis would bite more quickly than climate change. He said the agriculture industry needed to double its food production, using less water than today.

He said the prospect of food shortages over the next 20 years was so acute it had to be tackled immediately: "Climate change is a real issue and is rightly being dealt with by major global investment. However, I am concerned there
is another major issue along a similar time-scale – that of food and energy security."

Addis Ababa, 7 April 2008 – (ECA) Without decisive action for sound adaptation, climate change will severely compromise agricultural production and exacerbate poverty and food insecurity in Africa, the Deputy Executive Secretary of Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), Ms. Lalla Ben-Barka said today in Addis Ababa.

In a keynote address to the Senior Policy Seminar of the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) on Climate Change and Economic Development in Africa, Ms. Ben-Barka said climate change would significantly decrease the area suitable for agriculture, the length of growing seasons and yield potential, particularly along the margins of semi-arid and arid areas.

Citing climate change modeling results by the Nobel prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Mrs. Ben-Barka said that a warming by another 0.40 C on current temperatures would shorten crop-growing period by more than 20% in the Sahel by 2020, and reduce yields from rain-fed agriculture by up to 50% in many African countries.

She said projected losses in cereal production in Sub-Sahara Africa were estimated at about 33% by 2060, while climate change would decrease fisheries resources in large lakes due to rising water temperatures.

“The combined impacts of these events would threaten the livelihoods of large portions of the African population and curtail the prospects for broad-based economic growth, poverty reduction and food security in the continent,” she said.

Water resources in Africa have been decreasing over time, mainly as a result of persistent droughts, rapid melting of snowcaps, drying of lakes and rivers and land use patterns.

Ms. Ben-Barka said climate change would intensify the situation. “Water levels have decreased in major lakes such as Lake Victoria, lakes within the Rift Valley, and Lake Chad, which has already lost over 50% of its water between 1973 and 2002,” she said, adding that major rivers such as the Nile, Niger and Zambezi also face declining water levels.

“River flow in the Nile region will decrease by 75% by 2100 with damaging consequences on the well-known irrigation practices in the area,” she said.

She said it was in realization of  these serious challenges that African Union, in January 2007, called on countries to integrate climate change considerations into their development strategies and programmes.

ECA is already collaborating with the African Union and the African Development Bank to develop and implement the Climate for Development in Africa (ClimDev-Africa) which aims to improve climate-related observations and data, information services, risk management practices and policies, emphasising climate-sensitive sectors.

In a welcoming statement, AERC’s Executive Director, Prof. William Lyakurwa, said nearly all impacts of climate change were exacerbated by inappropriate policy change and the erroneous belief that business might suffer if necessary policy changes were put in place.

by Patricia Mayville-Cox

Recently, the melting of a glacier in southern Chile caused a glacial lake to swell, and then empty suddenly, causing a tsunami of sorts against a river. Fortunately, no one was injured. According to glacier scientist, Gino Casassa, the melting of the Colonia glacier can be blamed on rising world temperatures. The melting of the glacier filled Cachet Lake, and then bored a 5-mile tunnel through the glacier, emptying into the Baker River.

Casassa said that temperatures were unusually high during the recent summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and that events like this occasionally take place during the summer. But are events like this one attributable to global warming? According to Casassa, the answer is yes, "the basic cause is global warming."

The water bored a 5-mile tunnel through the glacier and finally emptied into the Baker River on April 6.

"The remarkable thing is that the mass of water moved against the current of the river," Casassa told The Associated Press by telephone from the Center for Scientific Studies in the southern city of Valdivia. "It was a real river tsunami."

The lake was nearly full again by late Wednesday, he said.
 

Disappearing forests

The Zabaikalsky Krai, a region in Eastern Siberia between Lake Baikal and the Russian Far East, is one of the worst affected areas.

According to the Federal Agency for Forestry, illegal logging here accounts for more than two million cubic metres a year.

The agency warned the region could be stripped of wood reserves in five years if nothing is done to stop the criminal trade.

Last May, Yuri Trutnev, the Russian Minister for Natural Resources, paid a surprise visit and said he was shocked by what he found.

He complained that "entire bandit villages" were cutting down trees, loading them on railway sidings and sending them to China.

Vladimir Putin recently described the export of unprocessed timber as "comparable with embezzlement".

"Our neighbours continue to make billions of dollars on Russian timber, but we are doing very little to create conditions for wood processing here at home," Putin said.

Chinese wealth

A decade ago, Manzhouli was a dusty border town in a corner of Inner Mongolia in North East China. Now it is a gleaming metropolis built on the wealth of timber from the Siberian forests. I understood the Russian president’s resentment.

Standing in a vast lumber yard surrounded by piles and piles of wood, I saw a forest of cranes and, beyond them, a cluster of brightly-coloured skyscrapers.

This surreal city plays host to a stream of Russian tourists who travel for days to buy clothes, cameras and DVDs in glitzy shopping malls.

Guang Delin, the boss of just one of the 70 timber businesses in Manzhouli, took us to lunch at an extraordinary restaurant.

Outside an icy wind blew across the steppe, but inside the atmosphere was tropical.

The restaurant was decorated with lush green plants and fish tanks. On my way to our table, I noticed a couple of alligators basking on the edge of an artificial pond.

As I watched waitresses carrying plates of steaming noodles past tinkling fountains, I thought about a woman I met on the other side of the border in Russia.

Life is very hard here and now the collective farm has fallen apart there is almost no work Natasha Lives in a ‘bandit village’

Natasha lives in one of the so called "bandit villages" in Zabaikalsky Krai, seven hours drive on bad roads from the regional capital Chita. Her house has no running water – she has to fetch it by bucket from a nearby well.

"I’m a single mother with three children and one is an invalid," she told me. "Life is very hard here and now the collective farm has fallen apart there is almost no work."

Her neighbour, an elderly man in a fur hat, agreed.

"Most people have to work as black market loggers just to survive, to buy bread and feed their families.

"We used to have so much forest round here," he added, throwing his arms wide open. "But now look – there’s almost none left and they only leave the small, skinny trees – the ones we call toothpicks."

Unlicensed logging

The police have just established a new forestry division to conduct spot checks.

But many points in the new Russian Forest Code contradict each other. The lack of clarity leaves room for unlicensed logging on a large scale, with poachers avoiding taxes and pocketing huge sums of money.

But it can be dangerous to speak out against the illegal trade.

What’s worse we are destroying our environment. What kind of legacy are we leaving to our grand children? Viktor Ostanin Russian MP

One regional MP, Vladimir Baranov, who also ran a wood processing plant, was shot dead on his doorstep in 2005.

Many, including a fellow MP Viktor Ostanin, believe he was the victim of a contract killing organised by powerful business interests in the area who have links with Chinese mafia.

Ostanin, a former intelligence officer, said the best way to fight illegal logging is to create more jobs in wood processing in Russia.

"Sadly we are allowing the Chinese to buy our forest very cheaply, they process it and send furniture and flooring to other countries – that makes no sense."

"What’s worse we are destroying our environment. What kind of legacy are we leaving to our grand children?"

But can Chinese companies be blamed for exploiting weak legislation and corruption on the other side of the border?

"I think initially they all wanted to obey Russian laws," Wen Bo, an environmental campaigner in Beijing, said.

"But if the Russians don’t care about their own forest, if Russian officials encourage them to do business illegally, bribing officials and paying money under the table, they soon learn how to do business in such an environment."