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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Tata finds a new home for Nano factory (IHT)

Villagers celebrating near the proposed site of the new Nano factory.

Tata Motors will open its factory on what is now a government-owned cow pasture.

(Ajit Solanki/The Associated Press)

Tata finds a new home for Nano factory
The Associated Press
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
MUMBAI: The car billed as the cheapest in the world has a new, $416.6 million home.
Tata Motors said Tuesday that it would manufacture the ultra-cheap Nano on what is now a government-owned cow pasture in the western state of Gujarat after two years of increasingly violent protests from farmers forced the company to pull its factory from West Bengal.
"We now have a new home," Ratan Tata said, speaking in Ahmedabad, the commercial capital of Gujarat.
Tata said the new factory would initially produce about 250,000 Nanos and that the company would do its best to launch the 100,000 rupee, or $2,100, car by year's end, as planned - possibly by initiating production at existing factories in Pune and Pantnagar.
He said he did not anticipate that the delay and relocation would cause any "appreciable loss" on the company's books.
The new factory and ancillary vendor park, which Tata says will generate 10,000 jobs, will be housed on 450 hectares, or 1,100 acres, that Anand Agricultural University had been using to graze cattle. The deal will halve the campus's size.
The Gujarat government acquired an additional 20 hectares of land from farmers adjacent to the campus in Sanand, outside Ahmedabad city, for an access road - the deal was completed in just six hours on Monday, said three locals who sold their land.
"I have no problem whatsoever if the government wants land," said Nazirkhan Pathan, who said he sold two acres to the government for 1,100 rupees a square meter, far more than the market price. "After all, it will bring prosperity to the entire state."
Suresh Rangarajan, a Tata spokesman, said the company picked the Gujarat site because the land has been in government hands for a century and work could get started quickly.
He said that seven farmers sold their land to make way for the access road. "They are very forward-looking," he said. "They want investment and development."
Tata's venture in Singur, West Bengal, collapsed Friday after intensifying protests by farmers and opposition party leaders who said the state's governing Communist Party hadn't fairly compensated locals for their property.
The mood in West Bengal was mixed Tuesday evening.
Manik Das, 36, an opposition party activist, vowed to continue protesting until she gets her two acres back. "It does not matter to me whether Tata set up their plant at Gujarat or anywhere else," she said. "I want my land back - not the money."
Bonani Ghosh, 35, had started a canteen for Nano plant workers. "My lifestyle as well as my family's got more comfortable after running this canteen," she said. "With Gujarat being selected for the production of the car, we have no more hope."
It's not yet clear what will happen to the abandoned plant site, but the West Bengal minister of industry, Nirupam Sen, has said that by law the land, which he insists was acquired legally, cannot be returned to farmers.
The Tata dispute was not the first time that West Bengal leaders have faced allegations of using strong-arm tactics to wrench land from poor farmers.
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International say that at least 30 people were killed, hundreds injured and thousands displaced in Nandigram, West Bengal, after villagers protested last year, eventually forcing the authorities to scrap plans for a shipyard and a petrochemical plant spread over more than 8,900 hectares of farmland.

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Farmers and factories fight over land in India (IHT)

A demonstration in support of the Tata car plant in Singur, India. Land clashes have held up many industrial projects in the country. (Parth Sanyal/Reuters)

