9 families sue Chinese milk company (IHT)

By Edward Wong
Thursday, October 30, 2008
BEIJING: Nine families with babies suffering kidney problems, allegedly because of contaminated milk, have filed separate lawsuits against one of China's largest milk companies, according to lawyers representing the families. They are the latest lawsuits to be filed in China's worst food safety scandal in years.
The lawsuits were filed on Wednesday in the northern city of Shijiazhuang, the location of the headquarters of Sanlu Group, a company at the center of the milk scandal. The lawsuits demand compensation from Sanlu.
The milk scandal and the lawsuits have become politically sensitive matters, and so far no judge has agreed to hear a case in court. At least three other lawsuits had already been filed before Wednesday.
Both product liability lawsuits and class-action lawsuits are rare in China. This means that Chinese consumers have one less layer of protection against defective practices by big companies if governmental regulatory processes fail, as they have in many recent food and product safety cases, some legal scholars say.
The milk scandal first emerged in September, when it was revealed that babies drinking milk formula tainted with a toxic chemical called melamine had developed kidney stones. Melamine had been illegally added to dairy products to artificially boost protein counts to meet nutrition standards.
At least four babies have died and at least 53,000 other children have fallen ill, according to reports from official news agencies.
Since September, a wide range of food products from China have been discovered to have melamine, from yogurt and eggs to biscuits. Countries around the world have ordered recalls of Chinese-made food products suspected of being tainted with melamine.
Senior government officials and company executives have been fired as the scandal has widened, and dozens of people suspected of being involved have been arrested.
Given the Communist Party's sensitivities over the scandal, many lawyers in China do not have high hopes that the lawsuits will get a fair hearing in the courts, if they are heard at all.
The families, which are from several provinces, hope that the central government will eventually provide some sort of compensation for the ill children, said Ji Cheng, a lawyer with the Deheng Law Office, a large firm based in Beijing that is representing the nine families.
Each family had an infant that had to go to the hospital because of kidney stones, and six are still in the hospital, Ji said. The families have kept hospital records and complete records of their purchases of Sanlu baby formula, he added. The families are asking for at least 14,000 yuan, or about $2,000, per child in compensation payments from Sanlu.
Ji said the lawyers did not file a class-action lawsuit on behalf of all the parents because each case had different details.
Class-action lawsuits are highly discouraged in the Chinese legal system. Technically they can be filed, but onerous rules put in place in recent years by official legal bodies have made it difficult for lawyers to file such lawsuits. Some Chinese legal scholars say the government views class-action lawsuits as a threat to social stability.
Over the course of the milk scandal, some lawyers have been discouraged from representing families seeking damages from dairy companies or from the government.
In the first weeks of the scandal, more than 100 lawyers put themselves on a list of lawyers volunteering to dispense legal advice to the families. But at least two dozen have since dropped their names from the list; most of them are from Henan Province, where lawyers have complained of subtle pressure put on them by local officials.
Huang Yuanxi contributed research.

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Bumper barley crop helps brewers, but not drinkers (IHT)

Reuters
Thursday, October 30, 2008
HAMBURG: A bumper barley crop has caused a sharp fall in prices for brewing malt and, while breweries are benefiting, beer drinkers will have little to cheer, analysts said Wednesday.
The European Union harvest of spring barley, which is used to make malt, rose by two million tons this summer after poor weather cut the 2007 crop.
As a result, malting barley prices have tumbled, cutting costs for beer makers. In Germany, malting barley is quoted around Euros160, or $207, a ton, compared with about €300 a ton before the harvest this summer.
"This price reduction provides a certain amount of relief on brewers' costs and could be positive for earnings," said Reiner Klinz at the consultancy KPMG, said. "But a beer retail price cut is not to be expected." He said brewers already had swallowed higher prices for raw materials, energy, glass and logistics, which had not been passed to consumers, and the commodity price reduction would help to reduce pressure on the sector.
The brewing giant SABMiller this month warned of an uncertain year ahead, despite the group's decision to raise prices to offset higher commodity costs and other input costs. Although prices for barley, aluminum and glass had fallen, the company said it would not see a big effect in the current year ending in March 2009 because of the company's forward hedging policy.








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Israeli troops kill armed Palestinian shepherd (IHT)

Reuters
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
By Wael al-Ahmed
Israeli troops in the occupied West Bank killed a 68-year-old Palestinian shepherd on Wednesday who was carrying a shotgun as protection against rustlers.
The Israeli army said Mohammed Abahereh opened fire at soldiers on routine patrol and they shot back, killing him.
Abahereh's son, Taher, who was helping him herd the sheep in the early morning darkness in al-Yamoun village, said rustlers had tried in the past to steal the animals.
"He was locking the gate and he heard something around us. He thought that it was thieves, so he went out with his shotgun and was shot immediately," Taher said.
The son said he had not seen the shooting but had heard the gunfire. He voiced doubts his father had shot at the soldiers.
"My father has never used his gun," he said, accusing the troops of leaving the shepherd to bleed to death and preventing an ambulance from reaching the area quickly.
An Israeli military spokesman denied the allegation.
"The troops did not prevent the evacuation and even guided the Red Crescent ambulance to the area so that it could get there as soon as possible," the spokesman said.
Israeli forces maintain a network of checkpoints and roadblocks in the West Bank and carry out patrols and raids against Palestinian militants.
The Palestinian Authority, engaged in peace talks with Israel, says Israeli military activity hampers its own efforts to exert security control in West Bank towns and villages.
(Additional reporting by Wafa Amr in Ramallah and Ori Lewis in Jerusalem; Writing by Jeffrey Heller; Editing by Angus MacSwan)

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Hong Kong finds more tainted eggs from China (IHT)

By David Barboza
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
SHANGHAI: Hong Kong officials said that for the second time in a week they had found a batch of eggs imported from China that contain high levels of melamine, the same industrial chemical that has been blamed for contaminating China's milk supplies.
The announcement, which came late Tuesday from the territory's food safety agency, is adding to concerns that melamine contamination may be more widespread in China's food supplies.
While Hong Kong officials cautioned that children and adults would have to eat a large number of tainted eggs in a single day to fall ill, the report is another blow to China's agriculture industry.
China is already struggling to cope with a milk scandal that has sickened over 50,000 children and caused the deaths of at least four infants this year after they consumed melamine-tainted baby milk formula. That case triggered a global recall of foods made with Chinese dairy products.
The Chinese government has tried to move boldly to deal with the crisis, promising to overhaul the nation's food safety system, announcing dozens of arrests and sacking high-ranking government officials, including the head of the nation's top quality inspection agency.
The government has attributed the dairy scandal to organized groups of scam artists who regulators say were intentionally adding melamine to watered-down milk to artificially boost its protein reading in quality tests.
Chinese regulators say they are now investigating how melamine got into eggs. The government is also doing spot checks in supermarkets in some cities, like Shanghai.
Zhang Zhongjun, an official in Beijing with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, said he met Wednesday with officials from China's Agriculture Ministry and was told they believed the problem eggs in Hong Kong were probably contaminated by melamine-tainted animal feed.
But Zhang said the government told him the source of the contamination was not yet known. "It's not clear whether the melamine was added by humans or by pollution," he said.
Some food safety officials say that if chicken feed is contaminated, it is possible hog and fish feed could be also.
The chemical, which is used to produce some plastics and fertilizer, was blamed last year for contaminating Chinese feed ingredients that were exported to the United States and eventually sickened dogs and cats. The case led to a major pet food recall.
On Monday, Wal-Mart Stores said some of its stores had pulled the Hanwei brand of eggs from shelves in China as a precaution after the Hong Kong government finding.
The first batch of eggs that tested positive for high melamine levels by the Hong Kong Center for Food Safety came from a company in Dalian, in northeast China. Officials from the region told Xinhua, the government news agency, that the contamination may have come from local poultry farms.
According to a notice posted on the web site of the Dalian Hanwei Food Co., regulators learned on Sept. 27 that some eggs were contaminated. The company said it was ordered to recall eggs, and exports to Hong Kong were halted by regulators in early October.
The second batch of tainted eggs found in Hong Kong was from the Jingshan Agriproducts Company in Hubei Province. Pan Fengxia, the company's general manager, confirmed by telephone Wednesday that eggs tested in Hong Kong were found to have higher levels of melamine than permitted, but she did not know why. "I never heard that melamine was added into feed or my products," she said. "Never."

