PHNOM PENH, Cambodia -- Cambodia became the first rice exporter on Monday to lift a ban on foreign shipments imposed by some Asian countries in the last six months to protect domestic supplies in the face of soaring international prices.
Prime Minister Hun Sen said the southeast Asian nation, a small exporter compared to neighboring Thailand or Vietnam, clearly had enough rice for its own needs and was also short of its own long-term storage space.
"The ban on the rice exports is being lifted from now on," he told students in the capital, Phnom Penh. "We still have over one million tons of rice that need to be exported. We don't have any shortage."
Rice production in Cambodia is finally getting back on track after decades of civil war and upheaval.
It produced a record 6.4 million tons in its 2007-08 crop year, giving it a 2.6-million ton surplus for export, although Hun Sen imposed a two-month ban on foreign sales on March 27 to safeguard domestic supply.
At the time, he blamed surging overseas demand for a near trebling of domestic rice prices from $0.35 a kilogram in January to $0.92 kg in March.
The ban, which followed similar moves by India at the end of last year and Vietnam, was seen as another indicator of rapidly tightening supplies in Asia, pushing prices to record highs and raising concerns about the continent's ability to feed itself.
A week ago, state media in communist-run Vietnam, which vies with India for the mantle of the world's second-largest exporter after Thailand, said the government might lift its export ban in early July.
Hun Sen said Cambodia's next harvest was looking like a good one.
"It seems we have plenty of rice to come. We need more warehouses to store our rice," he said.
by Reuters
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Cambodia to Remain the Focus of Leader Universal
CAMBODIA will continue to be the focus of Leader Universal Holding Bhd's power generation business as the Penang-based company looks to clinch downstream power-related jobs there.
Managing director and chief executive officer Sean C.H. H'ng said the company is eyeing power distribution and transmission activities in Cambodia where it has been present for more than a decade.
"We are also still pursuing our plan to list our power generation business but the timing is now uncertain, given the fact that the regional equity market is not performing well currently," he told reporters after the company's annual shareholders' meeting in Penang yesterday.
GA_googleFillSlotWithSize("ca-pub-5440138744487553", "News_Main_300x250", 300, 250);
Last year, LUH had announced plans to float its power generation business and was targetting to do so by the middle of this year. It was mulling a listing in either Singapore, Hong Kong or Dubai.
Apart from power generation, Leader makes and sells cables and wires for the power and telecommunication industries. It also develops properties.
The company, via 60 per cent-owned Cambodian Utilities Pte Ltd, is the first independent power producer (IPP) in Cambodia, where it began operations in 1996.
Last year, Leader won a bid to develop its second power plant, a 200 megawatt (MW) coal-fired plant which will be located in the port town of Sihanoukville.
Leader and its Cambodian partner, MKCSS Holdings, has signed a 30- year power purchase agreement.
"With the signing of the power purchase agreement and implementation agreement with the Cambodian authorities, construction works are expected to commence in early 2009, with commercial production targeted to begin in 2012," he added.
by Source: New Straits Times
http://www.redorbit.com
Managing director and chief executive officer Sean C.H. H'ng said the company is eyeing power distribution and transmission activities in Cambodia where it has been present for more than a decade.
"We are also still pursuing our plan to list our power generation business but the timing is now uncertain, given the fact that the regional equity market is not performing well currently," he told reporters after the company's annual shareholders' meeting in Penang yesterday.
GA_googleFillSlotWithSize("ca-pub-5440138744487553", "News_Main_300x250", 300, 250);
Last year, LUH had announced plans to float its power generation business and was targetting to do so by the middle of this year. It was mulling a listing in either Singapore, Hong Kong or Dubai.
Apart from power generation, Leader makes and sells cables and wires for the power and telecommunication industries. It also develops properties.
The company, via 60 per cent-owned Cambodian Utilities Pte Ltd, is the first independent power producer (IPP) in Cambodia, where it began operations in 1996.
Last year, Leader won a bid to develop its second power plant, a 200 megawatt (MW) coal-fired plant which will be located in the port town of Sihanoukville.
Leader and its Cambodian partner, MKCSS Holdings, has signed a 30- year power purchase agreement.
