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Central Asia has, since ancient times, been a region blessed with open borders and trade with people from all corners of the world. This blessing has turned into a double-edged sword in the 21st century. The lack of effective border controls and weak infrastructure has created borders that are very easy to penetrate for goods that need to avoid official routes, such as drugs, weapons and human trafficking.
In 2007, the opium poppy harvest in Afghanistan beat a record. This year, experts expect it to be similar. This is “good news” to hundreds of thousands of impoverished farmers who can’t rely on any alternative crop to make a living, but very bad news to the country and the world.
Philippines is the third largest producer of methamphetamine in the world. According to the last survey, there are about 7 million Filipinos who use dangerous drugs. The social and human costs are obviously very heavy. But drug trade is also a threat to national security. And the whole country is being held hostage by powerful drug syndicates.
The Church in China is a complex reality, hard to understand abroad. Besides political control and social pressures, Chinese Catholics face a great number of handicaps but also have many reasons to hope for a brighter future. This comprehensive portrait, published in 2005, can help us to know better the shadows and the light.
The economy continues to grow, but more slowly – because of China’s rigid government measures and worldwide contraction. Meanwhile, labor costs continue to increase, bringing crisis to companies accustomed to exploiting migrants. Experts say it will take months for government measures to bring adequate results.
In the summer of 2001, when the Olympic Committee assigned the 2008 summer Olympic Games to Beijing, there was some hope in the international community. People thought: that’s a chance to press the Chinese Government to mend its ways towards such sensitive issues as human rights, democratization, and take a more responsible stand in the world arena.
Effects of climate change, such as droughts and floods, will cause grave setbacks in efforts to rid the world of hunger. The availability of food will decline, prices will rise, employment opportunities will disappear and, consequently, many more people will face hunger and starvation. The statistics are pretty frightening.
China is looking at the Philippines to meet its domestic food and energy requirements, even as the Chinese economy is being restructured into an enormous assembly hub of manufactured goods for the American, Japanese and European markets.
The World Bank urged greater investment in the developing world’s farms, warning that failure to boost agriculture would doom the international community’s ambition to halve extreme poverty in the next eight years.
“Wheat and milk prices have surged to all-time highs while those for corn and soya beans stand at well above their 1990s averages. Rice and coffee have jumped to 10-year record and meat prices have risen recently by up to 50% in some countries.“ The world is gradually losing the buffer that it used to have to protect against big swings [in the market],” says Abdolreza Abbassian, Secretary of the Grains Trading Group at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. “There is a sense of panic. (…) The FAO estimates that those structural new trends will help to push the cost of agricultural commodities in the next decade between 20 and 50% above their last 10-year average. This is a problem for economies where food represents a significant share of their import payments. The International Monetary Fund says higher food prices are hurting poorer nations in Africa, such as Benin and Niger, as well as a number of countries in Asia, from Bangladesh to China itself, and parts of the Middle East.” Financial Times