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Grazing sheep help fight noxious weeds in U.S. (IHT)

By Pamela J. Podger
Monday, October 27, 2008
MISSOULA, Montana: Chilled by an autumn wind, Enrique Márquez watched from horseback as the sheep gamboled down the mountain. A border collie nipped the heels of wayward ewes.
All summer and into the fall, the flock grazed on noxious weeds infesting 1,000 acres, or 400 hectares, of public lands above the Missoula Valley as part of this city's effort to restore its native prairie grasses.
Throughout the United States, sheep grazing is gaining popularity as a low-cost, nontoxic tool in the battle to control leafy spurge, knapweed, Dalmatian toadflax and other invasive weed species. The approach is catching on in places like the Massachusetts island Nantucket, Civil War battlefields in Virginia, ski slopes in Vermont and vineyards in California.
Tom McDonnell, a staff consultant with the American Sheep Industry Institute, called this kind of grazing a "growth industry." McDonnell cited a study by the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University that indicated nonnative weeds had invaded 40 to 50 percent of U.S. croplands, pasture and public lands and were spreading at a rate of 1.75 million acres per year.
Sheep grazing is a long-term solution best used in conjunction with other methods, like beneficial insects, controlled burns, herbicides and hand pulling, officials said.
Jeff Mosley, an extension range management specialist at Montana State University, said sheep were a natural "low fossil fuel" way of controlling invasive plants, with the added benefit of providing meat and wool.
"It's environmentally friendly," he said. "Grazing has an aesthetic appeal and a bucolic aspect. It's a natural form, and people appreciate that as well."
In the mountains ringing the Missoula Valley, about 600 acres of city lands are 75 to 100 percent invaded by noxious weeds, said Missoula's conservation lands manager, Morgan Valliant.
"We're using the sheep to slowly turn back the clock and decrease the density of the weeds and get some seeds" of native grasses and wildflowers sown, Valliant said, adding, "Each year, we're learning more and more."
Still, some local residents are skeptical.
Giles Thelen, a plant ecologist at the University of Montana in Missoula, said that results of the sheep-grazing program were anecdotal and that plots should be used to measure how effective the sheep were.
Thelen also worries about the sheep worsening the problem by picking up invasive seeds in their wool and dropping them in new areas, as well as causing erosion with their hooves.
"There's no data to show if the sheep are making the situation worse or better," he said.
Some herbicides may be more effective, he said, "but people don't like poison on their public lands."
Each year, the city contracts with John Stahl, a fourth-generation rancher who drives his flock to the infested hills from his Missoula County ranch nine miles, or 14 kilometers, away.
The city pays Stahl about $1,300 a month, including a modest stipend for Márquez. The rancher provides Márquez's food, equipment, camp wagon and bus fare from his home in Chihuahua, Mexico.
Stahl said access to the forage on public lands allowed him to continue raising sheep and other livestock instead of selling the ranch to developers.
"I couldn't make a living on the sheep without access to the city land," Stahl said. "And Enrique really knows the sheep and all the places they can hide. He has an instinct for animals."
Before coming to Montana, Márquez, 57, a soft-spoken man with hazel eyes, worked with cattle in New Mexico for a decade, but he had never handled sheep. He said the money he earned each season helped him fix up his small cattle ranch in Mexico.
Márquez pointed out the telltale orange patches of leafy spurge in the dun-colored hills where his flock had not grazed. He said the sheep were effective and better than spraying.
"The chemicals kill the bad plants as well as the good ones," he said in Spanish. "In Mexico, we have a little spurge, but nothing like this. I've learned a lot about bad plants and sheep here."
On a recent Sunday morning, the flock departed the mountains before the first snowfall. The sheep moved through Missoula's streets, their bells clanging and hooves clattering on the pavement as they headed back to the ranch.
The herders included Stahl on an all-terrain vehicle, volunteers on bicycles and Márquez on horseback. The woolly procession rolled past subdivisions and apartments, where children ran alongside it.
A tractor-trailer slowed to a halt as it was engulfed by the flock.
The sheep ran through an interstate-highway underpass, then across railroad tracks and a busy four-lane state highway.
When the sheep arrived at the ranch after an hour and a half trip down from the mountains, they fanned out in the waist-high grasses.
Stahl said the roundup went faster each year.
"They make their way home from memory," he said.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/27/america/sheep.php



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A French family dynasty reinvents the oyster (IHT)

By Steven Erlanger
Monday, October 27, 2008
BOURCEFRANC-LE-CHAPUS, France: For Thierry and Véronique Gillardeau, the oyster has become their world.
A member of the fourth generation of a family of oyster farmers, Thierry, 37, has brought an economics education to what has become the most famous name in oysters: Gillardeau.
The family's small private company, founded 110 years ago here by the sea near La Rochelle and the Île d'Oléron in western France, produces only "spéciales," oysters that are fleshier and, consequently, more expensive than the standard. The Gillardeau name has become associated with fine oysters, rather like Hermès for neckties.
Thierry's father, Gérard Gillardeau, 61, took over the business from his father, Jean, who ran it after his father, Henri, who began as an illiterate farmhand before turning his hand to oysters. Oyster farming then dominated the economy of the region, where the Charente and Seudre Rivers add their fresh water to the salt flats and estuaries.
Henri did well enough to build a large house opposite City Hall in this village of 3,500 people, a house he called "Ça m'suffit," or "That'll do." Thierry and Véronique live there today with their two children.
"My grandfather couldn't read, but he knew how to count," Gérard said. "Now, oyster farmers know how to read but not how to count."
Many of his neighbors still farm oysters "the way they did in the Middle Ages," he said, by taking the seedlings to full growth in small oyster basins next to the sea, farming them in small, flat-bottomed boats and doing much of the work by hand. "They could be more profitable," he said. "But the past is so important to them that they don't want to change."
That attitude makes the Gillardeau family something of an anomaly in a nation famously resistant to change, especially in how it produces food and wine.
In 1978, Gérard sought to expand beyond his village and found a partner in the huge wholesale market in Rungis, just outside of Paris, a step that helped the Gillardeau company make a name for itself. For the past 15 years, sales have increased roughly 20 percent a year, Thierry said at a conference in May. As a private company, it does not reveal its accounts.
"In some business schools, they are studying our case like a case of marketing," he said. "But you have to know that there is no marketing behind Gillardeau, only quality." In fact, he said, marketing is by word of mouth. "Because our oysters are good people want to eat them again and again," he said. "They will go to a restaurant and say, 'Why don't you serve Gillardeau?'"
The number of local oyster farmers here in western France has dropped from more than 3,000 two decades ago to 700 now. Gillardeau no longer farms its oysters here. It now produces roughly half its oysters in Normandy, near Utah Beach, and half in County Cork, in Ireland, where the waters are cleaner and the sites easier to farm with tractors, and where there are fewer parasites and less agricultural runoff.
It employs some 100 people in all, but still sorts, finishes and packs its oysters here, producing about 2,000 tons a year of an annual French production of some 130,000 tons.
Unlike many other companies, Gillardeau buys seedling oysters that are one to two years old. That way it avoided most of the impact of the widespread death of younger French seedling oysters this year, believed to have been caused by a warm winter, heavy spring rains and possibly excess runoff of fertilizer and pesticides from local vegetable farms.
To protect the future, Thierry bought 20 million seedlings unaffected by the blight at a premium in Ireland, where the company will raise them itself.
Gillardeau normally farms the two-year-old oysters it buys for the next two years, coaxing them into a shape like a lemon and maximizing the quantity of the flesh by carefully adjusting the depth and salinity of the water. The company tries to keep its oysters from clumping together, putting 135 to 150 oysters in each of the thick plastic-screening sacks that can hold 1,000.
Workers with tractors turn the sacks every two weeks or so, to break the small shells that the oysters produce, to "stress" the oyster to eat more and to grow in the desired form. "You shape an oyster a little like a piece of furniture," Thierry said.
Oysters are then trucked here to be finished and packed. They spend several weeks in oyster ponds, with water changed regularly and salinity measured carefully, before being washed and sorted by size.
Before a batch is packed, one Gillardeau or another makes sure to taste a few oysters. Theirs are less briny than many others' — nuttier, fleshier and almost sweet.
The family firm is a tradition in France, but one extending four or five generations is rare. "I didn't want to work with my father," Thierry admitted. He went to a university and studied economics, starting his first company at 19, renting surfboards and selling drinks on the beach. After his military service, he cast around in import-export.
"But my father was in difficulties with his partner in Rungis," Thierry said. "He asked me to look into it." Since the age of 17, Thierry had worked every Christmas, high oyster season, at the huge Paris market, and he always fought with the partner, he said, smiling. "So I got rid of him" and invested in another Rungis company, he said.
"It was Rungis that gave me a love of oysters," he said. It was also in Paris, at a New Year's Eve party, that he met Véronique, a Belgian who was working at the fashionable Escada store. They married, and he brought her here 10 years ago.
"She worked for Escada, and now she can wear rubber boots and a hat pulled down to here," Thierry said, slightly ruefully.
Véronique is good-natured and proud of the company. "Of course there is jealousy," she said, when asked about competitors. "It's a small village, and everyone does the same thing." Gérard said neighbors had sneaked some oysters out of Gillardeau ponds, just to taste them.
Michael Moreau, an oyster farmer here, said the active oystering life that he remembered from when he was a boy had changed. "I could hear everyone laugh and drink and yell at each other, but that doesn't exist any more," he said. "Now it's abandoned. It's over. It's been industrialized."
Of course there is jealousy of the Gillardeau firm, Moreau said. "But he could have gone to Normandy, and instead he stayed here."
Bernard Jaulin, 57, gave up oyster farming nine years ago with great regret, in part because his two daughters had no interest in the business. He is now remodeling a bar-restaurant he bought in nearby Fouras. "Now it's different," he said. "It's bigger, more modern, more technological." The local oyster beds, he said, "don't give any more."
Asked about Gillardeau, his eyes lighted up. "Have you tasted them? The taste is exquisite. They have that extra body," he said, crunching his jaws.