"With the signing of the power purchase agreement and implementation agreement with the Cambodian authorities, construction works are expected to commence in early 2009, with commercial production targeted to begin in 2012," he added.
by Source: New Straits Times
http://www.redorbit.com
Food wars and the challenge for peace-makers
War and hunger are inseparable: long experience has shown the close relationship between economic distress and the outbreak of conflict. But the solutions the international community tends to apply are mostly political and rarely address material needs.
Everyday concerns of the population rarely reach the negotiating table, in part because the economic and social problems in conflict-ridden societies are extremely complex, involve many actors and can only be resolved in the long term.
So what happens when people are driven to kill one another for food? It's a critical question to ask as the world faces a sudden and unexpected food price crisis that is threatening to plunge millions back into poverty.
The sharp spike in food prices this year has already generated violence. Food riots in parts of Africa and the Caribbean have created social and political instability. In rice-growing countries like India, Vietnam and Thailand, hoarding has begun with export bans already in place, creating inter-state friction.
Burma's rice-growing capacity has been devastated by Cyclone Nargis, which will add to price pressures in the coming months.
This is largely a crisis born of inflation and other market factors rather than fundamental shortages. Prices for the benchmark Thai variety of rice, a food staple across much of Asia, have increased threefold in a year, reports the Asian Development Bank. Meat prices have risen by 60% in Bangladesh in the year ending in March, and by 45% in Cambodia and 30% in the Philippines.
With this sharp increase in the price of basic staples, people are already hoarding, stealing and fighting over scarce supplies. The World Food Programme calls it a "silent tsunami."
The threat of conflict is real, both within societies where the numbers impoverished by higher grain prices is already high, and also between states as the trend towards commercial liberalisation and conglomeration is suddenly reversed and replaced by subsidies, price-fixing cartels and export curbs.
In Indonesia, retired general recently warned: "If students demonstrate it's not a worry, but if hungry people take to the streets, now that's dangerous."
Hunger causes conflict when people feel they have nothing to lose and are willing to kill their neighbours over scarce resources. The peasant wars of the late 20th century in Central and South America and the wars that sprung from famine in Nigeria, Ethiopia and Sudan, are grim reminders of man's most basic instinct, which is to fight to survive.
The trouble is that in terms of resolving conflict, we have come to rely less on material remedies and more on political artifice. Many of the internal conflicts that have been peacefully resolved in recent years only superficially addressed the material seeds of conflict. Peace agreements have been elite affairs where leaders of armed groups and governments reached an understanding on how to share power within a common state.
This approach is a sensible first step toward conflict resolution: by convincing the people inciting violence to lay down their arms, it becomes possible to start designing a wider range of policies addressing socio-economic issues.
However, typically, the socio-economic changes and the economic reconstruction and development the public was expecting trickled down slowly, if at all. Aceh remains one of the poorest parts of Indonesia, as does Mindanao in the southern Philippines - two areas of Southeast Asia where peace has been negotiated.
When hunger drives people into conflict, we might presume that peace-making will simply be a question of providing food. We would be mistaken. In fact, the experience of humanitarian aid agencies in the 1970s and '80s in Africa was that food aid tends to fuel conflict, as the combatants seek to harness the supply of nutrition to the goals of war.
Experts tell us that farmers will eventually adjust the supply of food to cope with higher demand so that prices stabilise. More encouragingly, there are signs that decades of improving cooperation between states is stimulating a collective urge to resolve the crisis. The sharing of technology is key, says Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary-general. He believes that farmers in Africa could double food output in five to 10 years if rich countries partner them in a "Green Revolution" for a long-term solution to the continent's food crisis.
But realistically, trade agreements and technological advances are slow-moving transformations.
In the meantime, officials in India warn that the food price crisis could plunge millions of people into poverty in a country that is already battling an internal Marxist insurgency that draws support from impoverished and landless peasants.
In Bangladesh, where the soaring cost price of staples has forced the marginally poor to give up meat and rice, there is a significantly increased risk of conflict in an already fractured polity.
The immediate challenge, therefore, is to prevent and resolve conflict arising from the food crisis. This places a significant burden on the international community to swiftly respond to outbreaks of violence.
But if people driven to war by hunger are less inclined to compromise, this makes the task of peace-making rather more challenging.
