US-MIDEAST: Regional Players Key to Salvaging Peace Process

Global Intelligence News / IPS

Ali Gharib

WASHINGTON, Dec 4 (IPS) – One of the biggest foreign policy challenges facing the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama will be reinvigorating what looks like a completely stalled Palestinian-Israeli peace process.

Repeated failures in the struggle for peace make clear that a change in direction is needed. And many observers think that taking advantage of the Arab Peace Initiative put forward by the Arab League in 2002 is just the ticket to jumpstarting the process.

A push by Pres. George W. Bush in the final year of his two-term presidency yielded the Annapolis process which, though having made minimal procedural gains and bringing in regional players, largely ignored the existing Arab proposal spearheaded by then-Crown Prince and now King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.

The Annapolis track ended up failing to meet its own goals of having an agreement signed by the end of Bush’s time in office.
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Popularity: 36% [?]

DEVELOPMENT: New Food Must Go Nuclear

Global Intelligence News / IPS

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Dec 2 (IPS) – Better crops on the one hand, and nuclear power on the other might be, you would think, at extreme ends of the technological, and for some, even the moral spectrum. But it could be time to make agriculture more nuclear.

A lot of it is, already. Hundreds of millions of hectares of cultivation around the world is already nuclear assisted. And this technology goes back all of 80 years. Now the world needs this as never before, nuclear and agricultural scientists say.

”Currently there are over 3,000 officially released crop varieties that have involved radiation induced mutations, and over 100 countries routinely make use of this technology, which is one of their favourite strategies for crop improvement,” Pierre Lagoda, head of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) joint plant breeding and genetics section told IPS in an interview in London.

”These crops, grown all over the world, now form an integral part of our daily diet. They are raw materials in industries, and give countries billions of dollars in additional income for farmers.”

Essentially, the technique treats seeds with x-rays and gamma rays to produce new mutations of crops that are better resistant to difficult conditions and changing climate. Nature would of itself produce new mutations of crops to adapt to changing conditions, but only in time, and a long time at that. But this technique can speed up that change dramatically, here and now.

”Once seeds have been irradiated, the seedlings are integrated into normal crop breeding procedures of the countries,” says Lagoda. ”Compared to any other technology you could think about, this is cheap, cost effective, robust, environmentally friendly, and based on results. It is proven, and it is applicable anywhere in the world.”

But a frightening thought, nevertheless, to think of a meal made possible by something nuclear. And the thought raises the ghost of genetically modified (GM) crops, that this could be another, and far bigger instance of misusing science to fool around with nature.

Lagoda says the world can rest — and eat — assured.

”There is nothing that can be produced through radiation induced mutation that is not within the spectrum of possibilities of what nature can bring out in that crop, given sufficient space and time. All radiation induced mutation is doing is to facilitate a naturally occurring phenomenon.” And there is no residual radiation left in a plant after the mutation induction, he says.

Dinner can include a newly developed strain of rice using nuclear induced mutation, but the ingredients in the rice preparation will not be nuclear.

This technology can be critical in addressing world hunger and food security, the IAEA says. It leads to plant varieties that are not just high yielding but adapt to harsh climate conditions and are resistant to certain diseases and insect pests. ”The IAEA is urging a revival of nuclear crop breeding technologies to help tackle world hunger,” IAEA director general Dr Mohamed ElBaradei said in a statement. He has asked for allocation of more resources around the world for use and development of this technology.

The IAEA and the FAO together say that in addition to 850 million people worldwide already going hungry, a million more are being pushed below the one-dollar-a-day poverty level. Increased use of this new technology can improve health and livelihood, they say.

In Japan, the Institute of Radiation Breeding has figured that crops developed with radiation induced mutations have yielded 62 billion dollars in returns, for an investment of 69 million dollars between 1959 and 2001. That amounts to a 900 fold return. In Pakistan, use of the technique quadrupled cotton production in ten years. China and the U.S. are the other countries where the technology is in widespread use.

