Saudi still to decide on IMF funds offer.
by Souhail Karam on Wednesday, 12 November 2008

FINANCIAL CLOUT: Saudi Arabia is the largest shareholder in the International Monetary Fund.
Saudi Arabia will join calls for greater oversight of financial markets at a summit in Washington this weekend but has yet to decide whether it will offer the International Monetary Fund money to deal with the credit crisis.

A senior government official who declined to be named said Saudi Arabia would join European and developing nations demanding more scrutiny of the financial system.

But he declined to say if the kingdom would hand a cheque over to the IMF at the G20 meeting.

Riyadh will “call for better regulations and greater oversight on banks in the West and will demand the IMF plays a bigger role in monitoring industrial nations economies,” he said.

Saudi Arabia is the IMF’s largest Arab shareholder and the only Arab state in the Group of 20, which outgoing US President George W. Bush has called to a summit in Washington on Saturday.

Qatar has already pledged help while Kuwait has been more cagey, but the two have suffered more than Riyadh due to their sovereign funds heavy exposure to US and European stocks.

The Saudi hit has been less. The bourse lost some 40 percent of its value this year and question marks have been raised over some megaprojects because of falling oil prices, which are now under $60 a barrel from a record $147 a barrel in July.

But with most of its population suffering from the bourse crash and rising costs of living over the past year, the government will not want to appear as a cash cow for the West.

“The sentiment in the street, in the whole [Gulf Arab region], is that governments are not doing enough to save their own citizens,” said Mustafa Alani, a Dubai-based political analyst.

“The surplus it sits on is now superior to Russia’s,” he said. “It has to step forward to defend its interests and balance these against those of the global economy.”

But British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said after meeting Saudi rulers earlier this month that he expected Riyadh to chip in.

A senior banker familiar with Saudi thinking also saw Riyadh offering the IMF help: “There is an unwritten obligation that has to be maintained — some support from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Arab countries to help the global financial system.”

Like other Gulf Arab oil exporters, Saudi Arabia has an interest in repairing the state of the world’s economy, said Abdulaziz al-Uwaisheg, head of studies and economic integration at the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) General Secretariat.

“Demand for oil depends on the health of the global economy,” he wrote in al-Riyadh daily this week. “Investment of the GCC states - some $2 trillion - are affected by the economic conditions of the global economy.”

The IMF, which had $201 billion in loanable funds as of Aug. 28, has offered money to Iceland, Ukraine, Hungary and Belarus to help protect their economies against the crisis. Several other countries are in talks to secure funding.

But there are concerns IMF funds could run out and, flush with cash after several years of record oil revenues, Saudi Arabia could make a difference. (Reuters)

Paulson announces U-turn over US government bailout: Treasury Secretary says funds will be used to buy direct stakes in banks.

By Stephen Foley in New York
Thursday, 13 November 2008, for The Independent.

{All the points Paulson makes were foreseen by others, and we expressed earlier that Iceland appointed Women Chiefs of Banks, not because they were women, but because they learned the banking professions in schools not run by American MBAs. That does not mean that there are no wise American economists. We named five who said that Paulson does it all wrong - Professors, Joe Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Jeffrey Sachs, and billionaires George Soros and Warren Buffet. So why was Paulson allowed to fritt away further 700 billion, on top of all those “toxic assets” - this rather then going directly the emergency route to help the consumer - not the poison-oil merchants? Who will President-Elect Barack Obama put in Paulson’s place? Will it be again a financial industry insider, or finally an economist that has the unencumbered background that does not tie him to the financial bosses fraternity?}

The US government has staged a U-turn on its plans for bailing out the country’s financial system, saying that it no longer intends to buy the toxic mortgage assets at the heart of the credit crisis.

The announcement came less than six weeks after the Treasury won a gruelling battle with Congress for the authority to conduct the purchases. Hank Paulson, Treasury secretary, said that the remainder of the $700bn bail-out fund will instead be used to buy more direct stakes in banks and other financial firms.

As he spoke, the Federal Reserve and other banking regulators made an unprecedented joint statement urging banks to use money already received from the government to issue new loans, rather than hoarding the cash to pay dividends and staff bonuses.

The change of plan reflected the speed with which the credit crisis has overwhelmed government efforts to restore order to debt markets. They continue to be gummed up in a way that is starving businesses and consumers of loans and are throttling the US economy.