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A Place in the Auvergne Recommends

My wife being Australian and having three Australian passport holding kids from 2.5 to nearly 7, I am always keen to find good farm blogs from Australia, to help keep the Australian in them alive and well, given we live in rural France.

So I am delighted to recommend Bredbo Valley View Farm, in New South Wales, Australian, which was brought to my attention by farmer/blogger Martyn. (Martyn has also sent me some great recommendations which I hope to post shortly.)

Sustainable - Ethical - Local – Valley View Farm is a small family farm featuring a rustic old tumbled down cottage on the plains of the Southern Tablelands, filled with animals both big and small – the cottage that is!.

Here's what Martyn has to say about his blog and farm:

I grew up in the Army, following Dad from posting too posting, 11 schools in 10 years. When he discharged we settled in the hinterland of the Gold Coast. My parents found a beautiful old dairy farm tucked away in a green valley above a crystal clear mountain creek and I lived there until I joined the Army.

I love the outdoors, I love the solitary, the feeling of self and the isolation of farm life.

My wife had a different up bringing, she is the youngest daughter of German immigrants, grew up in the South Australian outback and loved having her family around.

Farming is something that we both talked about and always wanted to do.

Around 2000 we started looking to move into the country, but as Australian real estate prices skyrocketed and rural property prices exploded we began to worry it would become way too expensive. So we jumped in boots and all. In hind site we probably shouldn't have bought a place in the middle of a drought - but hey, it was cheap.

So for the last eighteen months it's been adventure after adventure. We usually have more animals in the house then humans, it's getting that bad I have started calling the house the Barn.

The kids love the adventure, the wife loves the freedom and I love getting up early and fixing electric fences.

So what did we do on our farm?

When we started we had the brilliant idea of breeding free range rare breed pigs and growing heritage vegitables. We started with six pigs - I now have eighty, we have 15 hectares of oats, recently acquired 40 sheep and have been given three goats. The fun never stops.

Our Blog is a diary of our daily adventures, our ideas, hopes and thoughts.

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Palestinians won't be driven off says Fayyad (IHT)

Reuters
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
By Wafa Amr
Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad joined West Bank farmers to pick olives on Wednesday and slammed assaults by Jewish settlers on the harvesters as "terrorism."
Fayyad rolled up his shirt sleeves and climbed up a ladder to help an old woman pluck olives from her tree in Mazra al-Gharbiyeh, a village north of the West Bank city of Ramallah which is surrounded by Jewish settlements.
His visit was "a clear message that we are here to stay," the Palestinian premier said.
"The settlers being here in itself is illegitimate. And on top of that they engage in acts of violence against our citizens, particularly at this time of year when they pick olives, with all that the olive tree signifies to our people," Fayyad told Reuters.
"This is nothing short of terrorism by the settlers."
Fayyad said the olive tree was not only a source of income for most Palestinians, but more importantly a "symbol of the determination of the Palestinian people to stay on their land and to preserve and defend it."
About 300,000 Jews live in settlements built by Israel in occupied West Bank land captured in the 1967 Six Day war.
Settlement expansion has seriously obstructed U.S.-sponsored peace talks. The Palestinians say they cannot achieve a viable, contiguous state of their own alongside Israel if the territory they secure is riddled with Jewish settlements and outposts.
Palestinians, the United Nations and Israeli leaders have expressed concern in the past month about an increase in violence by hardline Jewish settlers, who believe they have a divine right to the land.
The violence is seen partly as a warning to the Israeli government that some settlers will not go quietly if Israel agrees to return West Bank land as part of a peace settlement of the 60-year-old conflict.
Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said on Monday "the assaults by hooligans in the area ... deserve condemnation," but Israeli troops could not be everywhere to protect harvesters.
Israel had deployed forces to permit the harvest to proceed in peace, Barak told Israeli Army Radio. But Palestinians say the army does little to stop settler assaults and often breaks up clashes by forcing the farmers to leave the area.
An editorial in the left-leaning Israeli daily Haaretz on Wednesday said Barak was offering a "dubious excuse" for what it considered criminal failure to uphold the law.
Settlers had been "stealing the land of powerless farmers for decades" and were not averse to stealing their fruit as well. "This year, as every year, fairly small groups manage to reach the olive groves, where they beat, steal then return home safely," the paper said.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Sunday condemned settler attacks and pledged to fund the planting of a million trees to make the rocky West Bank terrain greener.
(Editing by Douglas Hamilton)

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Underground cattle trade thrives in Gaza tunnels (IHT)