But the technology has still not been used as widely as it ought to be, scientists say. ”In 1928 it was found that x-rays would change the blueprint of plants in a manner in which that which is hidden can become obvious and be used to create new crop varieties,” says Lagoda. And it was in 1964 that the IAEA and the FAO came together and set up a joint programme for using nuclear techniques in food and agriculture to ”mimic nature.” Now, he says, given the recent agricultural shocks, ”we can no longer wait for chance discoveries to give us new crop varieties.”

The IAEA, he said, is calling the attention of the world to the looming threat of global climate change and variation. ”This year, prices of all basic foodstuff went to their highest level in the past 50 years, and this situation is only going to get worse,” Lagoda says.

”The countries most at risk are their developing countries, with their fragile ecosystems, with their agriculture that is rudimentary, no effective irrigation, where farmers do not have enough resources to buy fertilisers. So when the environment changes so much, there will not be enough resilience in the crops to withstand these new conditions.”

The IAEA, he said, is ”calling for a revival of culture, if you may, of supporting agriculture.”
All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2008.

Popularity: 23% [?]

U.S.: Obama Urged to Quickly Engage Iran, Syria

Global Intelligence News / IPS

Jim Lobe*

WASHINGTON, Dec 2 (IPS) – The incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama should move quickly to engage Iran without preconditions and to promote an Israeli-Syrian peace accord, according to two veteran Middle East experts whose views are likely to have influence over Obama’s just-announced foreign policy team.

Obama should also ”make a serious effort from the outset to promote progress between Israel and the Palestinians,” propose its own solutions to the parties ”sooner rather than later”, and enlist the active support of the Arab League in its success, according to Richard Haass and Martin Indyk, senior Middle East aides under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, respectively.

They also called for Obama to consider providing nuclear guarantees and enhanced anti-ballistic missile defence capabilities to Israel if negotiations to curb Iran’s nuclear programme fail or do not achieve quick success in order to dissuade the Jewish state from attacking Tehran’s nuclear facilities on its own. Such an umbrella could also extend to Washington’s Arab allies in part to prevent a regional arms race.
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Popularity: 29% [?]

POLITICS-THAILAND: Status as Regional Leader in Doubt

Global Intelligence News / IPS

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Nov 29 (IPS) – For years, Thais affected an air of superiority when talking about their regional neighbours on mainland South-east Asia. Such pride came from the country’s record of political stability — despite numerous coups — that attracted foreign investment.

But the siege of Bangkok’s international airport by a right-wing anti-government protest movement, which entered its fourth day on Saturday, is shredding the superior edge Thailand had enjoyed.

This is the fourth airport in the country that this right-wing movement has succeeded in shutting down since it took to the streets in May to force a democratically elected government to resign.
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Popularity: 21% [?]

TRADE-WEST AFRICA: Swollen Shoot Disease Devastating Cocoa Trees

Global Intelligence News / IPS

Francis Kokutse

ACCRA, Nov 27 (IPS) – On a hot November afternoon, Opanin Owusu Adu showed me around his farm on the outskirts of Suhum, a town in the Eastern Region in Ghana.

He pointed out what has happened to the cocoa trees that he had hoped to make a living from. With a sad voice he said, ‘‘my son, that is what the people say swollen shoot disease does to the cocoa trees”.

What should have been golden pods, have become blackened, dried up and withered. ‘‘You cannot cultivate these ones. It means no money.”

Swollen shoot disease is a problem across the West African region. Farmers in Ghana, Ivory Coast, Togo and Nigeria have not been spared the devastation.

Worried by its long-term effect, Ghana’s President John Kufuor early this year called on the regional grouping the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to take steps to fight the disease.
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Popularity: 30% [?]

NICARAGUA-RUSSIA: Ortega Embraces Kremlin

Global Intelligence News / IPS

José Adán Silva

MANAGUA, Nov 25 (IPS) – The government of Nicaragua is seeking Russia’s support in a strategy that some analysts view as risky for the future diplomatic relations of this Central American nation.

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega has reestablished friendly relations and economic ties with the Kremlin, after over 16 years of a virtual freeze.

Nicaragua was the second country, after Russia, to recognise last August the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the two breakaway provinces of the former Soviet republic of Georgia.

Russia’s invasion of Georgia in August precipitated the greatest crisis between the West and Moscow since the end of the Cold War, which stretched from the mid-1940s, shortly after World War II, to the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.
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Popularity: 32% [?]

