FAO calls for increasing productivity of small farmers

KATHMANDU, May 14:Small farmers, the main food producers in Asia and the Pacific, go hungry themselves as inadequate farm technology, institutional and policy support is restraining their full productive capacities that can bring about gains in agricultural production and poverty reduction.

To eradicate hunger, it is necessary to increase the productivity of small farmers who make up the bulk of agricultural households in the region, delegates at 26th Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) regional conference for Asia and the Pacific, which began here yesterday, noted.

The Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s led to a ‘rediscovery’ of agriculture, which helped absorb significant numbers of displaced urban workers, the FAO said.

An effective anti-hunger and anti-poverty strategy for Asia-Pacific countries must ensure that rural poor have access to basic agricultural production resources such as land, water, farm technology, credit, other farm inputs and markets.

Addressing social imbalances and promoting human resource development are also vital. The removal of inequities along with access to public utilities, health, education and other social services are essential prerequisites for sustainable rural development.

The meeting from May 13 to 17 will assess constraints in empowering the rural poor and carry out an overview of the state of agriculture and food security in the region. Delegates from 28 countries will also discuss ways to boost productivity and incomes of small cultivators.

The region is home to 75 per cent of the world’s farm families and two-thirds of the 780 million hungry people in the developing world. Three-fourths of the region’s under-nourished people live in villages and depend on agriculture, fisheries and related rural industries for their livelihood. The outcome of the consultation will be put before the Agriculture Ministers from the countries during the May 16-17 plenary session of the conference.

Subsequent years have seen persistent reductions in public investment in agricultural research and infrastructure is a major reason for the decline in agricultural productivity since the 1990s, with latest estimates projecting that during 2002-04, the growth rates in the index of total agricultural production would fall below the annual population growth rate.

Lasting reductions in rural poverty and hunger are not possible without increases in agricultural productivity. "Unleashing the potential inherent in the vast majority of the rural poor who rely on agriculture for employment and incomes can accelerate poverty reduction.

Productivity in agriculture is still low despite the recent advances in technology, said the FAO paper.

It cited the example of Indian provinces where substantial increases in farm yields between the late 1950s to the early 1990s resulted in faster rural poverty reduction than in provinces with sluggish growth in farm productivity. Agriculture-led rural economic growth has been the main engine for the dramatic economic transformation in China since the late 1970s. This in turn was stimulated by extensive state support to agriculture research, infrastructure and institutional reforms in agricultural markets.

The Kathmandu conference is one of a series of FAO regional conferences in preparation for a gathering of world leaders at fao headquarters in Rome from June 10 to 13 for the world food summit: five years later (WFS:FYL). WFS:FYL has been convened to mobilise the political will and resources needed to accelerate national efforts to reduce hunger in keeping with the 1996 world food summit pledge by 185 nations to halve under-nourishment by 2015. (UNI)

Antarctic ice melt poses worldwide threat

HOBART, May 14: The Antarctic peninsula ice shelves are cracking up and, on the face of things, it is the most serious thaw since the end of the last ice age 12,000 years ago.

The break-up of the ice shelves in itself is a natural process of renewal, but the size and rate of production of icebergs — some the size of major cities — is alarming scientists, who blame global warming.

The break-off last month of a 500 billion tonne chunk of the larsen ice shelf — 650 feet (200 metres) thick and with a surface area of 1,250 sq miles (3,240 sq km) — is the second big break since a giant iceberg broke away in 1995 and is well beyond normal activity, scientists say.

The production of vast amounts of icebergs is a threat to the world’s climate and the way the ocean’s function, they say. And the process, once started, cannot be reversed.

The fear is that a snowball effect will lead to disintegration of the vast west antarctic ice shelf, kilometres thick in parts.

"The (first) break-off said ‘this is not theory, it’s real — a rapid and dramatic collapse of an ice shelf can happen’," says Neal Young, glaciologist with the antarctic Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) in Hobart.

"This is saying ‘that wasn’t a one-off thing."’

Significant warming in parts of the pristine Antarctic wilderness is expected to continue to send huge icebergs into the southern ocean, and lead to the disintegration of other sections of ice shelves that fringe Antarctica’s continental ice cover.