For one thing, conflict fuelled by hunger will be more widespread, exerting strain on international agencies involved in peace-keeping and humanitarian work. Food security is already fragile in many African countries and a protracted conflict tends to drift across borders, as we have seen in Sudan and Congo.
Peace-makers need to be more aware of, and recognise, the socio-economic roots of conflict. They should incorporate in peace agreements remedies for the population's grievances and to enlist the international community's support behind their implementation.
Such remedies should include pledges by leaders to address in a meaningful manner contentious issues such as land distribution, job creation, and racial and ethnic discrimination leading to socio-economic inequality.
The ethnic and religious wars of the last half of the 20th century have perhaps lulled us into a false sense of security.
We have grown accustomed to resolving conflict by forging political accommodation and compromise in situations where protagonists had much to lose materially if they kept on fighting.
But in a world where environmental and market pressures can treble the price of staple commodities in a matter of a few months, it is harder to find the grounds for compromise.
This calls for more effective negotiating skills, both domestically and internationally, bilaterally as well as multilaterally, to resolve these crises.
Markets must be kept open to assist with the flow of goods to crisis situations, and in affected countries solutions must be found that address both elite and popular grievances.
------
Michael Vatikiotis is Asia Regional Director for the Geneva-based Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue
by THE SILENT TSUNAMI
MICHAEL VATIKIOTIS
http://www.bangkokpost.com
Everyday concerns of the population rarely reach the negotiating table, in part because the economic and social problems in conflict-ridden societies are extremely complex, involve many actors and can only be resolved in the long term.
So what happens when people are driven to kill one another for food? It's a critical question to ask as the world faces a sudden and unexpected food price crisis that is threatening to plunge millions back into poverty.
The sharp spike in food prices this year has already generated violence. Food riots in parts of Africa and the Caribbean have created social and political instability. In rice-growing countries like India, Vietnam and Thailand, hoarding has begun with export bans already in place, creating inter-state friction.
Burma's rice-growing capacity has been devastated by Cyclone Nargis, which will add to price pressures in the coming months.
This is largely a crisis born of inflation and other market factors rather than fundamental shortages. Prices for the benchmark Thai variety of rice, a food staple across much of Asia, have increased threefold in a year, reports the Asian Development Bank. Meat prices have risen by 60% in Bangladesh in the year ending in March, and by 45% in Cambodia and 30% in the Philippines.
With this sharp increase in the price of basic staples, people are already hoarding, stealing and fighting over scarce supplies. The World Food Programme calls it a "silent tsunami."
The threat of conflict is real, both within societies where the numbers impoverished by higher grain prices is already high, and also between states as the trend towards commercial liberalisation and conglomeration is suddenly reversed and replaced by subsidies, price-fixing cartels and export curbs.
In Indonesia, retired general recently warned: "If students demonstrate it's not a worry, but if hungry people take to the streets, now that's dangerous."
Hunger causes conflict when people feel they have nothing to lose and are willing to kill their neighbours over scarce resources. The peasant wars of the late 20th century in Central and South America and the wars that sprung from famine in Nigeria, Ethiopia and Sudan, are grim reminders of man's most basic instinct, which is to fight to survive.
The trouble is that in terms of resolving conflict, we have come to rely less on material remedies and more on political artifice. Many of the internal conflicts that have been peacefully resolved in recent years only superficially addressed the material seeds of conflict. Peace agreements have been elite affairs where leaders of armed groups and governments reached an understanding on how to share power within a common state.
This approach is a sensible first step toward conflict resolution: by convincing the people inciting violence to lay down their arms, it becomes possible to start designing a wider range of policies addressing socio-economic issues.
However, typically, the socio-economic changes and the economic reconstruction and development the public was expecting trickled down slowly, if at all. Aceh remains one of the poorest parts of Indonesia, as does Mindanao in the southern Philippines - two areas of Southeast Asia where peace has been negotiated.
When hunger drives people into conflict, we might presume that peace-making will simply be a question of providing food. We would be mistaken. In fact, the experience of humanitarian aid agencies in the 1970s and '80s in Africa was that food aid tends to fuel conflict, as the combatants seek to harness the supply of nutrition to the goals of war.