Reuters
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
By Nidal al-Mughrabi
When the calves were hauled out of the tunnel from Egypt Tuesday, they could hardly stand up.
After a terrifying, 1000 metre (yard) underground trip into the Israeli-blockaded Gaza Strip, what the young cattle wanted most was a long drink of cool water.
Underground livestock smuggling has increased dramatically ahead of Eid Al-Adha, the day of sacrifice due December 10, when Muslims the world over slaughter animals and feed the poor to seek God's forgiveness.
"Even if we brought in animals every day we would not meet the demand for the Eid," said a tunnel operator who identified himself as Abu Luqaib.
Hundreds of Gaza merchants throng around the border area of Rafah every day to pick up merchandise coming to Gaza from Egypt via subterranean passages that have created a flourishing trade zone.
"It's an industrial zone here," said the 23-year-old tunnel operator as his crew pulled a bawling calf up the deep shaft by a simple rope around its middle. No livestock harness was used.
Gaza has suffered galloping unemployment since Israel tightened its blockade on the territory in 2007 to try to weaken its Palestinian rulers, Hamas, an Islamist group sworn to the destruction of the Jewish state.
Goods are scarce in Gaza markets because of Israeli restrictions on what Gaza may and may not import. The tunnel network handles all sorts of readily portable merchandise including fuel, automobile parts, computers and clothes.
TRANQUIL RIDE
The number of tunnels has mushroomed in the past year to around 800, according to Abu Luqaib. They employ between 20,000 to 25,000 workers in a grey economy struggling for survival.
A standard 500 metre tunnel costs $60,000 (35,344 pounds) to $90,000 to build, he says. A 1,000 tunnel built with extra safety features can cost up to $150,000.
The tunnels can be dangerous. Palestinian officials say at least 45 Gazans have died in cave-ins this year, some of which were blamed by Hamas on the security forces in Egypt, who are under pressure from Israel and the United States to clamp down.
But such risks are clearly outweighed by potential profits.
The calves that came through Tuesday cost $350 each plus $250 for the transport, a total of $600 per head.
Hamas, which seized control of Gaza in 2007 from the secular Fatah movement of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, endorses the tunnels as a way of defying the blockade, and, according to some Gaza residents, imposes taxes on the tunnel trade.
It also keeps a close eye on what comes through.
"No one can smuggle arms or drugs, on the orders of Hamas," said Abu Luqaib. Israel, however, says Hamas runs its own tunnel network to bring arms, explosives and ammunition.
The tunnels also ferry people who cannot otherwise leave or enter Gaza unless they have Israeli or Egyptian permission.
One Gaza woman, Umm Khaled, had been stuck in Egypt for several weeks while her husband fretted over telling her the unwelcome news that her only way home was via a dark tunnel.
So friends slipped a sleeping draught into her glass of juice, wrapped her in a blanket and laid her in an underground trolley to be whisked through to the beleaguered Gaza Strip.
"She got the fastest, most tranquil, and safest trip home in the end," said tunnel operator Ahmed, who gave no second name.
(Writing by Nidal al-Mughrabi and Douglas Hamilton; editing by Sami Aboudi)
http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/10/21/africa/OUKWD-UK-PALESTINIANS-CATTLE.php





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Urban cowboys take on Delhi's sacred cows (IHT)

Urban cowboys take on Delhi's sacred cows
By Jeremy Kahn
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
NEW DELHI: Brajveer Singh does not own a wide-brimmed hat, leather boots or a pair of jeans. And he has never ridden a mechanical bull.
But he can lay claim to being a real-life urban cowboy. Singh is among the dozens of men who spend their days roping cattle on the streets of this city as part of a long and frustrating battle to rid India's capital of stray cows.
There is perhaps no more stereotypical image of India than that of a stray cow sauntering down the middle of a busy city street, seemingly oblivious to the traffic swerving around it.
Hindus consider cows sacred animals, and their slaughter is banned throughout most of India. Cows are frequently allowed to wander where they please, even in cities, where Indians tend to view them much the way Americans and Europeans regard pigeons - an unpleasant but intractable part of the urban landscape.
But in New Delhi, many residents long ago lost patience with the thousands of stray cattle. They block roads, contributing to traffic jams and accidents. They scatter trash as they forage for food. They foul streets with manure. And, on rare occasions, rampaging bulls have been known to damage parked cars and maim pedestrians.
In 2002, after citizens petitioned the courts to do something about the capital's stray cows, judges ordered the cattle cleared from the roads.
Six years later, however, the cows are still here. In September, the government missed the latest in a series of court-ordered deadlines for their removal. And because the city is in contempt of the court order, it was also recently held liable for the death of a man whose scooter crashed after he swerved to avoid hitting a cow.
"So far, our efforts are not up to the mark," said Vijender Kumar Gupta, chairman of the standing committee of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, the government body responsible for overseeing the roundup of stray cattle. But, he insisted, the city is "committed to solving the problem" ahead of the Commonwealth Games, which will be in New Delhi in 2010.
Meeting that goal is up to Brajveer Singh and the city's 164 other "cow catchers," as they are called.
One recent morning, Singh and the seven other men in his team assembled near their truck in Old Delhi, the capital's ancient heart.
Seven of them squeezed into the truck's cramped cab, while one stood scraping day-old manure out of the truck's long, high-sided bed.
They set off looking for cows.
This is dangerous work. Only on the rare occasions when a trained veterinarian accompanies them are the cattle catchers allowed to use tranquilizer darts or a stun gun. Instead, they rely on rope lassos and brute strength to capture cattle, which often charge into traffic or kick and buck violently in an attempt to escape.
On this particular day, Singh literally seized a young bull by the horns, wrestling it into position for roping.
"The key is once you have the horn in your hand, try hard not to let go," he said with a grin.
Singh and the other cow catchers all have tales of being injured on the job, suffering everything from rope burns to broken bones. One even lost an eye after being gored by a bull.
But far more dangerous than the cattle, according to the cowboys, are the people they encounter. The cow catchers have been involved in fist fights with drivers enraged that the cowboys have blocked traffic while trying to remove cows from a busy road. Religious Hindus, who sometimes feed the stray cattle found near temples, have on rare occasions been known to pelt cow catchers with stones.
"It's an occupational hazard," said the city's most senior cow catcher, Virpal Singh, who is no relation to Brajveer Singh.
An even greater concern, however, are the thousands of illegal dairies that operate in the city. The government classifies any cow wandering the streets as "stray," but many of these animals are actually owned by unlicensed dairies. The dairy operators - and the slum dwellers who buy their cheap milk - often react violently when cattle catchers arrive.
This day, a young man carrying milk jugs on his scooter only glowered at the cattle catchers as they used a hydraulic lift to place a cow they had captured from the median of a congested road into the rear of their truck. But Brajveer Singh pointed to a scar on his scalp - a reminder of the seven stitches he required last year after a dairy operator beat him over the head with a stick.
In return for enduring these risks, a cow catcher earns about 10,000 rupees, or $250, per month. That is less than what the city employee assigned to drive the cow catchers' truck makes, but most cow catchers said they were just happy to have a government post, which provides job security and benefits. The majority of the men, including the two Singhs, are Hindus who also see a spiritual component to their work.
"What gives me satisfaction is taking cattle to a safe place," said Virpal Singh. "In a sense, I'm taking care of the cattle."
Once the cow catchers capture their daily quota of 9 to 10 cows, they drive the cattle to a city office to be registered. Workers use a long pipe-like gun to shoot a microchip down the cow's esophagus.
The city used to auction off the cows it seized. Winning bidders had to certify that they would take the animals outside city limits. But officials found that buyers routinely violated this promise. So now, once the cows have been registered, the cow catchers deliver them to one of five government-approved cow sanctuaries on the outskirts of the city.
These shelters are run by Hindu charities but receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional funding from the city. In theory, the microchips are supposed to keep the shelters honest, preventing them from selling the cows back to illegal dairies or turning them loose.
But the cow catchers say it is not uncommon to capture the same animals twice. Virpal Singh said dairies sometimes use political connections to force the city to release seized cows. And Gupta said that the influence of this "milk mafia" is the single biggest factor standing in the way of Delhi meeting the court order.
Over the past two years, the city government says that it has taken more than 20,000 cows off the street. But this still leaves an estimated 5,000 to 12,000 strays.
"I don't think Delhi will ever really be free of cows," Virpal Singh said.
Most of Delhi's cattle wranglers are recruited from rural areas outside of the city - where their families owned cows and where they gained experience handling livestock - and they commute into the city from their villages each day by train. While it is a small fraternity, the cow catchers said they rarely socialize outside of work. There are no cowboy bars in Delhi.
"After a full day of trying to catch cows, we are usually too tired to do anything except go home and go to bed," Brajveer Singh said.