A longer-term effect would be if the disintegration led to a meltdown of the grounded West Antarctic ice sheet, which would cause the world’s oceans to rise by up to five metres (17 feet).

As they delve deeper into the mysteries of the southern continent, scientists are finding a jigsaw on a gigantic scale.

The Antarctic peninsula, which juts out into the southern ocean, has warmed by 2.5 degrees celsius over the past 50 years, while some other areas have cooled. Some parts of West Antarctica have been losing ice, while, like shifting grains of sand on a beach, ice has built up elsewhere.

But the main message from the world’s biggest concentration of Antarctic scientists in Hobart, in Australia’s southernmost city, is of retreating west Antarctic ice and massive break-offs.

Scientists are not too worried for the moment about rising sea levels. This is because floating ice shelves displace large amounts of sea water, and sea levels would effectively remain unchanged if the ice shelfs disappeared.

The real problems arise if the ice built up over millions of years on parts of Antarctica’s land mass melts. "We aren’t too worried about the first 100 years or so when the ice shelves go, because there’s no real effect on sea level and feedback on global climate is really rather small," said Bill Budd, professor of meteorology at the CRC.

The CRC is a co-operative body between Australia’s antarctic division, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), the University of Tasmania and other bodies.

But scientists believe that the expected loss of half the Antarctic’s sea ice by the end of the century will have important consequences for earth’s entire natural system.

They are finding that the world’s deep ocean circulation system will slow as the Antarctic produces smaller amounts of dense oxygen-rich seawater, possibly within 30 years, threatening marine life.

"We can’t reverse it. Because the greenhouse gas levels are already up, we can’t bring them down, they just get higher, and the (ocean) cutoff will be stronger at higher levels," Budd said.

The Antarctic is normally the source for a large part of the "bottom water" which feeds oxygen to global ocean depths. And computer modelling results indicate production of this dense, rich water has fallen by 20 percent from pre-industrial times.

Two technology-crammed research ships, the 1,594 tonne former arctic trawler "the southern surveyor" and its bigger cousin, the bright orange "auora Australis", ride at anchor next to CSIRO marine research headquarters at Hobart Harbour.

Both vessels are allowing scientists to probe the southern seas as never before, as they deploy thousands of robotic floats and tonnes of sensitive equipment in parts of the Antarctic.

Senior physical oceanographer Nathan Bindoff is conducting the first study of ocean circulation under East Antarctica’s amery ice shelf. " Results show the ice shelves are vulnerable to climate change," Bindoff said. "An increase in temperature over the continental shelf (leads to) slightly warmer water at the back of the ice shelves...The melt rate goes up."

A small increase in ocean temperature from climate warming could produce a doubling of the melt, which would cause the ice shelf to shrink dramatically, recede and break off, he said.

Two years of physical research is proving model results, that the entire coastal shape of the 550 km long, 200 km wide amery ice shelf could soon change as it melts back, he said.

A 1999 expedition to the Antarctic south of Tasmania, near Commonwealth Bay, yielded even more alarming results.

An open coastal area near dumont d’urville in French territory has been found to produce the most important source in East Antarctica of bottom water — "the lungs of the ocean".

In the depths of winter, strong freezing winds cascade down the Arctic continent to race across the ocean surface, pushing ice floes away, forming new sea in open water near the coastline.

The oxygen-rich highly-saline seawater which remains sinks to the ocean floor to form 20-25 percent of antarctica’s total bottom water production, which then circulates the globe, promoting ocean circulation and life.

Bottom water is also sensitive to climate change, with no production near dumont d’urville in some years, Bindoff said.

"These patterns are beyond natural variability," he said.

One question occupying Tom Trull, leader of biogeochemical cycles programme at the CRC, is whether disappearance of half the antarctic’s sea ice by the end of the century would also halve the southern ocean’s krill, the tiny planktonic crustaceans which are most abundant animal organism on earth.

Krill, the keystone of the antarctic ecosystem and bread and butter for seals, penguins and whales, need ice for sanctuary and for food from algae.

Trull says CRC scientists predict a 15 percent drop in total global marine phytoplankton production by the end of the century because of slowing ocean circulation.