ECONOMY: Don’t Bank On Them

Global Intel Net / IPS

David Cronin

BRUSSELS, Nov 18 (IPS) – Public confidence in Belgian banks has eroded considerably over the past few months. A series of multi-billion euro rescue plans, reports of lavish executive bonuses and investigations into whether shareholders were misled about solvency levels have fuelled fears that the savings of the hard-pressed ordinary citizen are anything but safe.

Less noticed, though arguably more disturbing, are revelations that the country’s banks invest in projects that damage the environment and abuse elementary human rights.

By visiting the ‘Bank Secrets’ website (www.bankgeheimen.be), savers can monitor what is done with the money they lodge in their accounts. It says that there is a ”very high” chance that Fortis, Citibank and ING invest in harmful projects, and a ”high” risk that Dexia and KBC do.

Netwerk Vlaanderen, the Flemish human rights organisation which set up the website, has used four main criteria to assess projects that banks finance: if they involve the manufacture of weapons; if they respect the employment standards recommended by the International Labour Organisation; if they are ecologically destructive and; if they involve cooperation with repressive regimes.
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Popularity: 23% [?]

ENVIRONMENT-BURMA: Conflict Threatens Karen Biodiversity

Global Geopolitics Net Sites / IPS

Keya Acharya

BANGKOK, Nov 17 (IPS) – On top of 60 years of military occupation, the Karen people of Burma are now facing severe impairment of their environmental and cultural foundations, say activists.

Burma’s incredibly rich and highly endemic biodiversity has a recorded 11,800 plant species including a species-collection of 800 orchids, 100 bamboos, 1,000 birds and 145 globally threatened mammals.

A great part of this biodiversity is found in Karen State in southeast Myanmar bordering Thailand, now suffering heavily due to the ongoing conflict between the government’s State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) and the Karen National Union (KNU).

The conflict has displaced over 500,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) within Karen State, mostly hiding in the forests.

Civilians have become the target of the Burmese military as the SPDC aims to weaken the KNU by cutting off provisions and support from local Karen. And, according to Paul Sein twa, director of the Karen Environmental and Social Action Network (KESAN), there is a toll on the environment as well.
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Popularity: 19% [?]

BALKANS: Organised Crime Knows No Boundaries

Global Intel News / IPS

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Nov 14 (IPS) – Inter-ethnic hatred has remained alive among many Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs through the years since the wars of the disintegration of former Yugoslavia. But the ‘brotherhood’ imposed by communist rulers to keep people together remains alive in organised crime that knows no boundaries, or religious and ethnic divisions.

This was evident again in the killing last month of Ivo Pukanic (47), owner of the weekly Nacional. His paper ran a campaign to expose organised crime in the region.

Two weeks before Pukanic was killed, a young female lawyer Ivana Hodak died in a mafia-style ambush. She and her father, also a lawyer, were involved in one of the most spectacular cases against war-time generals-turned businessmen, who were accused of abusing state funds for private purposes at the time of Croatia’s war of independence in the 1990s.

Investigation of the latest killing, the first violent death of a journalist in Croatia since its independence war of the 1990s, has exposed a close-knit network of Bosniak, Croat, Montenegrin and Serb criminals who conspired in the act.
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Popularity: 27% [?]

VENEZUELA-RUSSIA: Business Deals Consolidate Alliance

Global Intel Net / IPS

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Nov 13 (IPS) – ”Tovariches! Comrades! Today I feel I must say to you: let us work to find gas and oil under these waters!” said Alexander Medvedev, deputy chairman of the Russian firm Gazprom, when drills on the Escorpión Vigilante marine platform finally perforated the Venezuelan sea bed.

It was Nov. 7, the anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution, and Medvedev and the Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, Igor Sechin, were accompanying their host, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, at the inauguration of operations by UrdanetaGazprom, a partnership with Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA to explore for gas in the northwestern Gulf of Venezuela.

Moments earlier, perched on the scaffolding of bars and walkways on the Escorpión Vigilante, a platform rented from the United States, Chávez saluted the ”strategic alliance between two energy giants,” his own country and Russia, ”the homeland of Lenin.”
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Popularity: 29% [?]

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