Experts tell us that farmers will eventually adjust the supply of food to cope with higher demand so that prices stabilise. More encouragingly, there are signs that decades of improving cooperation between states is stimulating a collective urge to resolve the crisis. The sharing of technology is key, says Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary-general. He believes that farmers in Africa could double food output in five to 10 years if rich countries partner them in a "Green Revolution" for a long-term solution to the continent's food crisis.
But realistically, trade agreements and technological advances are slow-moving transformations.
In the meantime, officials in India warn that the food price crisis could plunge millions of people into poverty in a country that is already battling an internal Marxist insurgency that draws support from impoverished and landless peasants.
In Bangladesh, where the soaring cost price of staples has forced the marginally poor to give up meat and rice, there is a significantly increased risk of conflict in an already fractured polity.
The immediate challenge, therefore, is to prevent and resolve conflict arising from the food crisis. This places a significant burden on the international community to swiftly respond to outbreaks of violence.
But if people driven to war by hunger are less inclined to compromise, this makes the task of peace-making rather more challenging.
For one thing, conflict fuelled by hunger will be more widespread, exerting strain on international agencies involved in peace-keeping and humanitarian work. Food security is already fragile in many African countries and a protracted conflict tends to drift across borders, as we have seen in Sudan and Congo.
Peace-makers need to be more aware of, and recognise, the socio-economic roots of conflict. They should incorporate in peace agreements remedies for the population's grievances and to enlist the international community's support behind their implementation.
Such remedies should include pledges by leaders to address in a meaningful manner contentious issues such as land distribution, job creation, and racial and ethnic discrimination leading to socio-economic inequality.
The ethnic and religious wars of the last half of the 20th century have perhaps lulled us into a false sense of security.
We have grown accustomed to resolving conflict by forging political accommodation and compromise in situations where protagonists had much to lose materially if they kept on fighting.
But in a world where environmental and market pressures can treble the price of staple commodities in a matter of a few months, it is harder to find the grounds for compromise.
This calls for more effective negotiating skills, both domestically and internationally, bilaterally as well as multilaterally, to resolve these crises.
Markets must be kept open to assist with the flow of goods to crisis situations, and in affected countries solutions must be found that address both elite and popular grievances.
------
Michael Vatikiotis is Asia Regional Director for the Geneva-based Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue
by THE SILENT TSUNAMI
MICHAEL VATIKIOTIS
http://www.bangkokpost.com
New road will benefit Trat, Koh Kong
KOH KONG, CAMBODIA : Tourism between Thailand and Cambodia is expected to flourish now that road transport has been improved, said Sasithara Pichaichannrong, the permanent secretary of Tourism and Sports Ministry.
Work was completed last month on the route known as the Southern Coastal Sub-corridor, linking Thailand's Eastern Seaboard provinces and Trat with Koh Kong and Sihanoukville in Cambodia, and onward to Nam Can in Vietnam.
According to Ms Sasithara, foreign visitor numbers are also expected to increase because Thailand and Cambodia have agreed to offer a single visa for travel to both countries.
However, tourism flows between Thailand and Cambodia could grow more if immigration procedures were relaxed by the Thai government, said Bun Beav, director of the tourism unit at Koh Kong province.
Cambodian visitors to Thailand totalled 108,776 last year but only 35,796 Thais visited Cambodia.
He proposed that the Thai government allow Cambodian visitors who hold border passes to travel in Trat province. Currently, Cambodian visitors must seek a visa in Phnom Penh if they want to travel to Trat. According to Mr Bun Beav, the improved road increased the number of foreign daily visitors to Koh Kong by 50% in April from an average of 400 a day in March. Koh Kong has six hotels and 12 guesthouses with a total of 780 rooms.
Sakol Sunate of the Trat Tourist Association said Thailand would gain the most benefit from the route because visitors from Phnom Penh liked to travel to Trat and other eastern provinces in Thailand.
He agreed that the Thai government should consider issuing visas on arrival for Cambodian visitors at the border of Bann Haad Lek in Trat. The two countries also should allow tourist buses to cross the border, he said.
Currently, caravan tours are allowed to drive in the cities but general tourists are required to change buses at the border.
Mr Sakol said Trat had potential to become the gateway for foreign visitors from third countries to Cambodia. However, the Thai government should consider attracting longer-stays in Thailand, rather than just transit at Suvarnabhumi airport.
