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UNEP or UN in the news Thousands starving due to 'silent tsunami' of rising food prices
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- India largest source of smuggled CFCs
UNEP or UN in the newsThousands starving due to 'silent tsunami' of rising food pricesTue, 29 Apr 2008 08:15a.m. U.N. officials on Monday blamed market speculation for the recent jump in global food prices and called for a concerted effort to ensure the world's poor can afford to feed themselves. "We have enough food on this planet today to feed everyone," the head of the U.N. Environment Program, Achim Steiner, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. But, he added, "The way that markets and supplies are currently being influenced by perceptions of future markets is distorting access to that food." “Real people and real lives are being affected by a dimension that is essentially speculative," said Steiner, noting that millions have found themselves unable to pay for food since prices began to rise steeply at the start of the year. Last week the World Food Program asked for an additional US$755 million to fill the hole in its budget caused by rising prices and growing reliance on food aid among the world's poor. Steiner's comments were echoed by the U.N.'s right-to-food advocate, who said that high food prices were destabilizing the world. Jean Ziegler told reporters at the U.N.'s European headquarters in Geneva on Monday that the "daily massacre of hunger" was being worsened by private equity companies seeking to profit from price swings on the international commodities markets. A U.S. government regulator last week rejected the idea that speculative trading is the primary culprit behind surging prices of corn, wheat and other crops. Bart Chilton, a commissioner with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, said commodities markets were functioning properly, and that shrunken harvests, smaller grain inventories and the declining value of the dollar were the reason for the all-time price highs. But over the weekend Vietnam moved to curtail speculative buying of rice after consumers were panicked into buying up stocks. State media quoted Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung on Sunday as insisting that supplies in Vietnam - the world's second-largest rice exporter after Thailand - were "completely adequate" for domestic consumption. But Dung warned that any organizations and individuals speculating in the commodity would be "severely punished." U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called the heads of all the global body’s major agencies for a meeting this week in the Swiss capital, Bern, to discuss the food crisis. Other senior figures including World Bank President Robert Zoellick and the director-general of the World Trade Organization, Pascal Lamy, are also attending the closed-door gathering. Steiner said underlying problems in global food production needed to be addressed. Governments should resist giving in to panic about short-term price increases, he said, and instead consider medium - and long-term solutions to the problem of feeding a world population already numbering some 6.5 billion and expected to hit 9 billion by 2050. "What we would clearly not welcome is a simple ratcheting up of the production machine without any consideration of the consequences," said Steiner. The U.N. Environment Program estimates that 70-80 percent of the world's water consumption goes toward agriculture, yet 40-60 percent of that water never actually reaches the fields. Likewise, over-reliance on fertilizers boosts production in the short term but depletes the soil in the long run, according to UNEP. "Sustainable agriculture will cost us a little bit more but will actually allow us to feed a lot more people," said Steiner. He said market corrections will eventually cause the speculation bubble to burst, but governments should consider the current situation a warning of what might come unless farming and consumption patterns are changed. "The footprint of a Western consumer today on the planet is simply many times that of a person living in a developing country," said Steiner. "We need to think in medium - to long-term responses, but not forgetting that we have a real situation right now with tens of millions of people essentially being priced out of feeding themselves."
...................................................... India largest source of smuggled CFCs(Ch. Narendra) Contact Reporter, Publication Date 29/4/2008 12:19:59 AM(IST) India is now the world'''s largest producer and smuggling source of chlorofluorocarbon (CFC), the gas that has created holes in the earth's ozone layer, says a senior UN Environment Programme official. Thanavat Junchaya, UNEP's regional network coordinator for its CFC project, said: "India now produces almost all the CFC that is still being produced in the world, and the amount it officially exports is frequently far lower than the amount reported by other countries to be imported from India. "As much as 55 percent of these goods are unaccounted for. After drugs, CFC is the most smuggled commodity." CFCs have created a hole in the ozone layer on top of the earth's atmosphere and are not supposed to be manufactured by any country by the end of 2009, as per the 1987 Montreal Protocol. CFC, used as a refrigerant, has been phased out of use from most home refrigerators and air-conditioners around the world now. But there are still many car air-conditioners that continue to use CFC, despite rules to the contrary. Industrialised countries have already phased out its manufacture, and many developing countries have done the same. With China ending exports last year and left with only one CFC producing plant, India and South Korea are the two major manufacturers left. UNEP estimates these two countries now account for over 70 percent of global CFC production, which has come down from a million tonnes a year to 50,000. As signatories to the Montreal Protocol, both India and South Korea are committed to ending CFC manufacture by Jan 1, 2010. Of the two countries, India now has the lion's share of CFC production. Junchaya said that a detailed study carried out in the Asia-Pacific region to trace CFC trade since 2000 had found CFC manufactured in India "being smuggled largely to Japan and Thailand, and to a lesser extent to Malaysia and Iran. Bangladesh, Nepal and Vietnam were also being used as transit countries by the smugglers." The study, carried out for UNEP by Liu Ning from the customs department in China, had found that most often, the smugglers simply did not declare the entire amount of CFC being exported in a legal consignment - they declared far less. Before China ended its CFC exports, it was as big a source of the smuggled gas as India, if not bigger, Junchaya said. "Our study found that in 2004, nearly 51 percent of legal exports from China and 47 percent from India to Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and Iran are not found in the import statistics of the importing countries. "That means over 4,000 tonnes of CFC were unaccounted for." The study found the main routes used by smugglers were India/China-Vietnam-Laos/Cambodia-Thailand, followed by Bangladesh-India, Nepal-India, China-Philippines, China-Malaysia, China-Indonesia, Singapore-Malaysia and Malaysia-Thailand. Junchaya said: "The smuggling is coming down as both exporting and importing countries become more aware of it. Earlier, customs inspectors had really no means of knowing if a gas cylinder marked as oxygen, for example, actually contains oxygen or CFC. "Now UNEP has made them more aware and helped them use special testing equipment." Rajendra Shende, chief of OzonAction in UNEP, said: "Through a number of initiatives like the Customs-Ozone Enforcement Networking Project and the Project Sky-Hole-Patching, countries' environment, ozone and customs authorities exchange information on the movement (of CFC). This has enabled countries to take action." The number of seizures has gone up throughout Asia-Pacific, he added.But CFC smuggling will remain an issue as long as substitutes continue to cost more and equipment using CFC are available, Shende said. http://www.mynews.in/fullstory.aspx?storyid=4323 ……………………………………………. Directory: cpi -> briefs briefs -> The environment in the news briefs -> The environment in the news briefs -> The environment in the news briefs -> The environment in the news briefs -> The environment in the news briefs -> The environment in the news briefs -> The environment in the news briefs -> The environment in the news briefs -> The environment in the news Download 0.5 Mb. Share with your friends:
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