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World Bank: Deforestation Good for Growth
The Ecologist
The World Bank has released a report encouraging the Indonesian government to create vast timber plantations that would damage local ecosystems and livelihood, in order to encourage economic growth.
Indonesia’s tropical forest reserves are the world’s third largest (after the Amazon and the Congo basin), but the sprawling nation has lost around 40 per cent of its canopy to loggers in the last 50 years.
At the present rate of deforestation — with an area roughly the size of El Salvador being cleared annually – lowland trees on Sumatra island and neighboring Borneo will disappear by 2010, many conservationists say.
Indonesia asked the World Bank to help devise a forestry plan and in June 2006 it released a 44-page outline. The paper, released on Wednesday, was a supplement to that strategy.
Activists with Friends of the Earth International, Environmental Defense and Indonesia’s WALHI accused the global lender of prioritizing a government goal to create more than 12.3 million acres of industrial timber plantation.
(22 Feb 2007)
Slavery returns to Britain on large scale, study says
Martin Wainwright, The Guardian
Slavery has made a “horrific” return to modern Britain, according to the most wide-ranging study of the secret world of forced labour yet published. Shocking statistics about the country’s sex trade, including an estimated 5,000 under-16s coerced into prostitution, mask equally violence-ridden and illegal practices in jobs ranging from crop picking and factory work to nursing and the catering trade.
Victims are now in the tens of thousands, according to the report by researchers at Hull university, commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. It says that parts of the economy depend on slave labour, in the same way that 18th century industries like sugar profited from the “triangular trade” between west Africa, the Caribbean and western Europe.
“We are not devaluing an emotive word,” said Professor Gary Craig, associate director of the Wilberforce Institute for the study of slavery and emancipation at Hull. “The shackles may not always be physical, although I have no doubt that in some cases they are. Debt bondage, theft of passports and ID, and threats of violence are tools of slavery.” ..
(26 Feb 2007)
Inadequate power supply killing cement co
Joseph Coomson, Ghanian Chronicle via AllAfrica
The Director in charge of strategy and corporate affairs of Ghacem Ltd, Dr George Dawson-Ahmoah has declared that the current shortfall of energy supplies in the country has significantly affected the production and supply of cement to the market.
He made this declaration when The Business Chronicle contacted him on telephone over the week-end. He confirmed that the company currently has a huge backlog of cement to supply to its valued customers and therefore committed to go the extra mile to supply to the market as and when power is made available. ..
(20 Feb 2007)