Tourism packages to link eastern Thailand and Cambodia thus needed to be developed, he added.
by CHATRUDEE THEPARAT
http://www.bangkokpost.com
Work was completed last month on the route known as the Southern Coastal Sub-corridor, linking Thailand's Eastern Seaboard provinces and Trat with Koh Kong and Sihanoukville in Cambodia, and onward to Nam Can in Vietnam.
According to Ms Sasithara, foreign visitor numbers are also expected to increase because Thailand and Cambodia have agreed to offer a single visa for travel to both countries.
However, tourism flows between Thailand and Cambodia could grow more if immigration procedures were relaxed by the Thai government, said Bun Beav, director of the tourism unit at Koh Kong province.
Cambodian visitors to Thailand totalled 108,776 last year but only 35,796 Thais visited Cambodia.
He proposed that the Thai government allow Cambodian visitors who hold border passes to travel in Trat province. Currently, Cambodian visitors must seek a visa in Phnom Penh if they want to travel to Trat. According to Mr Bun Beav, the improved road increased the number of foreign daily visitors to Koh Kong by 50% in April from an average of 400 a day in March. Koh Kong has six hotels and 12 guesthouses with a total of 780 rooms.
Sakol Sunate of the Trat Tourist Association said Thailand would gain the most benefit from the route because visitors from Phnom Penh liked to travel to Trat and other eastern provinces in Thailand.
He agreed that the Thai government should consider issuing visas on arrival for Cambodian visitors at the border of Bann Haad Lek in Trat. The two countries also should allow tourist buses to cross the border, he said.
Currently, caravan tours are allowed to drive in the cities but general tourists are required to change buses at the border.
Mr Sakol said Trat had potential to become the gateway for foreign visitors from third countries to Cambodia. However, the Thai government should consider attracting longer-stays in Thailand, rather than just transit at Suvarnabhumi airport.
Tourism packages to link eastern Thailand and Cambodia thus needed to be developed, he added.
by CHATRUDEE THEPARAT
http://www.bangkokpost.com
Food aid programs in Asia, Africa cut because of rising food prices
KAMPONG SPEU, Cambodia (AP): At dawn in a ramshackle elementary school in rural Cambodia, the children think of only one thing: their stomachs. They anxiously await the steaming buckets of free rice delivered to their desks.
But by the end of the month, they will no longer get free breakfast from the U.N. World Food Program. About 450,000 Cambodian students will become the latest victims of soaring global food prices.
Five local suppliers have defaulted on contracts to provide rice because they can get a higher price elsewhere, program officials say. Prices of rice have tripled on the global market since December.
Faced with a shortfall of 13,000 metric tons (14,330 US tons) of rice and more pressing needs, the World Food Program stopped the free breakfasts in March. The schools' remaining stocks are expect to run out in the coming days. That will leave students without what was often the best meal they got all day.
"I feel hopeless,'' said Boeurn Srey Leak, a 15-year-old in sixth grade.
Rich countries have pledged US$469 million (euro300 million) for food aid to address what is expected to be a US$755 million (euro486 million) deficit, due to food prices that have risen 76 percent since December. The U.S., already the largest provider of food aid, is expected to contribute almost a third of that money. If Congress approves, the U.S. will contribute US$770 million (euro454 million) more to be available after Oct. 1.
But the money will not arrive in time to save some food programs from being cut or ended. The World Food Program feeds almost 89 million people worldwide, including 58.8 million children.
"I don't think there is single program that doesn't have some kind of concerns because they have to scale down,'' said Susana Rico, a World Food Program official. "The majority of countries will suffer some kind of cutbacks in rations or programs in the next three to five months.''
The numbers are grim. In Burundi, Kenya and Zambia, hundreds of thousands of people face cuts in food rations after June. In Iraq, 500,000 recipients will likely lose food aid. In Yemen, it's 320,000 households, including children and the sick.
Private aid agencies based in the U.S. also said food price hikes are hurting their projects.
Mercy Corps will likely distribute 20 percent less food to Iraqi refugees in Syria and serve 12 percent fewer Colombian families fleeing violence in the countryside. World Vision may stop helping 1.5 million people -- nearly a quarter of the number it serves -- because of rising food prices and pledged donations not yet delivered. At least a third are children.
In Cambodia, the free breakfasts that started in 2000 have made children visibly healthier, said Nheng Vorn, the principal of Choumpou Proek School, about 70 kilometers (43 miles) west of the capital Phnom Penh.