By Somini Sengupta
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
SINGUR, India: Barely a month before the introduction of the world's least expensive car from a new factory on these former potato and rice fields, a peasant uprising has prompted Tata, one of the most powerful Indian conglomerates, to suspend work on the plant and consider pulling out.
The standoff is the most prominent example of a dark cloud hanging over India's economic transition: How to divert scarce fertile farmland to industry in a country where more than half of the people live off the land?
At the heart of the challenge, one of the most important facing the Indian government, is not only how to compensate peasants who make way for India's industrial future, but also how to prepare them - in great numbers - for the new economy India wants to enter.
In recent years, clashes over land have dogged several major industrial projects in almost every corner of this crowded democracy of 1.1 billion people, most of them rural and poor.
In the eastern state of Orissa, betel leaf farmers have held up a $12 billion project by Posco, the South Korean steel maker, occasionally kidnapping company officials. In western Goa, several proposed Chinese-style special economic zones were scrapped after sustained public protests. And outside Mumbai, India's commercial capital, village councils have insisted on a referendum this month on an economic zone proposed by Mukesh Ambani, the country's richest man.
In nearly all of these cases, the peasants who resist most intensely are often those who know they are qualified to do little beyond eke out a living off of the land.
If that fundamental anxiety feeds their protests, farmers and farmhands, often egged on by the politicians who seek their support, also stage protests to ratchet up the price of the land or to renegotiate deals.
The target of their ire is often the government, which in most cases acquires the land and turns it over to industrial developers. The central government has not finished a long-awaited national policy on compensating those who lose their land.
"If the price is right, people will sacrifice the emotional attachment, but if you no longer have the guarantee of living off the land, then what do you do?" said Subir Gokarn, chief economist for Standard & Poor's in India. "The people who are being displaced are not the people who see themselves as benefiting immediately from the employment opportunities."
Medha Patkar, one of the best-known opponents of large industrial projects in India, said, "Land is livelihood, it's not just property."
Last month, in this rich farm belt in the state of West Bengal, protesters laid siege to the new Tata Motors plant, on one occasion preventing workers from leaving.
The protesters want the government to return roughly a third of the 997 acres, or 403 hectares, that the state acquired for the Tata factory. Some of the land was taken by force from farmers.
Their demands have since led the state government, controlled by an elected Communist administration, to sweeten the deal without taking apart the factory site.
On Sunday, in a bid to assuage protesters, the government announced a more generous compensation package for those who had been evicted. It included a 50 percent increase in the price paid for the property and job training for one member of each displaced family. The governing party and its opponents have been staging competing protests this week.
That new deal only revealed the deep wedge of anxiety that the factory has driven through this cluster of villages.
"We are farmers," said Tayab Ali Mandal, of the village of Joymolla. "We know only farm work, we don't know any paper-pencil work." He gave up his land last year, but bitterly. Now he wants it back, and he rejected the government's latest offer of a job in the plant.
He said he would rather have his 16-year-old son continue to work in a small factory embroidering clothes, a traditional craft in his community. "I won't go inside that place, even to urinate," he said. "We are disgusted by that place."
Gopal Santra and his clan, who refused to accept money for the land they lost, said they hoped the renewed agitation would prompt the state to raise its offer even more.
The Santras owned land across the street from the Tata plant, which they sold a month ago for more than four times the price the state is now offering. Still others, like Sheik Muhammad Ali, who welcomed the Nano, Tata's flat-faced, pint-size car, to his fields, threatened to put the naysayers in their place.
Ali had readily given up his land and through his contacts with government officials, started a business supplying cement to the developer.
On Sunday, he was seething at the protesters who had halted work on the plant for the past two weeks and in turn, his business.
"There's a limit to our patience," he said. "If you take my plate of rice, will I just let you go off with it?"
Bidyut Kumar Santra, a rare high school graduate in Joymolla, was among the lucky few to get a job on the assembly line, and, in turn, realize how poorly equipped he was to keep up with events on the factory floor. The engineers all spoke English, to him an alien tongue.
"I feel ashamed, like what kind of education did I get?" Santra said the other day. He vowed to make certain that his son, who is in first grade, learned to speak English.
The villages of Singur, where the Nano was to be produced, stand at the crossroads of two Indias.
For Tata, it is ideally located along a new national highway heading north to New Delhi, the capital, and near an important east-west artery.
For farmers, it is ideally located on the fertile delta plains of the Ganges River and fed by irrigation canals, making the earth so rich and red that it yields two rice harvests a year, in addition to potatoes, cucumbers and squash.
West Bengal lured Tata here with heavy incentives, including a generous land lease and tax breaks from the state's industrial development agency.
Some of the details of the company's contract with the government have emerged in recent days, prompting the company to go to court, where it blocked further disclosures.
If Tata were required to give back 300 acres of land from the factory site, as the opposition demands, it would have to evict auto parts makers who are setting up shop next to the main Nano plant.
Their proximity allows Tata to save on the cost of production. Those savings and the generous land and tax deal allow Tata to sell the Nano at a price of less than $2,500.
The plant's fate is uncertain. Tata, while welcoming the government's proposed compensation package, has remained silent on its plans.
The company has several other plants where it could produce the Nano in time for the Hindu festival season in October, traditionally a time of big spending.
Tata has dangled the possibility of making the Nano elsewhere if the cost of production and the price of car rise too high.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/17/business/land.php



