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Indonesia

  • Food prices give Asian nations a wake-up call

    By Raphael Minder in Hong Kong, John Aglionby in Jakarta,,Amy Yee in New Delhi, and Daniel Ten Kate in Bangkok For years, farmers in the remote village of Pallantikang on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi relied on middlemen to sell their produce and found themselves largely isolated from the realities of market demands and price fluctuations. But when 50 of them recently started going directly to retailers, the outcome was a jump of 80 per cent in their earnings from their rice and cassava and 40 per cent from their corn.

  • Bird flu claims two lives

    Two more persons have died of bird flu in Indonesia, bringing the death toll in the country worst hit by the virus to 107, said the Health Ministry on Monday.

  • Moving on the low carbon road

    A meeting of United Nations member states in Bangkok on Monday to discuss climate change is the first in a series this year at which the action plan adopted at the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, Indonesia, in December 2007, will be translated into concrete steps on the road to a new global climate change agreement. We, the president of Indonesia and the prime ministers of Poland and Denmark, have decided to join forces in a coordination group at the highest political level. Our goal is to facilitate an ambitious climate change agreement in Copenhagen in 2009.

  • Mapping H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza risk in Southeast Asia

    The highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1 virus that emerged in southern China in the mid-1990s has in recent years evolved into the first HPAI panzootic.

  • Save the trees

    Scientists and policy-makers will meet in Bonn this June to discuss one of the most pressing concerns to come out of December's United Nations climate meeting

  • A Growing Cloud Over The Planet

    NEARLY half of the world's 1.3 billion smokers live in China, India and Indonesia, the three largest consumers of tobacco products. In China alone, more people smoke than live in the United States. Those countries and others in the developing world represent promising frontiers for the big tobacco companies as they move to win over existing smokers and, according to a new report by the World Health Organization, convince teenagers and women to light up. Smoking has declined slowly in the West. But over the last four decades it has grown steadily in the developing world, in fact, during that time, the respective shares of global cigarette consumption between rich and poor nations flipped:Tobacco products already are responsible for about 5.4 million deaths a year from lung cancer, heart disease and other illnesses, according to the W.H.O., an arm of the United Nations. If trends continue, that number will rise to more than eight million annually by 2030, the agency estimated, with 80 percent of those deaths in the developing world. The eventual toll from tobacco products could be a billion deaths in this centuff, the report said - 10 times the 100 million smoking-related deaths that occurred in the 20th century. The W.H.O. tracked the vigor of tobacco controls worldwide and found them especially weak in poorer nations. One reason is that many governments are in the tobacco business and rely on it for revenue. Case in point: the world's largest cigarette maker is the state-owned China National Tobacco Corporation. BILL MARSH China Has 30 percent of the wodd's smokers. India Has 11 percent of the world's smokers. Indonesia Has 5 percent of the world s smokers Below are percentages of adult smokers in China, India and indonesia - defined by the United Nations as those 15 years and older - and nonsmokers who offer a potentially fucrative market for tobacco products

  • Quake kills 3 in Indonesia

    A powerful earthquake struck western Indonesia today, killing three people and injuring 25 others, officials said. A tsunami warning was briefly triggered, but no waves were detected. The US geological survey said the quake had a preliminary magnitude of 7.6 and struck under the island of Simeulue off the western coast of Sumatra - the region worst hit in the 2004 tsunami. Rustam Pakaya, the head of the Indonesian health ministry's disaster center, said "many' buildings on Simeulue were damaged and three people were killed. He said at least 25 others were seriously injured. Meanwhile, rough sea and high tide scared people of Thengaipatinam village in the coastal district of Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu today. Official sources said the boats on the seashore were swept away by the high tides and walls of the houses near the shore also collapsed. An Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS) said there was no possibility of a tsunami hitting any Indian region following the massive undersea earthquake off Sumatra that caused damage in Indonesia.

  • Quake kills 3 in Indonesia

    A powerful earthquake struck western Indonesia today, killing three people and injuring 25 others, officials said. A tsunami warning was briefly triggered, but no waves were detected. The US geological survey said the quake had a preliminary magnitude of 7.6 and struck under the island of Simeulue off the western coast of Sumatra - the region worst hit in the 2004 tsunami. Rustam Pakaya, the head of the Indonesian health ministry's disaster center, said "many' buildings on Simeulue were damaged and three people were killed. He said at least 25 others were seriously injured. Meanwhile, rough sea and high tide scared people of Thengaipatinam village in the coastal district of Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu today. Official sources said the boats on the seashore were swept away by the high tides and walls of the houses near the shore also collapsed. An Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS) said there was no possibility of a tsunami hitting any Indian region following the massive undersea earthquake off Sumatra that caused damage in Indonesia.

  • Jakarta to seize gas field in Exxon dispute

    Indonesia yesterday said it would seize Asia's largest undeveloped gas block from ExxonMobil and ask Pertamina, the state-owned energy group, to prepare a feasibility study to take over the field. The latest move in a three-year dispute between Jakarta and the US energy group was made after talks with Exxon about the Natuna D-Alpha field became deadlocked over tax issues, the extension of a contract and how to split the gas, said Purnomo Yus-giantoro, Indonesia's energy minister.

  • Sumatran tigers 'being sold into extinction'

    The wildlife trade monitoring network TRAFFIC issued a wake-up call to the Indonesian authorities this week: stop the illegal trade in Sumatran tiger body parts or the species will be hunted to extinction.

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