"They are more focused on lessons, and their reading ability has improved subsequently,'' he noted.
But principals at many such rural schools don't have the money to replace the breakfast program. Girls in particular will be at risk of dropping out because families need them at home to work in the field or help raise siblings, said World Food Program Cambodia director Thomas Keusters. Children in Cambodia often start school late and repeat grades a lot, he said.
"It's not uncommon to have a girl in grade five or six who is already 15 or 16 years old,'' Keusters said. "We are paying them to come to school. I'm very concerned about them because I have no rice.''
About 10 kilometers (6 miles) away from Choumpou Proek school, the students of Sangkum Seksa school devour hearty portions of rice, peas and sardines in the morning. The school has only 10 rooms, housed in two faded yellow concrete buildings. Some students go barefoot.
"I can only feel pity for them,'' said the principal, Tan Sak. "I have no solution for them after the current stock is used up.'' Before the free breakfasts, many students left school before noon so they could eat lunch at home.
"I had difficulty sitting in the class because my stomach was growling,'' Rim Channa, a 13-year-old fifth-grader.
Now, once again, all they will have for breakfast is the tart fruit from the nearby tamarind trees.
by the star online
But by the end of the month, they will no longer get free breakfast from the U.N. World Food Program. About 450,000 Cambodian students will become the latest victims of soaring global food prices.
Five local suppliers have defaulted on contracts to provide rice because they can get a higher price elsewhere, program officials say. Prices of rice have tripled on the global market since December.
Faced with a shortfall of 13,000 metric tons (14,330 US tons) of rice and more pressing needs, the World Food Program stopped the free breakfasts in March. The schools' remaining stocks are expect to run out in the coming days. That will leave students without what was often the best meal they got all day.
"I feel hopeless,'' said Boeurn Srey Leak, a 15-year-old in sixth grade.
Rich countries have pledged US$469 million (euro300 million) for food aid to address what is expected to be a US$755 million (euro486 million) deficit, due to food prices that have risen 76 percent since December. The U.S., already the largest provider of food aid, is expected to contribute almost a third of that money. If Congress approves, the U.S. will contribute US$770 million (euro454 million) more to be available after Oct. 1.
But the money will not arrive in time to save some food programs from being cut or ended. The World Food Program feeds almost 89 million people worldwide, including 58.8 million children.
"I don't think there is single program that doesn't have some kind of concerns because they have to scale down,'' said Susana Rico, a World Food Program official. "The majority of countries will suffer some kind of cutbacks in rations or programs in the next three to five months.''
The numbers are grim. In Burundi, Kenya and Zambia, hundreds of thousands of people face cuts in food rations after June. In Iraq, 500,000 recipients will likely lose food aid. In Yemen, it's 320,000 households, including children and the sick.
Private aid agencies based in the U.S. also said food price hikes are hurting their projects.
Mercy Corps will likely distribute 20 percent less food to Iraqi refugees in Syria and serve 12 percent fewer Colombian families fleeing violence in the countryside. World Vision may stop helping 1.5 million people -- nearly a quarter of the number it serves -- because of rising food prices and pledged donations not yet delivered. At least a third are children.
In Cambodia, the free breakfasts that started in 2000 have made children visibly healthier, said Nheng Vorn, the principal of Choumpou Proek School, about 70 kilometers (43 miles) west of the capital Phnom Penh.
"They are more focused on lessons, and their reading ability has improved subsequently,'' he noted.
But principals at many such rural schools don't have the money to replace the breakfast program. Girls in particular will be at risk of dropping out because families need them at home to work in the field or help raise siblings, said World Food Program Cambodia director Thomas Keusters. Children in Cambodia often start school late and repeat grades a lot, he said.
"It's not uncommon to have a girl in grade five or six who is already 15 or 16 years old,'' Keusters said. "We are paying them to come to school. I'm very concerned about them because I have no rice.''
About 10 kilometers (6 miles) away from Choumpou Proek school, the students of Sangkum Seksa school devour hearty portions of rice, peas and sardines in the morning. The school has only 10 rooms, housed in two faded yellow concrete buildings. Some students go barefoot.