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Apples and onions cross frontier in disputed Kashmir (IHT)

Reuters
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
By Aftab Borka
Trucks loaded with apples, onions and nuts crossed the frontier in divided Kashmir for the first time in decades Tuesday as nuclear-armed India and Pakistan opened a trade link aimed at easing tension.
The decision, taken only last month, to allow limited trade across the front line in Kashmir symbolises attempts to solve a bitter dispute over the Himalayan region by creating "soft borders" allowing the free movement of goods and people.
"I'm quite confident that this beginning will lead us to proper and regular trade and commerce," Sardar Attique Ahmed Khan, prime minister of Pakistani Kashmir, told reporters.
But Khan cautioned against hopes the opening of trade across an old cease-fire line and the de facto border, known as the Line of Control (LOC), would lead to a quick solution of the more than 60-year dispute over Muslim-majority Kashmir.
"All these steps, cross-LOC trade, communication, people-to-people contacts, talks, all these things slowly and gradually they are most generally contributing factors towards the ultimate resolution," Khan said.
"But no high hopes should be attached, no wild wishes should be attached to only the one event of today. But this is a great success," he said.
Indian Kashmir's governor, N.N. Vohra, said the trade link was a major step in a slow-moving peace process: "Today is a historic day ... The trade volume will increase."
The South Asian neighbours, who claim Kashmir in full but rule in parts, have fought two wars over the region and were on the verge of a third in 2002 before pulling back from the brink.
Tuesday, white doves of peace were released as 14 Pakistani trucks bedecked with the national flag crossed a bridge into Indian Kashmir carrying rice, onions and dried fruit.
Schoolchildren chanted "Long Live Pakistan" and "Kashmir will become a part of Pakistan" as a brass band played patriotic music.
"A DREAM COME TRUE"
Indian trucks garlanded with marigolds and banners reading "long live cross-border trade" set off the other way loaded with apples, honey and nuts.
"I'm delighted, it's a dream come true," said 35-year-old lorry driver Gulam Hassan Baba.
It was the first time vehicles had been allowed across the cease-fire line and the newly constructed Aman Setu, or Peace Bridge, since a 1948 war.
The opening of trade in Kashmir is the latest in a series of tentative peace moves that have done little to resolve their central territorial dispute, which has for decades hobbled regular trade across their international border further south.
But it does go some way towards meeting one of the demands of separatist groups in Indian Kashmir, who have been leading months of anti-India protests, some of the biggest in years.
India has moved slowly on opening up Kashmir's borders, believing that they could boost separatist militant attacks on Indian forces from bases in Pakistan. Militants have been battling security forces in Indian Kashmir since 1989.
A bus service connecting Srinagar, Indian Kashmir's summer capital, and Muzaffarabad, capital of Pakistani Kashmir, was launched in 2005, one of many confidence-building measures undertaken since the two sides began a peace process in 2004.
But because of elaborate security checks, suffocating bureaucracy and mistrust, only 9,000 passengers have travelled between the two sides of Kashmir on the "peace bus" service.
For the time being, trade will take place just once a week, with a limited list of goods allowed. Khuwaja Farooq, head of the Muzaffarabad Chamber of Commerce, said he wanted free trade.
"It should be a permanent feature ... but as of now, nothing seems permanent," he said.
(Additional reporting by Sheikh Mushtaq; Writing by Robert Birsel; Editing by Alex Richardson)
http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/10/21/asia/OUKWD-UK-KASHMIR-BORDER.php



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Sugar harvest advances have social cost in Brazil (IHT)

Ines dos Santos, who also once travelled to Sao Paulo, to work as an orange picker with some of her kids, fears for their future."The only way will be going back to farming, just like it was before," she said.

Reuters
Monday, October 20, 2008
By Inae Riveras
Ines Ferreira dos Santos lives with four of her kids in a spacious, colourful house at the end of a dusty street.
"With money from sugar cane we built this house. It has been good to us, too good," the 43-year-old housewife said.
This is the eleventh year that her husband, Joao Barbosa dos Santos, has travelled the 3,000 kilometres (1,864 miles) to work as a sugar cane cutter in Sao Paulo state in southern Brazil.
This time he is accompanied by three sons, also labouring in the cane fields, and a daughter, who cooks for the group. Every month, they send 2,000 reais (544 pounds) to the rest of the family.
The Santos' story is that of most people in Princesa Isabel, a town of 19,000 people in the arid backlands of Paraiba state in northeastern Brazil. With few other options to make a living, three out of 10 residents have worked as cane cutters.
But that is about to change.
The days are numbered for manual cane cutting, a gruelling job once done by slaves, in top cane producing states such as Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais, which account for 70 percent of Brazil's sugar cane crop.
For environmental and public health reasons, cane burning in these states must be phased out by 2014 in flatlands and by 2017 in hilly areas. Similar initiatives are being discussed in fast-growing farming states Mato Grosso do Sul and Goias.
But the change is likely to have a big impact on cane cutters and the families who depend on them.
Controlled burning has long been used in cane plantations to remove foliage and make it easier for workers to move about the fields. But when humidity is low, thick clouds of black smoke billow above the fields.
Every year, a larger share of the crop is harvested by machines, a trend that is starting to drive up unemployment in faraway towns like Princesa Isabel.
FAST CHANGES
The phasing out of manual cane cutting began to intensify two years ago, just as ethanol was making headlines around the world as a substitute for gasoline, ratcheting up the pressure for stricter environmental standards.
In Sao Paulo, where more than half of the crop this season will be cut mechanically, the number of cane cutters dropped to 140,000 from 158,000 in 2006, according to the Sugarcane Industry Association known as Unica. About 70 percent come from other states, mostly in the impoverished northeast.
"There will be a big number of unemployed people. What will happen to them? The government should help to settle them in their place of origin but little has been done," said Pedro Ramos, a cane industry expert at the University of Campinas.
The deaths of 20 workers on the job or while being transported to work locations in recent years increased calls for changes. Though the cause of these deaths is still being investigated, they put a spotlight on the brutal working conditions of cane cutters, driving up labour costs.
"Mechanized harvesting is today 25 percent cheaper than a cane cutter. Each machine replaces 90 workers per day," said Unica's technical director, Antonio de Padua Rodrigues.
In a sign of the times, not a single cane cutting job was created in Brazil's south-central region in the last two years, even as output surged to 487 million metric tons from 373 million metric tons.
"Things are already changing. There were less people going (to Sao Paulo) this year and some had already returned. In the past, no one would come me back before the end of season," said Joaquim Antonio Silva, who owns a transportation company to take workers from Princesa Isabel to Sao Paulo.
SOCIAL DISASTER
The bleak outlook for manual cane cutting has people on edge in Princesa Isabel, which has been churning out migrant workers for 15 years. Cane cutting is the town's main source of income after the public sector.
Every year, in February and March, about six buses leave town daily, southbound to Sao Paulo. About 2,500 to 3,000 workers make the journey, returning only in December.
"They send money every month. And when they get back, with the money from the contract's termination and unemployment insurance, sales jump in local shops," said Eduardo Abrantes, Princesa Isabel's financial secretary.
"Cane mechanization is a big worry for all of us. It's beginning to cause a very serious social problem."
Most of the streets in the town, which is named after the princess who signed a law abolishing slavery in Brazil in 1888, are unpaved. None of the houses have sewage.
Blessed with a favourable microclimate, the region was a big producer of beans and corn 20 years ago. But irregular rains and the allure of cane have emptied farms. The rural exodus snowballed, causing a disastrous drop in regional grain production, Abrantes said.
"More than government money, the worst problem here is the lack of technical assistance for small farmers," said Rinaldo de Medeiros Francisco, one of the region's largest producers.
Ines dos Santos, who also once travelled to Sao Paulo, to work as an orange picker with some of her kids, fears for their future.
"The only way will be going back to farming, just like it was before," she said.
(Reporting by Inae Riveras; Editing by Todd Benson and Eddie Evans)

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Israel slams assaults on Palestinian olive harvest (IHT)

