An aerial shot taken last year shows a massive oil palm plantation (left) beside shrinking natural forest cover in Central Kalimantan. Reports of the stripping of forests come even as lawmakers remain deadlocked over how to preserve them. -- PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
JAKARTA: Indonesia's Ministry of Forestry said illegal logging, land clearance, forest fires and mining have devastated Kalimantan and cost the country an estimated 311.4 trillion rupiah (S$44.5 billion).
A file picture (above) supplied by the pro-rebel organisation www.WarWithoutWitness.com shows what it says are injured Tamil civilians at a makeshift hospital inside the 'no fire zone' in northern Sri Lanka. The photo was taken in May 2009. A UN report says both sides may have been guilty of war crimes in the final stages of the civil war in Sri Lanka two years ago. -- PHOTOS: REUTERS, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
UNITED NATIONS: A United Nations report has painted a barbarous picture of the final days of the civil war in Sri Lanka two years ago, saying that both sides in the conflict may have been guilty of war crimes.
WASHINGTON: Parts of North Korea are expected to run out of food in less than two months, even if foreign donors agree to provide aid, a United States relief group said.
The US and South Korea have reacted cautiously to reports of dire food shortages in the North, with some officials suspecting that the isolated communist state is exaggerating the problem to win assistance.
But Samaritan's Purse, one of five US groups that visited North Korea in February, said on Wednesday that a harsh winter has reduced crop yield by up to half.
Mr Ken Isaacs, the group's vice-president for programmes and government relations, said the groups want to provide 160,000 to 175,000 tonnes of food to North Korea, but it would be impossible to arrange shipments in time. 'If a green light was given today, that food probably isn't going to be in North Korea for about three months,' he said.
Hundreds of thousands of North Koreans died in a famine in the 1990s. But North Korea, which prides itself on its philosophy of self-reliance, abruptly kicked out US aid groups in 2009.
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
By Ho Ai Li, China Correspondent
A migrant worker having his lunch at a construction site in Hefei, Anhui province. There are 665 million people living in China's urban areas, reflecting the former agricultural country's rapid transformation. -- PHOTO: REUTERS
BEIJING: One in two Chinese people now lives in a city, the country's latest census released yesterday revealed. It also showed population growth has slowed and the population is ageing.
A woman looking at price tags of vegetables at a supermarket in Seoul yesterday. South Korea is one of several Asian countries where food price inflation has already risen by double digit figures. -- PHOTO: REUTERS
World Bank report says loss hinders goal to be high-income economy
By Leslie Lopez, Senior Regional Correspondent
KUALA LUMPUR: There are common threads that connect Mr Tang Kok Yew, chief executive of Affinity Capital, with Mr Richard Ong of RRJ Capital and Mr Cheah Cheng Hye of Value Partners.
All are stars in Asia's financial marketplace. All are Malaysian-born. And all left the country long ago.
HOW many people in your organisation are innovative thinkers who can help with your thorniest strategy problems? How many have a keen understanding of customer needs? How many understand what it takes to be assured employees are engaged at work?
If the answer is 'not many', welcome to the club. Business leaders around the world have told me that they despair of finding people who can help them solve wicked problems - or even get their heads around them. It's not that firms don't have smart people working with them. There are plenty of MBAs and even PhDs in economics, chemistry or computer science in the corporate ranks. Intellectual wattage is not lacking. It's the right intellectual wattage that's hard to find. They simply don't have enough people with the right backgrounds.
His house destroyed, rice farmer Shinichi Shibasaki lives on a square of blue tarp on the top floor of a farming cooperative office with others like him. He has one set of soiled clothes. But all he can think about is getting back to work.
'If we start washing the soil out now, we can start growing our rice seedlings at the end of April at a different location, and plant them here a month later,' the 59-year-old said.
That may prove overly optimistic but agriculture experts say a quick recovery is possible, maybe within a year.
A key factor will be how long it takes for the salt to wash out from the fields, some still flooded with seawater. There are no official estimates yet of how much farmland was affected. A rough calculation based on last year's harvest in tsunami-hit towns indicates that, at most, 8 per cent of Japan's 1.6 million ha of rice farms has been hit, affecting about 4 per cent of total production.
A greater concern may be manpower. 'I'm worried that a lot of these elderly farmers are just going to leave their fields and not come back,' said Mr Masao Takahashi, an official in the Miyagi office of the Japan Agricultural Cooperatives, a politically powerful national network of farming groups.
In Natori, 60-year-old rice farmer Kikuo Endo points to a shed full of ruined farm equipment, which he estimates was worth 10 million yen (S$155,000). 'People shouldn't give up but I don't think I will farm again.'
AP
In three years' time, you will be able to choose healthier versions of local dishes like char kway teow made with wholegrain noodles at all hawker centres in Singapore - and at no extra cost.
The Health Promotion Board (HPB) unveiled these plans yesterday at the launch of its new Healthier Hawker Programme, which aims to stem the rising obesity rates here. The latest National Health Survey last year showed that one in 10 Singaporeans is obese.