"I can only feel pity for them,'' said the principal, Tan Sak. "I have no solution for them after the current stock is used up.'' Before the free breakfasts, many students left school before noon so they could eat lunch at home.
"I had difficulty sitting in the class because my stomach was growling,'' Rim Channa, a 13-year-old fifth-grader.
Now, once again, all they will have for breakfast is the tart fruit from the nearby tamarind trees.
by the star online
Land-locked Laos has history of isolation, unrest
Through a combination of history, geography and politics — and with the exception of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma — Laos may be the least known to the outside world of any country in Southeast Asia.
To begin with, it’s landlocked — bounded by China on the north, Vietnam on the east, Cambodia on the south and Myanmar and Thailand on the west — so access to tourists as well as traders historically has been relatively difficult.
Besides that, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic is one of the world’s few remaining traditionally communist nations; the Pathet Lao took control of the country in 1975 from its royalist government two years after the departure of the United States military from Vietnam, and kept the country pretty well closed to outside influences until about 10 years ago.
In the eighth century, after hundreds of years of Chinese and Indian influence, the country now known as Laos became home to the Lao people, who began to migrate into the area along with other Thai groups and Hmong-Mien hill tribes.
These groups set up separate principalities that lasted for the next 500 years, until they consolidated to withstand the threat of invasion by Kublai Khan’s Mongol army.
In the mid-14th century, a strong warlord in the area of the present-day city of Luang Prabang further consolidated his power, but centralized control disintegrated into three separate kingdoms in the early 1700s.
Friction between what is now Thailand and Vietnam over the area continued until Laos became a French protectorate — part of the vast holdings known as Indochina — in 1893, which ushered in nearly a century of unrest, semi-autonomy, civil war and unification followed by more war.
French control ended in 1953, when Laos became an independent monarchy, which lasted until the 1975 Pathet Lao takeover.
Of all the countries in Southeast Asia, Laos suffered the heaviest bombing during the U.S.-waged Vietnam War because the Ho Chi Minh Trail ran down the eastern slopes of its mountain valleys, linking communist North Vietnam with Cambodia and South Vietnam.
More than 100 people die each year in Laos from inadvertently setting off unexploded bombs left from the Vietnam War.
With a land area of about 91,000 square miles, Laos is nearly the same size as Oregon, which has 96,000 square miles. However, its population, estimated at about 6.5 million, far exceeds Oregon’s 3.7 million.
Vientiane, the capital city, has about 700,000 people.
The mainly agricultural economy depends primarily on the health of its rice, sugar cane, tobacco, coffee and fruit crops, as well as cultivation of silk for turning into textiles. Tourism has become an important part of the economy during the past 10 years, although travel to remote areas remains difficult.
By Randi Bjornstad
The Register-Guard
To begin with, it’s landlocked — bounded by China on the north, Vietnam on the east, Cambodia on the south and Myanmar and Thailand on the west — so access to tourists as well as traders historically has been relatively difficult.
Besides that, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic is one of the world’s few remaining traditionally communist nations; the Pathet Lao took control of the country in 1975 from its royalist government two years after the departure of the United States military from Vietnam, and kept the country pretty well closed to outside influences until about 10 years ago.
In the eighth century, after hundreds of years of Chinese and Indian influence, the country now known as Laos became home to the Lao people, who began to migrate into the area along with other Thai groups and Hmong-Mien hill tribes.
These groups set up separate principalities that lasted for the next 500 years, until they consolidated to withstand the threat of invasion by Kublai Khan’s Mongol army.
In the mid-14th century, a strong warlord in the area of the present-day city of Luang Prabang further consolidated his power, but centralized control disintegrated into three separate kingdoms in the early 1700s.
Friction between what is now Thailand and Vietnam over the area continued until Laos became a French protectorate — part of the vast holdings known as Indochina — in 1893, which ushered in nearly a century of unrest, semi-autonomy, civil war and unification followed by more war.
French control ended in 1953, when Laos became an independent monarchy, which lasted until the 1975 Pathet Lao takeover.
Of all the countries in Southeast Asia, Laos suffered the heaviest bombing during the U.S.-waged Vietnam War because the Ho Chi Minh Trail ran down the eastern slopes of its mountain valleys, linking communist North Vietnam with Cambodia and South Vietnam.