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Loggers still advance on Amazon Indians (IHT)

BRASILIA: Isolated native Indians in the Amazon forest of Brazil and Peru remain threatened by advancing loggers despite growing international attention to their plight, a senior Brazilian official said on Thursday.
"Pressure from Peruvian loggers continues, it's a concern," Marcio Meira, head of the government's Indian affairs agency, Funai, told the foreign press association in Brasilia.
Brazil's Acre state along the border with Peru is one of the world's last refuges for such groups, but increasing activity by wildcat miners and loggers puts them at risk.
Dramatic pictures of pigment-covered Indians from the region threatening the photographer's aircraft with bows and arrows were carried in May by media worldwide.
The Peruvian ambassador to Brazil subsequently told Meira his government was concerned about the issue and preparing measures, without detailing what these were.
Brazil has 26 confirmed native Indian tribes that live with little or no contact with the outside world. There are unconfirmed reports of an additional 35 such groups.
Many of them live in the forest like their forefathers did centuries ago, hunting and gathering.
More than three months after the photographs sparked an international media frenzy, Funai officials continue to witness logging activity in the region. "There is evidence. We see timber floating down the river which originates in Peru," said Meira.
Survival International, a group that campaigns for tribal peoples' rights, said last week that the Peruvian government had not lived up to its promise of publishing an investigation into accusations of illegal logging.
"The Peruvian government must not be allowed to bury this issue, or to turn their backs on the uncontacted tribes," said Survival's director, Stephen Corry.
The issue will be discussed at an international conference on native Indians in Georgetown, Guyana, later this month, Meira said.
Advancing loggers also threaten isolated tribes in Brazil's northern Mato Gross state and along the upper Xingu river in Para state, Meira said.
http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/09/11/america/OUKWD-UK-BRAZIL-INDIANS.php




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West Bank settlers take over more land (IHT)

JERUSALEM: Israeli authorities and settlers have seized large tracts of land in the occupied West Bank for security zones around Jewish settlements beyond an Israeli-built barrier, a human rights group said on Thursday.
In a new report, the Israeli B'Tselem group said some 12 settlements east of the barrier had been fenced off under an official "Special Security Area" (SSA) plan, blocking Palestinian farmers from reaching their fields.
B'Tselem, which opposes Israeli settlement on territory occupied in the 1967 Middle East war, estimated that the overall area of some settlements in the plan had more than doubled.
Some 70,000 settlers live beyond the barrier of barbed wire-tipped fences and cement walls Israel is constructing in the West Bank, and security authorities view their settlements as particularly vulnerable to attack.
Asked about the B'Tselem report, the Israeli army said it had established security zones around settlements after they had been attacked repeatedly by Palestinians and dozens of Israeli civilians had been killed.
"The use of these zones has been approved a number of times by the Israeli Supreme Court. Any building in these zones is illegal," the army said.
B'Tselem said it could give only a rough estimate of the total territory closed to Palestinians but that at least 1,126 acres (456 hectares) had been "unofficially annexed" outside the 12 settlements.
It said half of the closed-off land was privately owned by Palestinians.
Control of the land, the report said, was achieved by fencing it off or through attacks by settlers and sometimes soldiers against Palestinians who ventured near it.
A spokesman for the Yesha settler's council, an umbrella group for Israelis living in the West Bank, said taking control of the areas was a necessary security measure.
"It must be clear to B'Tselem that if their demands are heeded, it will be easier to murder Jews," Yishai Hollander said.
Israeli Vice Premier Haim Ramon has proposed offering compensation to settlers living beyond the West Bank barrier who agree to move to Israel or to major settlement enclaves it intends to keep in any peace deal with the Palestinians.
Israel says the barrier, deemed illegal by the International Court of Justice because it is being built on occupied territory, keeps Palestinian suicide bombers out of its cities.
The Palestinians call the project a land grab and say settlement expansion could deny them a viable and contiguous state in the West Bank.
http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/09/11/africa/OUKWD-UK-PALESTINIANS-ISRAEL-SETTLEMENTS.php






