North Korea’s nuclear future

This week many discussions among leaders will continue regarding the future of North Korea’s nuclear program. “Important issues will be discussed…including the appraisal of the declaration and the establishment of a verification mechanism,” according to Kim Sook, South Korea’s chief nuclear envoy.North Korea revealed details of its nuclear program last month, and soon after destroyed a water cooling tower in a facility used to extract plutonium for nuclear weapons. On June 26^th a 60-page declaration written in the English language was given to China describing plutonium productions from as early as 1986. North Korea admitted to producing around 40 kilograms of enriched plutonium, or roughly seven nuclear bomb’s worth. The tower was destroyed the day following the submittal of the declaration. The United States paid North Korea around $2.5 million for doing so.

Other parts of the nuclear program are being dismantled. This has gained North Korea the lifting of some U.S. sanctions and the removal of its name from the U.S. State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism. Other sanctions on North Korea will remain in effect. Five other nations have been watching North Korea in addition to the United States. They share a common goal of ending Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program. Other nations are offering energy assistance and food to North Korea.

China will host talks for the first time in nine months. No details had been announced at this time. Kim claimed the talks would begin on Tuesday. Japan, Russia, the United States, and both Koreas are to be involved. North Korea’s report is not considered complete or verifiable by U.S. President George Bush, “To end its isolation, North Korea must address these concerns. It must dismantle all of its nuclear facilities, give up its separated plutonium, resolve outstanding questions on its highly enriched uranium and proliferation activities, and end these activities in a way that we can fully verify,” Bush said. He also stated, “[there are still] a number of issues of serious concern to the United States and the international community.” North Korea is still a suspect in an airliner bombing, and has not revealed details on its supplying Syria with nuclear technology.

Asia’s Food Woes

In Thailand, supermarkets have placed large “warning” signs limiting the amount of rice that shoppers are allowed to purchase. This, in a country which produces 10 million more tons of rice than it consumes and is the world’s largest rice exporter. But this is just the tip of the iceberg of the Asian food crisis.

A hungry man is an angry man, indeed. In Asia, the food crisis has incurred the wrath of commonfolk, putting pressure on respective Asian governments to relook their budgets. Their people have an increasing need for food subsidies and a higher likelihood of civil unrest.

H.S. Dillon, former adviser to the Indonesian Ministry of Agriculture, has previously said that a major concern in Indonesia is food riots. In January, a spike in soybean prices created ripples of protests throughout Indonesia, albeit controlled. “I don’t see an immediate danger right now, but it has happened in the past and can happen again,” Dillon said.

In Indonesia, the government recently revised its 2008 budget, increasing the amount it will spend on food subsidies by 2.7 trillion rupiah, or about $290 million. Total government spending on fuel, electricity and food subsidies this year will total $20 billion.

A large majority of Malaysian voters, in the country’s March elections, cited skyrocketing prices of fuel and food as “the most important problem in the country” in a postelection survey carried out by the Merdeka Centre, an independent polling agency.

If Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi steps down, which many members of his party are pressuring him to do amid postelection turmoil, he will be the region’s first high-profile political casualty of fuel and food price inflation.

Grain prices including rice, the staple food for half the world, have surged this year on concern there’s a shortage in the international market, prompting some growers to impose export curbs. The price of rice has been closely monitored by think tanks as a gauge of potential political unrest.

“Rice is a political commodity,” said Kwanchai Gomez, the executive director of the Thai Rice Foundation, a research center. “It’s not only an economic one.”

In the Philippines, the government has mobilized police officers and soldiers to supply the poorest Filipinos with subsidized rice in recent weeks. The rice, much of which was imported from Vietnam, sells for 18.25 pesos a kilogram, or 20 cents a pound, half the price of the cheapest commercially sold rice in the Philippines.

The surge in prices has prompted governments in Asia to adopt measures to raise output. China, the world’s biggest rice producer, will boost the subsidy on the grain, according to a report today from the China National Grain and Oils Information Center.

The Philippines plans to spend more than 39.5 billion pesos ($948 million) through 2010 to help boost rice output, its Agriculture Secretary Yap said April 4. The funds will be devoted to improving irrigation and farm-to-market roads.

Malaysia will spend at least an additional 6 billion ringgit ($1.9 billion) to increase production, Bernama reported April 11, citing Agriculture Minister Mustapa Mohamed.