Reuters
Monday, October 20, 2008
JERUSALEM: Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak condemned Monday "assaults by hooligans" disrupting Palestinian olive picking in the occupied West Bank, but said Israeli security could not protect the harvesters everywhere.
Israel has deployed forces in a "supreme effort" to let the harvest proceed despite attacks by Jewish settlers in some olive groves this month, Barak told Israel's Army Radio.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told reporters Sunday that the disruption of the harvest was "a dangerous Israeli escalation." He pledged to fund the plantings of a million trees to make the rocky West Bank terrain greener.
Asked about Abbas's remarks, Barak said "the assaults by hooligans in the area ... deserve condemnation."
"But there are hundreds of sites where the olive harvest takes place and it isn't possible to be everywhere," Barak added. He also urged Palestinians to coordinate with Israeli security forces to ensure they could harvest olives safely.
Olives are an important cash crop for thousands of Palestinians among the three million Palestinians living in the territory captured by Israel in a 1967 war.
About 300,000 Jews live in settlements built by Israel in the territory, an issue that has bedevilled Western-backed peace talks for decades. Palestinians say settlements rob them of land they need for a viable state.
Israeli soldiers intervened to chase away dozens of settlers who assaulted olive harvesters near the West Bank town of Qalqilya Sunday, Palestinian witnesses said.
But another harvest near the West Bank town of Hebron was called off Saturday after several settlers assaulted two photographers and a foreign peace activist. Police restored order by forcing everyone to leave the area.
(Writing by Allyn Fisher-Ilan; Editing by Myra MacDonald)

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Shortage of pollinators is not affecting crops, at least for now (IHT)

By Henry Fountain
Monday, October 20, 2008
In recent years, the worldwide decline in pollinators has been big news in agriculture. The collapse of honeybee populations, which is still poorly understood, has gotten the most press, but more broadly there is evidence of declines among other pollinators.
Since many fruits, seeds and vegetables depend to varying extents upon pollination by insects or birds, agricultural experts have become concerned that a decline in pollinators may lead to a decrease in crop yields.
For those experts, there's good news and bad news in a study by Marcelo A. Aizen of the National University of Comahue in Argentina and colleagues. On a global scale, the researchers report in Current Biology, pollinator shortages are not affecting crop yields. But there could be problems in the future because, the researchers say, the amount of acreage being devoted to pollinator-dependent crops is increasing.
The researchers analyzed 45 years of Food and Agricultural Organization data for pollinator-dependent crops like fruits, nuts and seeds and nondependent crops like many grains and root vegetables. Over all since 1961, yields have increased consistently by about 1.5 percent a year, and in looking at trends over time, the researchers found little difference between pollinator-dependent and nondependent crops in either the developed or developing worlds.
They did find that the proportion of pollinator-dependent crops increased greatly over the decades, to 23 percent of total agricultural production in 2006 from 14 percent in 1961. So if pollinators keep declining, the shortage may eventually have an impact. Recommend More Articles in Science » A version of this article appeared in print on October 21, 2008, on page D3 of the New York edition.

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With cyclone aid comes an imbalance in Myanmar (IHT)

A worker returning from the fields in Rakhine State, Myanmar. Many people here are stateless, unrecognized by the government because they are Muslim. (International Herald Tribune)

With cyclone aid comes an imbalance in Myanmar
By The International Herald Tribune
Monday, October 20, 2008
SITTWE, Myanmar: In some spots, the road that leads to Kobi Ramau's village looks as if it has more potholes than pavement.
Not that it matters too much to Ramau, a farmer and father of four: He does not have a car, let alone a bicycle. And Myanmar's military government bans him from traveling outside his district without a permit.
Like the more than 720,000 Muslims who live in Rakhine State, this rain-soaked western corner of Myanmar, Ramau is stateless. His parents and grandparents were born here in British colonial times, but the military government does not recognize him as a citizen.
Ramau's life is an extreme example of the deprivation, hunger and general poverty that many people in this country face. Soldiers expropriated Ramau's land a decade ago and took his 80 buffalo. He is now paid the equivalent of $25 a month by the military to till the land he once owned. "They took everything," he said.
But a few hundred miles southeast, in another low-lying, rice-growing area of Myanmar that was no better off - until recently - a very different picture has emerged.
The cyclone that ravaged Myanmar's Irrawaddy Delta five months ago has unexpectedly opened the door to foreign money and foreign aid workers who are leading projects to "rebuild better" the roads, schools, houses and water storage tanks that were destroyed or damaged during the storm.
After initial resistance by Myanmar's junta, dollars are cascading into the Delta on a scale that this country has perhaps never seen.
Britain, the European Union, the United States and Australia - all of which have long been considered the sworn enemies of the ruling junta - have led donors in a fund-raising effort that has so far provided $240 million, or about $100 for every person who survived Cyclone Nargis, an amount that the United Nations hopes to double in the coming months.
Aid workers say that this intensive rebuilding effort in the Delta, where only a small fraction of the country's population lives, has opened up the possibility to expanded humanitarian operations in the country.
But, in the here and now, the assistance to the Delta has created a stark imbalance in the country.
"There's a serious amount of money flowing into this country and it's all for Nargis victims," said Frank Smithuis, head of the aid group Médecins Sans Frontières in Myanmar, which tends to the sick both inside and out of the Delta. "That is great, but it is strange that nobody seems interested in the needs of the rest of the country."
The list of those in need of food and medical attention in Myanmar is long and distressing.
Here in this city overlooking the Bay of Bengal, a half-dozen men have as their only employment an umbrella repair business, fixing battered "made-in-China" models that would be tossed into the trash in neighboring countries.
A household survey carried out in June for UN agencies found a "worsening and alarming economic situation" in villages near the border with Bangladesh. With bad weather last year leading to crop failures, families cut back from three to two meals a day. Only 60 percent of boys and less than half of girls had "normal" body mass - the rest were severely malnourished. And only 12 percent of households had soap.
In northern Myanmar, erstwhile opium farmers who gave up the heroin business in recent years in exchange for promises that they would be given food aid have now returned to planting opium because they are hungry, aid officials say.
Across the country, out of a quarter of a million people infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, 80,000 are in urgent need of retroviral drugs and only 15,000 will receive them, according to Smithuis. "The others will die," he said.
In Chin State, near the border with India, villagers are suffering what has the ring of a biblical plague. Thousands of rats, attracted to a rare blooming of bamboo flowers, have eaten through rice fields and other crops. Farmers in some villages are now living off of wild tubers in the jungle.
"The rats ate everything," said Pyi Kyaw, a 38-year-old villager who rowed a boat loaded with bamboo and other timber for several days downstream to exchange the wood for large bags of rice. It will take nine days to row back home against the currents, he said.
For years, Western countries were reluctant to provide aid to Myanmar for fear that it would strengthen the grip of the junta and its repressive policies. But the shocking toll of the cyclone, which struck on May 2 and 3 and left an estimated 130,000 people dead or missing, was a watershed moment because Western governments believed that the plight of the victims overrode concerns about ways that the junta might benefit. Today, 26 international aid organizations are operating in one district of the Delta alone.
In past years Myanmar has received tiny levels of aid compared with its neighbors. In 2005, the latest year for which comparable data are available, Myanmar received $3 per person in aid compared with $9 per capita in Bangladesh, $38 in Cambodia, $49 in Laos and $22 in Vietnam.
The quandary for aid organizations is that assistance pledged for the Delta must be spent in the Delta, aid workers say. The World Food Program, a United Nations agency that delivers rice, beans, cooking oil and iodized salt, is fully funded through January for victims of the cyclone. But the organization will have to cut back programs in northern areas of the country because of an immediate shortfall of $11.2 million, partly caused by the increase in global food prices.
"We haven't been able to convince donors to give us money for projects in the northern areas," said Chris Kaye, the head of the Myanmar operations of the World Food Program.
The cyclone has also drained resources away from areas outside the Delta. Trucks, aid personnel and equipment were channeled to the cyclone-hit regions from northern areas of the country. And with a key rice-growing area in the Delta damaged by the storm the government forbade the World Food Program from buying cheaper locally produced rice, fearing food shortages. The United Nations is now forced to buy more expensive foreign rice, further straining budgets.
In perhaps the most stark example of the imbalance between the Delta and the rest of the country, impoverished villagers here along the border with Bangladesh have been forced by the government to donate money for the victims of Cyclone Nargis - a philanthropic gesture, couched as patriotic duty, they can hardly afford.
Ramau, the farmer, seems initially startled when asked what types of things he needs.
"We need so many things," he said, pausing to respond. "We have no money."

