China Offers Funds To Boost Asean

China Offers Funds To Boost Asean

(NSI News Source Info) April 13, 2009: China has unveiled plans to establish a $10bn (£6.8bn) investment fund for south-east Asian countries. It has also offered credit of $15bn to the Association of South-East Asian Nations, or Asean. Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao had planned to announce the fund at the cancelled Asean summit this weekend. China's premier Wen Jiabao (2nd L) meets unidentified officials, as he arrives at the U-Tapao military airport, some 170 km south-east of Bangkok on April 10, 2009 for the 14th Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit and Related Summits held in nearby Pattaya. Hundreds of protesters massed in the Thai beach resort of Pattaya where Asian leaders are holding a major summit April 10 to 12, opening a new front in rallies against the country's prime minister. Asean was set up in 1967 in part to counter influence from communist China but has since become a vehicle for close ties. The collapse of the Asean summit, scheduled in Pattaya, Thailand, this weekend, delayed the conclusion of a key investment agreement between China and the economic bloc. That deal is intended to create the world's largest free trade area, covering nearly two-billion people. China funds China's Foreign Minister, Yang Jiechi, announced the new funding plans in Beijing to a gathering of envoys from the 10 members of Asean - Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Brunei, Burma, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. The $10bn investment fund was designed for cooperation on infrastructure construction, energy and resources, information and communications, China's state news agency Xinhua quoted Mr Yang as saying. Over the next three to five years, China planned to offer $15bn in credit, including loans with preferential terms of $1.7bn in aid for cooperation projects. China also planned to offer 270 million yuan ($39.7m) in special aid to Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar to meet urgent needs, inject $5m into the China-Asean Cooperation Fund, and donate $900,000 to the cooperation fund of Asean Plus-3, the side grouping of Asean plus China, Japan and the South Korea. Several South- East Asian economies rely heavily on exports to China. China said it would provide 300,000 tons of rice for the emergency East Asia rice reserve, and more government scholarships. "The overall thought for China-Asean cooperation is that the two sides should rise to difficulties in face of the grim global financial crisis, and make efforts to convert unprecedented challenge into opportunity for closer pragmatic cooperation and common development," Mr Yang said. Region watching China has played a larger role in recent years in the export-dependent economies of South East Asia, as a market for goods and raw materials and as a source of investment. It has been active in building roads and other transport links through Laos, Burma and Cambodia, linking southern China to South East Asian resources and ports. During the financial crisis of 1997-98, China also offered support to South East Asian economies. Analysts have noted that while its economic role is increasing, Asean remains strategically linked to the stronger military power of the US. Tensions persist between China and the many south-east Asian claimants to groups of islands in the South China Sea.

Burma's Opium Production Back On Rise

Burma's Opium Production Back On Rise

(NSI News Source Info) February 4, 2009: News for farmers making a living off the isolated fields and forests of Burma has been dismal over the past few months. Prices for rubber, a key crop, are down an estimated 75% in the southeastern Mon State. Rice has lost a quarter of its value, while maize has been cut by half. Teak, betel nut and palm oil have also been ravaged by the global drop in commodity prices, throwing millions of Burmese who barely cling to the poverty line further into distress.

Burma's Opium Production Back on Rise. Poppies grow in a field in Burma's Shan State.

But one crop in Burma hasn't been affected: poppies, the colorful blooms that have been processed into opium for thousands of years, and, in more recent history, refined into heroin. A Feb. 2 report by the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime found that the price of opium in Burma, also known as Myanmar, increased by 15% last year.

As a result, Burmese land dedicated to poppy cultivation actually expanded in 2008, despite promises by the country's ruling junta to combat its reputation as one of the world's most notorious narco-states. The uptick in last year's Burmese poppy cultivation signals just how easy it is for impoverished farmers to turn to a delicate red flower when things get tough. Most of Burma's poppies flourish in the northeastern Shan State, which abuts the infamous Golden Triangle, where the borders of Burma, Thailand and Laos meet.

(The flowers are also grown in Kachin and Karen states.) And given the omnipresence of opium and heroin smuggling in Burma — the nation is the world?s second-largest poppy producer, after Afghanistan — it's hard to imagine how the trade can flourish without at least the tacit support of the military regime that has ruled there since 1962. Back in 1999, Burma's top brass unveiled a 15-year plan to completely eliminate opium cultivation. For a few years, production, as measured in part by U.N. helicopter forays over Burma, did indeed decline. But the U.N. now reports that poppy land has increased by 33% since the lowest levels recorded in 2006.

Last year was the second consecutive year of growth, and the trend shows how unlikely it is that the junta will make good on its goal of completely wiping out poppies by 2014. (The alarming statistics didn't stopped Myanmar T.V., however, from claiming earlier this month that the anti-drug effort is going forward with "added momentum" and "remarkable progress.") Opium and heroin aren't the only drugs that provide an economic lifeline to Burma. For years, an influx of Burmese-made methamphetamine has flooded into neighboring Thailand and China, feeding Asia's chemically induced highs. There are some signs that the Burmese government is trying to stanch the drug flow.

In January, a high-profile raid in the Burmese commercial capital, Rangoon, netted a large amount of heroin loaded onto a ship bound for Singapore, according to the Irrawaddy, a media organization run primarily by Burmese in exile in Thailand. But the raid appears to have been galvanized by foreign anti-drug agents, and, as the Irrawaddy points out, it's not clear whether the Burmese junta would have raided the ship without international pressure.

In the mean time, Southeast Asia's largest narco-state continues to thrive. And some Burmese farmers are able to fill their bellies for now, even as they are feeding the world's drug habit.