The rise in prices affects consumers differently across Asia. For the wealthiest in Singapore, Hong Kong or Kuala Lumpur, food inflation can engender a political backlash, but it is not a life-or-death problem. But for the poorest across Asia, rising prices mean the prospect of increasing rates of malnutrition.

“Food price increases are especially regressive,” said Paul Risley, the spokesman in Asia for the World Food Program, the UN agency that feeds the world’s destitute.

Singaporeans on average spend only 8 percent of their income on food, compared with 15 percent in Malaysia, 26 percent in Indonesia and Thailand, 28 percent in China, 33 percent in India and around 40 percent in Pakistan and Vietnam, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Those likely to be hurt the most by the sharp increase in food prices are the urban poor, the residents of Asia’s sprawling megacities, Risley said. People in rural areas may have less cash, but they can resort to hunting and gathering.

Slum dwellers in the Philippines, the world’s largest rice importer, are among the worst off in the region. Even before the spike in food prices this year, poverty and food insecurity were on the rise. According to a government report released in March, the number of people who do not have enough income to meet basic food needs in the Philippines rose to 12.2 million in 2006 from 10.8 million three years earlier, an increase of about 13 percent.

Waiting in line outside a warehouse last weekend to buy government-supplied rice was Julieta Casanova, 60, who lives with her two children and eight grandchildren in Tandang Sora, a slum outside of Manila.

“We can’t survive without rice,” Casanova said. The government rations the rice to five kilograms per person, which Casanova said would last two days.

Arroyo, the Philippines’ president, and many other leaders across the region have blamed hoarding by traders and millers for the price increases. Thai Grade B rice, a widely traded variety, reached $854 per ton last week from $322 a year ago, a rise that appears speculative as much as driven by market fundamentals.

Bad weather and increased consumption have caused rice supplies to shrink, experts say, but the world is not in immediate danger of running out. Indonesia is in the midst of a record harvest this year and after years of importing rice will have a surplus of 1.2 million tons, according to Bayu Krisnamurti, deputy for agriculture for the Coordinating Ministry of Economic Affairs. The Food and Agriculture Organization, a United Nations agency, predicts that an overall good harvest this year will increase rice production by 12 million tons, or about 1.8 percent globally.

Yet this news has been overshadowed in a generalized atmosphere of soaring prices for gasoline and economic uncertainty stemming from the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis. In Hong Kong and other Asian cities, some shoppers have panicked, emptying shelves of rice as news of rice prices became a front-page story.

Myanmar’s delay on aid ‘cost tens of thousands of lives’

The Myanmar government’s delay in allowing international aid into the cyclone-hit country cost “tens of thousands of lives,” US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said Saturday.

Speaking at a top-level security conference here, Gates said US ships could have quickly delivered much needed aid to Myanmar in the aftermath of the May 2-3 storm that left 133,000 people dead or missing. “Our ships and aircraft awaited country approval so they could act promptly to save thousands of lives — approval of the kind granted by Indonesia immediately after the 2004 tsunami and by Bangladesh after a fierce cyclone just last November,” Gates told the regional forum. “With Burma (Myanmar), the situation has been very different — at a cost of tens of thousands of lives.”

Gates added that many other countries besides the United States have also felt hindered in their efforts to help Myanmar recover from Cyclone Nargis.

“Despite these obstructions, we continue to get help into Burma and remain poised to provide more,” he said, reiterating that the US does not support the use of force to deliver assistance.

“My own view is that (force) will be a serious mistake and it clearly has been a policy of our government and we don’t expect it to change.”

He said many governments including the US have tried to reach out to the leadership of Myanmar after the cyclone.

“We have reached out. They have kept their hands in their pockets,” Gates said.

Nearly four weeks after the cyclone pummelled large swathes of Myanmar, foreign aid has still only reached 40 percent of the 2.4 million needy survivors, the United Nations said.

Inciting international outrage, Myanmar’s isolated military had largely barred foreign aid workers from gaining access to the southwest Irrawaddy Delta, which bore the brunt of the cyclone.

Relief workers slowly moved into the delta on Thursday after the government started to ease restrictions on access.

The United Nations said Friday it has received all the visas it had requested from Myanmar for its disaster aid workers but called for unhindered access for other humanitarian workers and groups.

US war ships carrying relief supplies have been off the coast of Myanmar for two weeks waiting for Myanmar’s permission to move in. US military planes, however, have been allowed to land in the main city Yangon to deliver aid.