By then, melting of the grounded antarctic ice sheet could be adding to predicted sea level rises of 30-50 centimetres this century. And fears remain about the long-term stability of the West Antarctic ice sheet because of rises in ocean temperature.

"It is unlikely to collapse over the next 100 years, but projections on a longer term are uncertain," said John Church, polar waters programme leader in the CRC. (AGENCIES)

Strange statues tell a tale of two Presidents in Jakarta

By Peter Janssen JAKARTA, May 14 : Jakarta offers few attractions for tourists. Lonely planet’s guide to Indonesia describes the capital as "the big durian, the foul-smelling exotic fruit that some can’t stomach and others can’t resist."

As the country’s main center for Government and business, some 10 million people apparently can’t resist living in the city, helping to make it crowded, traffic-bound and polluted.

Although Jakarta is somewhat lacking in special attractions, the city does boast of a rich history. The Dutch East Indies Company (VOC) made Jakarta, or "Batavia" as they dubbed it, their commercial headquarters back in 1619 and it has remained the heart of the Indonesian archipelago ever since. Unfortunately, much of the city’s buildings and monuments harking back to the Dutch colonial period have fallen victim to decades of neglect or the urban construction boom of the late 1980s to mid-1990s, halted by the Asian economic crisis that struck in 1997.

" The only good side effect of the economic crisis is they don’t pull down old buildings so quickly anymore," said Adolf Heuven, author of " historical sites of Jakarta."

Heuven, a German catholic priest who moved to Jakarta in 1960, has waged a lifelong campaign with city authorities to preserve the capital’s historical sites from "greedy" developers, but he concedes it is a losing battle given the public’s lack of appreciation for the past.

Consequently, even Jakarta’s oldest part of town, Kota, has not been well preserved as a possible tourist attraction.

Jakarta is unique, however, in boasting the largest collection of public statues in Asia, which provide a quick glimpse of Indonesia’s more recent history of post-independence, achieved in 1945. The capital’s many statues and monuments are the work of two men - Indonesia’s first President Sukarno (1945-1965) and his long-lasting successor president Suharto (1966-1998).

Sukarno kicked off the city’s statue-building trend in 1962, when his incredible popularity had peaked before the harsh realities of Indonesia’s economic plight, aided by Sukarno’s leftward-leaning tendencies, started to hit home in 1964 and 1965.

During his last years in power Sukarno commissioned the construction of a half-dozen bronze statutes portraying the politically charged concepts of independence, liberation and revolution, or simply marking his own triumphs.

Some edifices speak for themselves, such as "the monument to West Irian liberation" showing a man dramatically breaking his chains asunder, commemorating Indonesia’s victory over Dutch troops in Irian Jaya in 1962.

The "welcome monument," of a man and woman heartily waving hello in the center of the traffic circle outside hotel Indonesia, was also built in 1962 to mark Jakarta’s hosting of the Asia Games that year.

Both were built by the late Indonesian artist Edhi Sunarso.

Perhaps more interesting historically is the "hero statue," depicting a muscular young peasant shouldering a rifle and going off to war while his mother fondly passes him his lunch.

The statue, made by Russian artists Matvei Manizer and his son Otto, was put up in 1963, a year when Indonesia was not going to war with anyone but the Communist movement was gaining strength in the country, with tacit support from Sukarno. Sukarno met the two Russian stalinist-era artists during a visit to Moscow where he persuaded them to travel to Java for inspiration for the "revolutionary era" statue, said Nurhadi Sastrapraja, head of education and museum affairs at the Jakarta city administration.

Sukarno’s downfall came on October 1, 1965, the day army chief of staff General Suharto successfully crushed an alleged Communist plot to seize the Government, launching his own political ascendancy.

To commemorate the day, Suharto built the "supernatural pancasila monument" in 1972, glorifying his political doctrine of national unity and social justice.

One of Suharto’s most remarkable statues is the "youth builds the nation monument," nicknamed "hot hands harry" or the "angry waiter" because of it resemblance to an angry young man carrying a flaming pizza.

Suharto erected the statue in 1971 to symbolize youth’s dedication to building a united Indonesia.