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India farmers threaten new protests at Nano car site (IHT)

CALCUTTA: Indian farmers have threatened to resume protests that have blocked construction of a factory to build Tata Motors' low-cost Nano car unless talks aimed at resolving a dispute over land bring results soon.

"We have not given up the protests," said Partha Chattopdhayay, a senior leader of the Trinamool Congress, which has halted its demonstrations for seven days. "We have only suspended our agitation."

The West Bengal government has agreed to a land-based solution for the farmers but ruled out major concessions within the Tata Motors site. The factory and its ancillary units were being built on about 1,000 acres, or 400 hectares, of land. About 400 acres, earmarked for ancillary units, are under dispute.
After the first meeting of the committee Tuesday, a member representing the farmers said they wanted to regain land that had been designated for the project area.

"We have demanded 300 acres," said Rabindranath Bhattacharya, a Trinamool Congress leader.
Tata Motors said that separating the ancillary units from the main plant would increase the project's cost.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/10/business/tata.php



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Farmers suspend protest of Tata car plant (IHT)

Farmers suspend protest of Tata car plant
KOLKATA, India: Farmers in eastern India who have blocked construction work at a Tata Motors car plant said they were suspending their protest after the government promised to return some land, officials said on Sunday.
A dispute over land given to Tata Motors in communist-run West Bengal state forced the top vehicle maker in India to suspend work late last week at the plant where it planned to build the Nano, billed as the world's cheapest car.
On Sunday, the governor of India's communist-ruled West Bengal state said a committee would work out the modalities of returning land in a week's time.
"The government has taken the decision to respond to the demand of those farmers who have not received compensation," Gopalkrishna Gandhi, the governor said after meeting the chief minister and opposition leaders.
A Tata Motors spokesperson said they would not immediately comment on the outcome of the talks.
Trouble began after the government took over 1,000 acres of farmland for the factory last year.
The government offered compensation but some farmers rejected it, demanding that at least 400 acres of land be given back to them.
The protests also reflected a larger standoff between industry in India and farmers unwilling to part with land in a country where two-thirds of a population of more than one billion people depend on agriculture.
Discouraged by the protests in West Bengal, which have been led by the local opposition Trinamool Congress party, Tata Motors said they were looking for alternative land, despite investing $350 million on the plant.
After days of talks, the government agreed to return some land within the project area and identify more in adjacent areas, governor Gandhi said.
The Trinamool chief, Mamata Banerjee, said she was suspending her protests for seven days since the government has agreed to stop construction of ancillary units on land she said belonged to unwilling farmers.
"We will get land back within the project," said Banerjee. "This is our victory."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/08/business/08tata.php





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Dwindling forests pose a severe threat to Kenya (IHT)

NAROK, Kenya: Joseph Nkolia, a Maasai goatherd, pointed dismissively at two shallow pools, the only water in a parched stream west of the Kenyan town of Narok.
"It rained yesterday and look at it," he said. "Two years ago it used to flow strongly through here. Now I often have to get a lorry to bring water from Narok for us and our animals, and it costs a lot." His flock went by without bothering to drink the scant brown water.
The stream is a tributary of the Ewaso Ngiro, one of 12 rivers fed from the Mau Complex, the biggest Kenyan forest and a vital water collection basin in the west of the country.
Destruction of the woodland by rampant illegal settlement, logging and charcoal burning threatens severe damage to the Kenyan economy with an impact on energy, tourism, agriculture and water supplies for cities and industry.
A familiar Kenyan saga of corruption, illegal land grabs and the use of state resources to buy votes has destroyed a quarter of the 400,000-hectare, or 988,000-acre, forest in the past decade, with an impact that may be felt as far away as Egypt.