Gates also told the seventh Shangri-La Dialogue that the US welcomed ASEAN’s leadership, and looked forward to the quick emergence of a mechanism that can help international assistance reach those who need it.

Singapore holds the current chair of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), of which Myanmar is a member.

An assessment team from ASEAN was set to arrive in Yangon on Friday to determine how best to help the survivors in desperate need of food, shelter and medicine.

In a keynote opening address to the Shangri-La Dialogue on Friday night, Singapore’s prime minister said Myanmar’s response to foreign offers of help for cyclone victims is regrettable.

“It’s regrettable that the Myanmar government has responded in this way. Myanmar’s partners in ASEAN have all been deeply concerned by the massive suffering of the victims, which a more rapid international relief operation could have minimised,” Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said.

Criticism also came from White House spokeswoman Dana Perino in Washington on Friday. She said Myanmar military’s response to the crisis “continues to frustrate not just the United States, but other countries, and certainly the non-governmental organisations that are trying to get in there”.

In an apparent reference to the United States, the New Light of Myanmar newspaper, a government mouthpiece, on Friday criticised countries for maintaining sanctions on Myanmar despite the cyclone devastation.

The US renewed sanctions two weeks after the storm, accusing Myanmar’s rulers of suppressing the pro-democracy movement, while insisting the sanctions will not affect humanitarian aid.

Also known as the Asia Security Summit, the Singapore meeting of defence and national security officials and analysts is organised by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, an independent think-tank. - AFP/ir

Tibet unrest spreads beyond Lhasa

Protests in Tibet over Beijing’s rule have spread to neighbouring parts of China, after days of demonstrations and violence in Tibet’s main city, Lhasa. Clashes between Tibetan protesters and police in Aba, Sichuan province, saw a police station and cars attacked. Rights groups said several people had been killed in the clashes. Protests were also reported in Gansu province.

The unrest came after exiled Tibetan leaders said a Chinese crackdown had killed at least 80 people in Lhasa.

Indian-based officials said the figure was confirmed by several sources, even though China had put the death toll during Friday’s riots at 10.

The Dalai Lama has called for an international inquiry into China’s crackdown, accusing it of a “rule of terror” and “cultural genocide”.

The clashes in Aba, known as Ngawa in Tibetan, happened around 1200 local time on Sunday, according to Kate Saunders of the International Campaign for Tibet.

“According to reliable reports the police opened fire,” said Ms Saunders, who is in London but said she had indirect phone and web access to eyewitness accounts. “We know there have been deaths.”

She said that more than 1,000 monks had been on the streets of the town, which is home to a large monastery.

Accounts of how many people died differ, but she said the most reliable eyewitness source put the toll at seven.

Reuters news agency cited an unnamed police officer in Aba saying that Tibetans had thrown petrol bombs, burned a police station, and torched vehicles during the clashes.

In China’s north-western Gansu province, at Machu town, hundreds of protesters marched on government buildings and set fire to Chinese businesses, Reuters reported, quoting the Free Tibet Campaign. About 1,500 people - monks and lay people - shouting “Free Tibet” and “Long Live” the Dalai Lama were tear-gassed by security forces.

In the Gansu capital Lanzhou, more than 100 Tibetan students staged a sit-down protest on a university’s playing field, according to the activist group Free Tibet.

Elsewhere in Gansu, at Xiahe, security forces extended their clampdown on Sunday after confrontations there between hundreds of monks and police over the weekend.

In Lhasa, where demonstrators set fire to Chinese-owned shops and hurled rocks at local police on Friday after days of mainly peaceful protests, Chinese troops were out in force.

The authorities in Tibet have urged the protesters to hand themselves in by Monday morning.

Tibet’s spiritual leader the Dalai Lama has been quoted in interiews saying he feared there would be more deaths unless Beijing changed its policies towards Tibet.

“It has become really very, very tense. Now today and yesterday, the Tibetan side is determined. The Chinese side also equally determined. So that means, the result: killing, more suffering,” he said.

China says Tibet has always been part of its territory, though Tibet enjoyed long periods of autonomy before the 20th Century and many Tibetans remain loyal to the Dalai Lama, who fled in 1959.

The unrest erupted a fortnight before China’s Olympic celebrations kick off with the start of the torch relay, which is scheduled to pass through Tibet.

The Dalai Lama emphasised that he still supported Beijing’s staging of the Olympic Games this summer, saying it was an opportunity for the Chinese to show their support for the principle of freedom.