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China enacts major land reform (IHT)

By Jim Yardley
Sunday, October 19, 2008
BEIJING: Following days of uncertainty, the ruling Communist Party announced a rural reform policy Sunday that for the first time would allow farmers to lease or transfer land-use rights, a step that advocates say would bolster lagging incomes in the Chinese countryside.
The new policy, announced by Chinese state media, marks a major economic reform and is also rich in historical resonance, coinciding with the 30th anniversary of the land reforms by Deng Xiaoping, which were considered the first critical steps in the policies that have fueled China's rapid economic growth.
For President Hu Jintao, whose tenure has disappointed some reformers, the new policy seems intended to position him as a worthy heir to Deng. "The new measures adopted are seen by economists as a major breakthrough in land reforms initiated by late leader Deng Xiaping 30 years ago," reported Xinhua, the state-run Chinese news agency.
Currently, Chinese farmers can sell what they produce but are mostly prohibited from transferring their collectively-held land-use rights. Under the new policy, the government will establish markets where farmers can "sub-contract, lease, exchange or swap" land-use rights or join cooperatives. Xinhua reported that giving farmers this latitude would enable them to become more efficient by increasing the size of farms while also providing income that can be used to start new businesses.
The fate of the reform program has been uncertain for the past week. Analysts had expected an announcement last Sunday after the conclusion of an important annual Communist Party planning session. But the communiqué released after the meeting made no mention of land reform, fueling speculation that opponents might have derailed the plan.
Critics had warned that weakening the existing system of collective village ownership could deprive peasants of the security of having a piece of land and possibly lead to millions of landless farmers. But the existing system has become rife with corruption, as local officials and developers have illegally seized farmland for urban expansion while paying minimal compensation to farmers.
Signs that the reforms had been approved began to appear as the week wore on. In Chengdu, a government land market opened last Monday. On Thursday, a leading Communist Party magazine published an article by one of the country's most senior official on rural issues in which he said the party would create a market for transferring land-use rights in the countryside.
Under the current system, farmers are assigned small plots of land. Reform advocates say allowing leasing or transfer would enable the creation of larger, more efficient farms that could increase output. The new program also pledges to uphold "the most stringent farmland protection system" and require that local officials maintain 120 million hectares, or 300 million acres, of farmland, the minimum deemed necessary to feed the world's most populous nation.
Deng's reforms broke up the collective use, if not ownership, of land and created a household registration system that assigned land to individual families to use as they saw fit. Those reforms enabled farm incomes to rise sharply during the early 1980s, even as city dwellers suffered.
But the later creation of an urban real estate market saw an explosion of wealth in the cities that has contributed to a sharp income divide between affluent city dwellers and impoverished peasants. In recent years, rural protests have become increasingly common as disgruntled farmers have demonstrated against illegal land grabs or corrupt local officials. At the same times, tens of millions of farmers have flocked to cities in search of work, leaving plots of land to be tended by their elderly parents.
Reducing the rural-urban income gap has been a major priority for Hu — yet it has continued to widen in recent years as China's has become one of the most unequal societies in the world. On Sunday, Xinhua also announced the party's intention to establish a modern rural financial system to extend more credit and investment into the countryside. Chinese banking regulators have been ordered to establish 40 more rural banking institutions by year's end.
Raising incomes in the countryside is a major part of the government's effort to boost China's domestic consumption at a time when the overall economy is slowing. More than 700 million people are still designated as rural inhabitants, yet their spending is minimal. Economists say that jump-starting the rural economy is one way to offset the possibility of a recession as exports are expected to slow because of the global financial crisis.

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Food crisis in retreat, but 'major emergency' still exists (IHT)

By Laura MacInnisReuters
Sunday, October 19, 2008
GENEVA: At first sight, it seems like good news for those fighting hunger around the world: the spikes in commodity prices that set off food riots this year have been all but erased amid the recent financial turmoil.
But relief officials now have another fear: that distracted donors will forget that the problem goes much deeper, and stop devoting time and money to a food emergency that will only be worsened by a now-looming recession.
"There is no automatic correlation between what happens in the wheat futures market in Chicago and the price of wheat flour in Afghanistan," said John Holmes, the top UN humanitarian aid official, who also coordinates a task force on the food crisis.
International food prices hit nine-month lows in September and have since tumbled farther as investors pulled their money from turbulent markets. In the past three weeks alone, corn futures have fallen 32 percent and soybean futures 28 percent, according to Thomson Reuters data.
"What we fear is that people will look at those prices and think that the crisis is over," Holmes said. "We still regard it as a very urgent crisis and a major emergency."
Many food commodities are now trading at around half their peaks in June, when the United Nations called an emergency meeting in Rome to tackle a crisis that had sparked protests, strikes and riots in countries including Cameroon, Mozambique, Senegal, Haiti, Peru, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Afghanistan.
At that time, the UN World Food Program called costlier food a "silent tsunami" threatening millions with starvation.
Now, the program says lower prices mean it can afford better nourishment for the 90 million people it helps feed around the world. "We may be able to buy slightly more food for our beneficiaries," Emilia Casella, a spokeswoman for the agency, said.
The aid group Oxfam estimates that 967 million people worldwide now suffer from hunger - 119 million more than before high energy prices, biofuels, greater emerging market demands and speculation started to push up staple food costs.
Siwa Msangi, a research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, said those stresses had not disappeared. "There has probably been less financial market activity involving commodities, due to the overall economic situation, and some consumer demand may have dropped off. But the longer-term drivers of upward price pressure are still there," Msangi said.
Donor governments at the UN's Rome summit meeting pledged $12.3 billion to help bolster agricultural productivity and encourage farmers to plant more, especially in poor countries where huge numbers of agrarian workers are moving to cities.
But only $1 billion of that has been paid out so far, as bank failures and market stresses have distracted governments.
Jacques Diouf, head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, said he feared that the financial crisis might cause international commitments to invest in seeds, fertilizers and other yield-bolstering technologies to "evaporate."
"The great uncertainty now enveloping international markets and the threat of global recession may tempt countries towards protectionism and towards reassessing their commitments to international development aid," he said.
Holmes said the UN food crisis task force would meet again in the coming weeks.
Rice, a staple in much of Asia, remains relatively expensive, with prices still up 15 percent this year. "The prices are shooting down because the demand is pulling back," Pavel Vavra, a trade and agriculture expert at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, said. "Whether it is going to last is difficult to predict."

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Gunmen kill WFP worker, fighting rocks Mogadishu (IHT)

Gunmen kill WFP worker, fighting rocks Mogadishu
Reuters
Friday, October 17, 2008
By Ibrahim Mohamed and Abdi Sheikh
Gunmen shot dead a Somali man working for the United Nations' World Food Programme on Friday and fighting in the capital Mogadishu killed at least 14 people.
In the latest assassination in the anarchic Horn of Africa nation, men armed with pistols attacked the U.N. employee as he left a mosque in the central town of Merka.
"We were praying inside and then rushed to the scene," local man Ahmed Salad told Reuters. "We saw the WFP official was terribly wounded and bleeding from his chest."
A U.N. source named the dead man as Abdinasir Aden Muse. "We rushed him to Merka hospital where he died after a few minutes," the source said.
A WFP spokesman in Nairobi later confirmed that a senior assistant working for the programme had been killed in Merka, but did not name him.
The attack came hours after mortar duels in the capital killed at least 14 people and wounded dozens more.
Residents said Islamist insurgents fired artillery at a base in the city's K4 area used by Ugandan peacekeepers serving with a small African Union mission.
That prompted an exchange of mortar shells and heavy machine-gun fire that lasted for several hours.
"They attacked our defence position at K4 and we chased them ... There are no casualties from our side," said a spokesman for the AU force, AMISOM.
The peacekeepers have been targeted in a string of bombings and ambushes since the Islamists launched their rebellion early last year.
The fighting has killed nearly 10,000 civilians, and eight AU soldiers -- seven Ugandans and one Burundian. More than a million people have been displaced.
Hussein Aden, a grocer at Mogadishu's main Bakara Market, said he saw eight mutilated bodies after three mortar bombs detonated nearby.
"The first one landed in front of a shop killing four people and wounding four others who were busy buying vegetables," he said.
Another blew up four children when it dropped in front of their house, he said.
Hospital sources said six out of at least 35 civilians who were injured in the clashes later died.
Ethiopian soldiers are also in Somalia supporting its U.N.-backed interim government which has struggled to impose control in the face of the Iraq-style insurgency by the rebels.
On Thursday Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said the time for his forces to leave was fast approaching, but the soldiers would stay until all 8,000 of the planned AU peacekeepers were fully deployed.
There are currently about 3,000 troops from Uganda and Burundi operating in Mogadishu.
(Writing by Daniel Wallis; Editing by Jon Boyle)