The Mau was broken into 22 blocks by human settlement over the past century but the real destruction began in 1997, when large plots were given away by the government of former President Daniel arap Moi to win votes in an election.
"My life will be completely ruined if I cannot get water for us and our livestock, our land will turn into a desert. We will all die," said another Maasai, Moses Mundati, standing on sunbaked ground that the Ewaso Ngiro once flowed across. As he spoke, people brought yellow containers to gather water from the narrowed river beside him.
But if the saga is familiar, the recent reaction is not.
Kenya's new coalition government set up a task force in July to reverse the destruction of the forest, which the United Nations Environment Program says could cost the tourism, tea and energy sectors alone at least $300 million.
"Such an extensive and ongoing destruction of a key natural asset for the country is nothing less than a national emergency," Prime Minister Raila Odinga said.
So drastic is the problem, the inauguration of the 60-megawatt Sondu Miriu hydroelectric project in western Kenya has been delayed because of inadequate water flow. The $260 million Japanese-financed project was designed to depend on water from the Mau and has only a small storage reservoir.
As high oil prices push Kenya to look for alternative energy, experts say water from the Mau, if it is preserved, could generate nearly 60 percent of current national capacity.
Lake Nakuru, center of a popular game park, and Lake Natron in Tanzania, breeding ground for the Rift Valley's famous flamingos, are both receding. "If we don't take action, in 10 years Lake Nakuru will be gone," said Francis Nkako, head of the local development authority.
The rivers fed by the forest's giant moisture reservoir and generation of rain also supply Lake Victoria, source of the Nile, and two other Kenyan lakes.
Revenue from tea, a leading export for Kenya, has declined while tourism, is also under threat, after already suffering a 23 percent drop because of a bloody post-election crisis earlier this year.
"This is destabilizing the environment to such an extent that it has a huge impact on economic development at a national level," said Christian Lambrechts, a forestry expert with the UN Environment Program. "It is basically a suicide process."
The government stance changed drastically this year when first the finance minister, John Michuki, and then Odinga, the prime minister, were flown over the forest. Officials say they were shocked by the huge scars in once densely wooded areas.
Officials say Odinga and President Mwai Kibaki - bitter rivals until their power-sharing deal ended the political crisis - are united on the issue. But saving the forest is likely to be painful: Lambrechts estimates there are 25,000 squatters in the forest.
"We are not going to go anywhere," said Nicodemus Yegon, one of thousands of people living in the southern Maasai Mau block who say they have title deeds to land in what officials say is protected forest. "When God descends, he will find us here."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/03/business/forest.php

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Setback at Tata plant reflects Indian divisions over land (IHT)

MUMBAI: The Tata Nano, an Indian creation soon to hit the market as the world's least-expensive car, accelerated head-on this week into the world's largest democracy.
Some farmers in eastern India who sold their land to make way for the Nano factory have since been agitating to get it back. With the protest swelling in recent days, Tata Motors decided this week to stop construction of the plant and shifted start-up production elsewhere. But it is not only a setback for the $2,250 car.
In a country where 740 million people - two-thirds of the population - live scattered through 660,000 villages, the closing of Tata's factory deals a cruel blow to a widespread hope among policy makers and business people: that India will find a peaceful way to wean these millions from their land and move them into productive alternative livelihoods.
"As each generation develops, the children of the rural economy must decide whether they want to continue to work on the farms," Ratan Tata, chairman of the Tata Group, said Wednesday in an interview by telephone, his first since it was announced Tuesday that operations in Singur, about an hour's drive from Calcutta, would be suspended.
To enthusiasts of a "new India," the choice of staying on the land or leaving is not a tough one. There is, after all, only so much value that can be wrung from a cow's udders or a cob of corn. Millions of village dwellers have already migrated to cities.