"Sukarno and Suharto had totally different ideas on statues," said Sastrapraja. "Most of Sukarno’s statues represented his ideas of liberation, revolution, while Suharto’s statues were about filling out independence, developing the country."

One statue that both Presidents built was monas, or the "national monument," a towering edifice with a burning head that was started by Sukarno in 1961 and finished by Suharto in 1975.

While Suharto can claim to have completed the job, this statue was definitely a Sukarno inspiration, symbolizing a 115 metre tall phallus with four portals at the base representing womanhood.

With Monas, Sukarno, a notorious playboy who had three wives and numerous girlfriends, has seemingly left the bigger imprint on Jakarta’s skyline than his successor.

"Monas represents something universal, man and woman," said Sastrapaja. "And Ya, Sukarno was the big lover, so this is the big..."(DPA)

Suspected Taliban-Al Qaeda wounded in raid - US

BAGRAM AIR BASE, AFGHANISTAN,May 14: The U.S. military today said some of the 32 suspected Al Qaeda or Taliban militants detained in a special forces raid in southern Afghanistan over the weekend had been wounded.

Five suspected Islamic militants were killed when U.S. Special Forces raided a compound just before midnight on Sunday in what appeared to be an old home of elusive Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar.

U.S. Army spokesman Major Bryan Hilferty said the wounded among the 32 captured in the raid were treated in hospital at Bagram Air Base, the U.S.-led coalition’s Afghan headquarters 50 km north of Kabul.

Hilferty, speaking to reporters at Bagram where the detainees were being held, did not say how many had been wounded and gave no further details.

The detentions brought to more than 40 the number of people arrested over the past week in operations in southern Afghanistan, where the fundamentalist Taliban emerged in 1994 and established its power base among conservative ethnic Pashtun tribes.

There were no U.S. casualties in the raid, U.S. Marine Captain Steven O’Connor said on Monday.

Sunday night’s firefight was the first major clash between U.S. forces and rebels since March, when U.S. and Afghan forces took on several hundred militants in the Shah-i-Kot Valley in eastern Afghanistan.

The U.S. troops were fired on when they approached the complex, suspected of providing sanctuary to senior Taliban and Al Qaeda figures since the Taliban were ousted late last year after a concerted U.S. air campaign and advances by Afghan opposition forces.

The compound was in Dehrawd, 50 km north of the Taliban’s former spiritual stronghold of Kandahar.

Dehrawd, or Dara Wat, in Uruzgan province, is a mud-house village where the Taliban supreme leader, the one-eyed Mullah Omar, was taken in as a child by his uncle, according to some versions of his life story.

There has been no sign of Mullah Omar since the Taliban were kicked from power in December in punishment for harbouring Al Qaeda, blamed for the September 11 attacks on the United States.

Australian special forces two weeks ago killed four suspected Al Qaeda fighters near the Pakistani border.

Military officials say Al Qaeda and Taliban rebels have dispersed, melting into the population or slipping across the border into Pakistan’s semi-autonomous tribal areas, where Pashtun traditions have many parallels with the Taliban’s strict interpretation of Islam.( AGENCIES)

Three N Koreans leave China, Japan talks stall

BEIJING, May 14: Three North Koreans who sought asylum in a US consulate in China last week arrived in South Korea today while the fate of seven who made separate dashes for Japanese and Canadian missions remained unclear.

Talks between Japan and China over five would-be asylum seekers whom Chinese police dragged out of Japan’s consulate in Shenyang on Wednesday ended without any agreement or plans for further negotiations.

"We requested the apology and humanitarian treatment and the assurance of a non-recurrence but the Chinese side said they had no reason to apologise. And they rejected all the requests especially in the case of the hand over," a senior Japanese diplomat told media.

A Chinese foreign ministry official said on Tuesday the case of two North Koreans who entered the Canadian embassy on Saturday had been resolved. A spokeswoman for the Canadian embassy could not confirm the breakthrough.

In South Korea, a witness said three North Koreans who scaled the wall into the US consulate in Shenyang on Wednesday and Thursday arrived at Inchon airport near Seoul in the afternoon.

The asylum bids have created a diplomatic dilemma for China, forcing it to balance an obligation to poverty-stricken Communist ally North Korea to send escapees back with pressure from elsewhere in the world to respect human rights.