More than 100 people die each year in Laos from inadvertently setting off unexploded bombs left from the Vietnam War.
With a land area of about 91,000 square miles, Laos is nearly the same size as Oregon, which has 96,000 square miles. However, its population, estimated at about 6.5 million, far exceeds Oregon’s 3.7 million.
Vientiane, the capital city, has about 700,000 people.
The mainly agricultural economy depends primarily on the health of its rice, sugar cane, tobacco, coffee and fruit crops, as well as cultivation of silk for turning into textiles. Tourism has become an important part of the economy during the past 10 years, although travel to remote areas remains difficult.
By Randi Bjornstad
The Register-Guard
Spinning preah Vihear
The Thai press placed areas on the eastern border under an unwanted spotlight amid two high-profile cases involving a territorial dispute with Cambodia and the vandalising of an ancient Hindu temple in Buri Ram province. Thai Rath newspaper quoted Foreign Minister Noppadon Pattama expressing optimism that things are moving in the right direction with regard to the dispute between Thailand and Cambodia over the latter's proposal that Unesco add the ancient Hindu Preah Vihear Temple to its World Heritage list.
Noppadon told reporters that Phnom Penh was prepared to propose to Unesco that only the main Preah Vihear Temple's grounds - not the disputed 4.6 square kilometre area surrounding it - be considered for recognition as a Unesco World Heritage site.
The former consiglieri for ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, although falling short of declaring victory, put a positive spin on negotiations that basically resulted in Cambodia rejecting Thailand's proposal that the areas in dispute fall under a "joint administrative regime".
But, as it is, things are back to what they were before the latest dispute erupted.
The area in dispute remains tense, with security officials from both sides glaring at their counterparts, and with the Thai side hosting the only accessible route to the Hindu temple that the International Court ruled in 1962 was in Cambodian territory after years of disputes over its ownership.
Separately, local television stations and daily newspapers reported that residents were taking matters into their own hands by employing black magic in their search for the culprits behind the recent act of vandalism at Phanom Rung, the ruins of a ninth-century Hindu stone temple and a monument to the ancient Khmer civilisation.
Shamans were called in to carry out ceremonies that saw bundles of incense and candles accompanying baskets of fresh fruits and half a dozen boiled pig heads to stave off the potential wrath of Shiva, the Hindu deity for whom the temple was built over 1,000 years ago.
On domestic matters, Thai dailies reported Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej as saying he is determined to push through a referendum in July on whether to amend the Constitution, which voters approved by a referendum during the previous administration.
The newspapers said Samak was in no mood to debate the issue when the Parliament convenes in less than two months. He decided that he would instead use his executive powers as prime minister to push the referendum through for a vote in July.
by http://nationmultimedia.com
Noppadon told reporters that Phnom Penh was prepared to propose to Unesco that only the main Preah Vihear Temple's grounds - not the disputed 4.6 square kilometre area surrounding it - be considered for recognition as a Unesco World Heritage site.
The former consiglieri for ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, although falling short of declaring victory, put a positive spin on negotiations that basically resulted in Cambodia rejecting Thailand's proposal that the areas in dispute fall under a "joint administrative regime".
But, as it is, things are back to what they were before the latest dispute erupted.
The area in dispute remains tense, with security officials from both sides glaring at their counterparts, and with the Thai side hosting the only accessible route to the Hindu temple that the International Court ruled in 1962 was in Cambodian territory after years of disputes over its ownership.
Separately, local television stations and daily newspapers reported that residents were taking matters into their own hands by employing black magic in their search for the culprits behind the recent act of vandalism at Phanom Rung, the ruins of a ninth-century Hindu stone temple and a monument to the ancient Khmer civilisation.
Shamans were called in to carry out ceremonies that saw bundles of incense and candles accompanying baskets of fresh fruits and half a dozen boiled pig heads to stave off the potential wrath of Shiva, the Hindu deity for whom the temple was built over 1,000 years ago.
On domestic matters, Thai dailies reported Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej as saying he is determined to push through a referendum in July on whether to amend the Constitution, which voters approved by a referendum during the previous administration.
The newspapers said Samak was in no mood to debate the issue when the Parliament convenes in less than two months. He decided that he would instead use his executive powers as prime minister to push the referendum through for a vote in July.
by http://nationmultimedia.com
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