In the village of Jhajjar, outside New Delhi, in the northern state of Haryana, a company called Reliance Industries was trying to do the same thing: buy farmland and put it to industrial use.
But there, under a bright morning sky, a village elder sat in his front yard, offered his visitors spicy tea, explained his deep attachment to the soil and noted that he had shotguns in his house and would fire them at any Reliance land scout who came his way.
This dilemma does not belong to India. Every nation that has industrialized has had to reconcile these conflicting feelings. But in China, Russia, South Korea and elsewhere, fiat has helped to suppress naysayers.
As the United States urbanized a century ago, it did so in a politically insulated world where many Americans still could not vote, and no one had a television beaming potential new grievances into their home night after night. In present-day India, by contrast, "everyone has a veto," in the words of Aroun Shourie, a former cabinet minister.

But the dilemma is also acute here because land has meanings and resonances in India that it does not possess everywhere else.
At the poshest cocktail parties in Bangalore or Delhi, an Indian-looking interlocutor will inevitably be asked her "native place" - not the place you were born, the place you live now, or the place where your parents live. It is the village where your family last tilled the soil - even if they left in 1838.
Land is status. Throughout history, and in many parts still today, Dalits, known once as untouchables, have been confined to land on the outskirts of villages, on the theory that their nearness would pollute the others.
Without a sacred commitment to a particular patch of earth, the entire caste system could not have worked. No one would have been untouchable anymore if it was so easy to sell land and move to where no one knew you.
"They derive their identity from land," said Suhel Seth, a longtime adviser to the Tata Group and the managing partner of Counselage, a strategic branding firm in New Delhi. "It also ties them to a certain social acceptability. Their entire societal being relates to the land that they own."
And so, even where farmers consent to sell their land, he added, "you're creating a sense of displacement, and through that displacement you're creating a sense of insecurity. This is why land has become an emotional issue."
Tata says it has tried to help villagers succeed in a new world, training them, sending them to other plants to learn skills and making plans to employ them on the Nano.
But Arundhati Roy, the novelist and a frequent critic of India's economic policy, said that such efforts touched too few people.
"People have understood that clinging to even the tiniest of landholdings will offer them a better chance of survival and dignity than all the false promises of jobs and prosperity that the government and big companies make before evicting them," Roy added. "For these reasons, the battle for land in India is increasingly becoming a fight to the death."

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/03/business/tata.php

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Ontario wrestles to revamp mining law (IHT)

LETTER FROM CANADA
Ontario wrestles to revamp mining law
SOUTH FRONTENAC, Ontario: When Peter Griesbach discovered someone had chopped down trees at his weekend house to make crude posts staking out a mining claim, he assumed he could rid his land of the uninvited prospector relatively quickly. He was wrong.
Indeed, seven years later Griesbach is still campaigning to change the provincial law that allows anyone who pays the equivalent of $26.50 to dig for pretty much any mineral on private property in much of rural Ontario.
Historically high mineral prices have set off a new wave of prospecting in Canada, and with it new battles over mineral laws, some of which date to the 19th century. Under the so-called free entry system, effective in much of Ontario, prospectors and miners have had relatively unfettered access to private land in many areas.
Now, after decades of promises to modify the law from successive governments, Griesbach and other landowners may finally find some measure of relief.
After a highly publicized clash between an Indian tribe and a mining company this year, which led to the jailing of one native leader, Ontario's government said it would alter the law by December. But change is so controversial that even the broad details of any modification will not be worked out for some time.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/02/america/letter.php


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Protests halt Tata plant for world's cheapest car (IHT)

A protest in front of the unfinished Tata Nano plant in Singur last week. (Prashanth Vishwanathan/Bloomberg News)