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Lawsuits in China's milk scandal unlikely to be settled in court (IHT)

Yi Yongsheng, whose baby boy died after drinking tainted milk, and his daughter, Yi Xuan. (Greg Baker/The Associated Press)

Lawsuits in China's milk scandal unlikely to be settled in court
By Edward Wong
Friday, October 17, 2008
BEIJING: The first sign of trouble was powder in the baby's urine. Then there was blood. By the time the parents took their son to the hospital, he had no urine at all.
Kidney stones were the problem, doctors told the parents. The baby died on May 1 in the hospital, just two weeks after the first symptoms appeared. His name was Yi Kaixuan. He was 6 months old.
The parents filed a lawsuit on Monday in the arid northwest province of Gansu, where the family lives, asking for compensation from Sanlu Group, the maker of the powdered baby formula that Kaixuan had been drinking. It seemed like a clear-cut liability case; since last month, Sanlu has been at the center of China's biggest contaminated food crisis in years. But as in two other courts dealing with related lawsuits, judges have so far declined to hear the case.
Tainted infant formula is the latest in a long string of food and drug safety problems that have exposed corruption and inefficiency among China's regulators. But the problem goes well beyond the inability of regulators to police a huge, dynamic economy. Companies that produce shoddy goods rarely face financial penalties from the legal system, run by the Communist Party.
Some lawyers and judges are making great efforts in China to establish the power of the courts. Still, courts often remain passive pawns in the party's efforts to handle big disputes behind closed doors.
"I felt myself falling apart when he died, and my wife even avoids thinking about it now," the baby's father, Yi Yongsheng, 30, said by telephone from the city of Xian, where he works menial construction jobs to send money home. "I don't place too much hope in the lawsuit. I just want to ask for justice."
Chinese officials, under pressure to promote fast rates of economic growth and to enforce social stability, routinely favor producers over consumers. Product liability lawsuits remain difficult to file and harder still to win, especially if the company involved is state-owned or has close connections to the government.
Officials also view high-profile lawsuits as a potential political threat and go to great lengths to silence the plaintiffs rather than allowing the wheels of justice to turn. In the milk crisis, officials in several provinces have put pressure on many involved, including parents, lawyers and judges, to drop the issue, said legal scholars and lawyers who have volunteered to help the parents.
Western lawyers would probably have lined up to sue Sanlu. One of China's largest milk companies, Sanlu, based in the city of Shijiazhuang, was the most prominent dairy producer found to sell milk products tainted with melamine, a toxic chemical illegally added to watered-down milk to artificially increase the protein count and fool safety tests. At least four babies have died from complications resulting from kidney stones, and 53,000 children have been sickened. Senior government officials and company executives were fired after evidence emerged of a wide-ranging cover-up.
In China, Yi and his wife, who are seeking $152,000 from Sanlu, are among only a handful of Chinese who have filed a lawsuit against a dairy company. The plaintiffs are all individual families; lawyers say there is almost no chance that any judge would consider a class-action lawsuit because those are strongly discouraged in China.
More than 100 lawyers across the country put themselves on a list of volunteers willing to give legal advice to anxious parents, but local government officials have put pressure on some not to take on any cases, several lawyers said. At least two dozen have since removed themselves from the list.
"This will move further away from the legal system," Zhang Xinbao, a law professor at People's University of China, said of the milk crisis. "The legal system and mechanism we have can't function in this case. This is what law experts are concerned about."
"This is a product liability case that in a Western country would turn into a class-action lawsuit," Professor Zhang said. In China, he said, "they don't want to see so many people getting involved in one lawsuit. This might threaten social stability."
Qian Weiqing, the head of the Dacheng Law Office in Beijing, said at a legal conference last week that the government, in continually suppressing such lawsuits, had "missed many opportunities to improve the system to deal with these problems, including perfecting the law enforcement system, the judicial system and the relief system."
Government officials have told parents and lawyers in the milk cases that their complaints can be resolved through out-of-court compensation payments.
Local governments in Sichuan Province employed the same strategy with grieving parents whose children died in school collapses during the May 12 earthquake. Over the summer, the officials compensated the parents if they signed individual papers agreeing to drop demands for investigations into shoddy school construction. Most of the parents accepted the money, but many said they were furious that no one had been held responsible for the deaths of their children.
As with the school collapses, the milk scandal involves a web of complicity linking company executives to government officials. Those connections make sorting out responsibility a delicate political task. Rather than allow the courts to weigh in, officials prefer to press complainants to take compensation, said Teng Biao, a lawyer in Beijing who is collecting material for a possible class-action lawsuit. "Traditionally in China, politics is always higher than the law," he said.
"To protect Sanlu is to protect the government itself," he added. "A public health crisis like this not only involves Sanlu. It involves many officials from authorities in the city of Shijiazhuang up to the central government. It involves media censorship, the food quality regulatory system and the corrupt deal between commercial merchants and corrupt officials."
In the milk scandal, judges are trying to decide whether to accept three lawsuits that have been filed separately in the provinces of Gansu, Henan and Guangdong. The Gansu lawsuit is the only one to involve a dead child, Yi's son. Courts in Henan have already rejected two other cases, said Chang Boyang, a volunteer lawyer in Henan representing parents whose 1-year-old son died in early September.
Lawyers in Henan, a poor backward province, have faced more harassment from local officials than lawyers elsewhere. At least 20 of the lawyers who have dropped off the volunteer list are from Henan. On Sept. 27, officials from the province's judicial bureau, which administers the courts and legal licenses, met with lawyers to discourage them from taking the cases.
A working brief issued Oct. 7 by the national volunteer group said the officials had directly told the lawyers not to give any legal aid to the parents.
Chang said the pressure actually took a subtler form. Officials told the lawyers to report to the government if they decided to handle a milk case. The officials also reiterated rules mandating that the lawyers tell the government if they take any cases centered on incidents involving many people or delicate issues.
Li Fangping, a human rights lawyer, said officials from the Beijing lawyers association met with lawyers in the capital last month to discourage them from filing milk lawsuits, especially suits with plaintiffs from multiple provinces. The lawyers were told not to publish working briefs on the Internet. At the time, the volunteer lawyers had already gotten more than 1,200 phone calls from concerned parents.
Many lawyers find it hard to ignore the entreaties of provincial judicial bureaus or lawyers associations, which they are required to join. Those groups are controlled by the Ministry of Justice, which ultimately makes the rules for licensing lawyers.
The All China Lawyers Association, the country's bar association, strongly discourages class-action lawsuits. In March 2006, the association put out a guiding opinion aimed at curbing cases involving 10 or more plaintiffs. There was no outright ban on class-action lawsuits, but the association put in place onerous rules, including a requirement that lawyers report conversations with clients to the judicial bureaus, said Jerome Cohen, a professor of law at New York University who specializes in the Chinese legal system.
On Oct. 10, a group of lawyers, law professors and a judge from the Supreme People's Court held a conference at People's University to discuss the milk scandal's legal issues. The judge, Chen Xianjie, said China's courts had little experience with class-action suits. "If the court accepts the Sanlu case as a collective lawsuit, consumers would end up with no legal protection," he warned.
Judge Chen said it would be better for the parents' complaints to be treated in the traditional manner. The government should handle them as an administrative issue and dole out compensation, he said. It has already agreed to pay medical bills, but has yet to offer more compensation.
Some Chinese have raised questions, though, about whether the government should be using taxpayers' money to compensate for private companies' mistakes.










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