So far this year, 162 North kKreans have defected to South Korea, compared with a record 583 last year.

South Korean aid groups say that between 150,000 and 300,000 more North Koreans are scattered in the hills of Northeast China and asylum attempts are expected to rise as the region comes under the spotlight during next month’s world cup. China, which does not consider the asylum seekers to be refugees, refuses to allow them to fly directly to Ceoul and has insisted they transit through third party countries in order to avoid upsetting Pyongyang.

Japan says Chinese guards at its consulate violated diplomatic conventions by seizing the two men, two women and three-year-old girl after they had crossed the threshold of the consulate.

Television footage showed chinese consulate guards manhandling the kicking and screaming North Koreans.

But China has asserted Japanese consular staff gave approval for the action and says the guards were acting out of goodwill.

The incident has strained ties between the Asian neighbours who have been preparing to commemorate the 30th anniversary of normalised relations this year.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan said the incident involving two North Koreans entering the Canadian embassy in Beijing had been resolved. "The problem at the Canadian embassy no longer exists," he said without elaborating.

But the embassy said they were unaware of any resolution. "We’re checking with the foreign ministry because that’s not our understanding of the situation. We haven’t had a resolution yet," said embassy spokeswoman Jennifer May.

A US consulate spokeswoman said the three North Koreans who had been holed up in the Shenyang mission left on Monday evening.

"The embassy in Beijing and the consulate-general in Shenyang worked with the Chinese Government to resolve the situation and we appreciate the Chinese Government’s constructive response," she said. (AGENCIES)

Karzai says set to use force against Afghan warlord

KABUL, May 14: Afghan leader Hamid Karzai said today that a large military force was poised to capture renegade warlord Padshah Khan Zadran if he did not surrender by the time an ultimatum to give himself up expires tomorrw.

Karzai said he still hoped the issue could be resolved peacefully, but if necessary US forces in Afghanistan would be asked to help seize Padshah Khan, who was sacked as Governor of eastern Paktia province in February.

The warlord, locked in a battle for control of Paktia with his Karzai-appointed replacement, Taj Mohammad Wardak, rained around 500 rockets on the provincial capital of Gardez last week. He was then set a seven-day ultimatum to surrender or face war.

The rocket attack killed 30 civilians and wounded 100 more in the biggest challenge to Karzai’s authority since he took power last December, when the fundamentalist Taliban were ousted in a US-led war for harbouring Osama bin Laden, chief suspect in September 11’s attacks on the United States.

"We have a force ready, which is a fairly large force," Karzai told reporters.

"But we don’t like to use force. And we would like to have this problem of attacks on civilians by rockets — the murder and killing of civilians — resolved through means other than the use of force. And I think there is that chance now," he said. Asked if US forces, with whom Padshah Khan was allied during the war on the Taliban, would be called on if negotiations broke down, Karzai replied: "if need be. Yes."

Karzai has already called in ex-king Mohammad Zahir Shah to help negotiate with Padshah Khan — who has boasted of a force of about 3,000 fighters — and US military forces have made clear the warlord should no longer be regarded as an ally.

Paktia Governor Wardak, who Karzai ordered to replace Padshah Khan after complaints from tribal leaders, said US forces had seized a private radio station used by Padshah Khan to broadcast his views in Paktia and neighbouring Khost province, which the warlord regards as his sphere of influence.

Padshah Khan’s brother Kamal Khan has been running Khost province while another Karzai appointee, Hakim Taniwal, waits for security to improve so he can take over as governor.

Wardak said he believed Padshah Khan was behind a rocket attack on Monday night on Khost airport where US troops and special forces are based.

Both Paktia and Khost, ethnic Pashtun majority provinces bordering Pakistan, were once regarded as Taliban strongholds, and have been the scene of widespread hunts for bin Laden’s Al Qaeda followers, including the battle of Shah-i-Kot in March, the biggest US-led ground attack of the war.

"Following the seizure of his radio, Padshah Khan may have fired rockets on Khost’s airport last night. There has been no damage or casualties as a result of it, but the attack was probably launched by him after he got angry with the coalition forces over the radio issue," Wardak told media. (AGENCIES)

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