Protests halt Tata plant for world's cheapest car
MUMBAI, India: This country's project to build the world's cheapest car has driven into a quintessentially Indian ditch.
On Tuesday, the automaker Tata Motors said that political protests over land had compelled it to stop building the plant in eastern India for its much-awaited Nano model. The car was scheduled to go on sale next month for 100,000 rupees, or about $2,250, less than the cost of the optional surround sound system and DVD player on the Lexus LX 570 sport utility vehicle.
Late Tuesday, an executive with knowledge of Tata's deliberations said the company would still begin making Nanos in October, under a backup plan to shift production to other sites. For the first two months, Tata will produce 10,000 cars a month instead of the planned 40,000, said the executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for the company.
The Nano has been dogged from the beginning by one of India's most wrenching problems: how to create space for industry by moving farmers off their land and compensating them adequately.
In a tale rich with incongruities, the Communist-run government of West Bengal State invited the Tata Group, a symbol of Indian capitalism, to set up its plant in an area called Singur. It acquired 1,000 acres from farmers on the company's behalf.
As the project advanced, some farmers who had sold their land demanded it back. The main state-level opposition party, the Trinamool Congress, led protests demanding that the land be returned. Most people sympathetic to Tata accused the opposition of inducing the farmers to protest, while Tata's critics said the farmers had legitimate grievances.
The issue simmered for months. But in recent days, protesters began surrounding the plant, blocking roads and preventing Tata workers from reaching the plant. "The existing environment of obstruction, intimidation and confrontation has begun to impact the ability of the company to convince several of its experienced managers to relocate and work in the plant," Tata said in a statement on Tuesday.
The halt to the plant has caused many Indian business people to warn of a chilling effect on investment in the country. It is also unclear how Tata will be able to keep the Nano's cost so low, since part of the affordable price reflects the company's savings on the land in Singur.
"It's a slap on the face for Brand India," said Suhel Seth, a longtime adviser to the Tata Group and the managing partner of Counselage, a strategic branding firm in New Delhi. "Which foreign company will want to come in when India's most respected group cannot set up industry in a state?"
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/03/asia/03tata.php





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Environmentalists weigh costs of Alberta oil sands (IHT)

FORT MCMURRAY, Alberta: The huge dump truck sits parked under a massive mechanical shovel, waiting to transport 400 tons of oily sand at an open pit mine in the northern reaches of Alberta.
Each Caterpillar 797B heavy hauler - three stories high, with tires twice as tall as the average man - carries the equivalent of 200 barrels of heavy oil, worth $23,000 at the current prices.
"It's like sitting on your back porch and driving your house," said Todd Dahlman, the manager of Shell Canada's Muskeg River open pit oil sands mine in the Athabasca region of Alberta.
Shell, which has 35 of the gigantic loaders working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, has ordered 16 more - at $5 million each - as it expands its open pit mines. And it is not alone among major oil companies rushing to exploit the Alberta oil sands, which make Canada one of the few countries that can significantly ramp up oil production amid a decline in conventional reserves.
Shell, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Imperial and other companies plan to strip an area here the size of New York State that could yield as much as 175 billion barrels of oil. Daily production from the oil sands, now at 1.2 million barrels, is expected to nearly triple to 3.5 million barrels in 2020. Overall, Alberta has more oil than Venezuela, Russia or Iran. Only Saudi Arabia has more.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/25/business/sand.php











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Thousands protest land seizure for India's Nano car (IHT)

Thousands protest land seizure for India's Nano car

KOLKATA, India: Thousands of protesters surrounded a factory building what is billed as the world's cheapest car, the Nano, in the biggest demonstration yet against seizure of farmland for industry in eastern India on Sunday.
Enthusiasm for the Tata Motor's $2,380 snub-nosed "people's car" has been dampened by months of protests by farmers refusing to give their land for the project, now hobbled by cost overruns. The car's planned October launch is also threatened.
Waving flags and shouting slogans, thousands of villagers and activists gathered at the factory site in Singur, an hour's drive from Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal.
Many protesters arrived in trucks and rickshaw taxis. Some sat in rows of makeshift stages built along an expressway leading to Singur, a verdant countryside of paddyfields and small houses.
"We have gathered today to get back our land. Money cannot compensate our loss," said Kajal Das, wife of a farmer who lost land to the project.
Thousands of armed policemen guarded the factory. Water canons were on standby.
The protests that the Nano factory faces reflect a larger stand-off between industry in India and farmers unwilling to part with land in a country where two-thirds of the billion-plus population depend on agriculture.
http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/08/24/asia/OUKWD-UK-INDIA-TATA-PROTEST.php







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