Mr Paulson’s new statement did little to reassure markets, which remain confused over the scope and ultimate effectiveness of government intervention. “I will never apologise for changing an approach or a strategy when the facts change,” he said. “During the two weeks that Congress considered the legislation, market conditions worsened considerably. It was clear to me by the time the bill was signed on 3 October that we needed to act quickly and forcefully, and that purchasing troubled assets – our initial focus – would take time to implement and would not be sufficient given the severity of the problem.”

The Treasury’s original plan was based on the assumption that removing toxic mortgage assets from banks’ balance sheets would finally establish how much they were worth, thereby restoring confidence and enabling companies to raise private money. But Mr Paulson said the Treasury would spend an initial $250bn buying direct stakes in banks before it turned to the mortgage purchases. Economists had argued that directly recapitalising the banks was more efficient, because institutions could leverage the new money to make many times that amount in new loans.

Although the Treasury Secretary said yesterday that there would be a pause to assess the success of the initial $250bn investments, he said that more capital infusions were likely. The scheme would also be extended to non-bank institutions which operate in the securitisation market, buying and selling portfolios of credit-card debt and student and car loans. This securitisation market has also ground to a halt, with knock on consequences for consumer spending, and for colleges and the car industry.

However, Mr Paulson stopped short of agreeing to Democrat demands that Tarp funds be used to inject money into near-bankrupt car makers. He said other programmes should be used for helping companies such as GM and Ford, as they struggle to cut jobs and retool factories to make more popular, fuel-efficient cars.

The first tranche of Tarp funds were handed to nine of the country’s biggest banks on 14 October, but the money came with few strings attached, and critics say the firms have hoarded. The regulators’ joint statement yesterday was an attempt to cajole banks into responding.

CUBA: No Choice but to Adapt to Storms.
By Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Nov 12 (IPS) - Three hurricanes have caused a total of 10 billion dollars in damages in Cuba in less than three months, according to the latest official estimates, while highlighting the vulnerability of Cuban housing to storms.

“As a result of climate change, hurricanes are going to become increasingly frequent and intense. We have no choice but to adapt,” President Raúl Castro said this week on a tour of Camaguey and Las Tunas, two east-central provinces whose coastal areas were pounded by Hurricane Paloma on Saturday.

Although the hurricane quickly weakened after making landfall, the combined action of the wind, torrential rains and sea surges left hundreds of families in coastal towns like Santa Cruz del Sur in Camaguey and Guayabal in neighbouring Las Tunas homeless.

In Guayabal, 110 homes were completely destroyed, while the rest of the 273 dwellings in the town suffered damages to varying degrees, with a one-metre surge driven 700 metres inland. The streets were littered with telephone poles.

In Santa Cruz del Sur, meanwhile, 9,889 homes were damaged, including 1,353 that were totally destroyed, when a four-metre storm surge flooded one and a half kilometers inland.

“My life was saved, but I lost everything,” one woman told the local TV station on Sunday.

Televised images showed the destruction caused by Paloma in that town on the southern coast of Cuba just a few hours after the 76th anniversary of the worst catastrophe in the history of Cuba: a Nov. 9, 1932 cyclone that claimed 3,000 lives in the same area.

“There are still people alive who survived that storm on Nov. 9, 1932. Entire families were killed. It was terrible,” Digna García, a retired high school teacher from Camaguey, 534 km from Havana, told IPS.

This time around, everyone in the area was evacuated in a timely fashion.

“They are costly measures, but it is difficult to think about what would have happened if we had not evacuated,” said Castro, who told local residents that their homes would be rebuilt as soon as possible, in the same area, but farther from the sea. He also promised that the belongings lost by families would be replaced.

He said Cuba must get ready to “coexist” with hurricanes, and added that a total of 47 municipalities were affected by Hurricanes Gustav and Ike, which walloped the country between Aug. 30 and Sept. 9, and Paloma.

“We are spending what we have and what we do not have (on purchases of food and construction materials),” he said.

The governing Communist Party newspaper Granma reported Wednesday that Gustav and Ike caused 2.07 and 7.27 billion dollars in losses, respectively.

Castro, meanwhile, said that with the damages caused by Paloma, “we are almost reaching 10 billion dollars” in losses.

Although Cuba’s internationally acclaimed disaster prevention system run by the Civil Defence System has kept the loss of human life to a minimum, the material damages have been severe, aggravating, among other things, the housing shortage, already acknowledged by the government as one of the country’s most pressing problems.

Granma reported that the housing that was destroyed or seriously damaged by Paloma was added to the “half a million units damaged by Gustav and Ike.” In the coastal regions of central Cuba, most houses are made of wood with tile roofs.

Experts say the combined effects of the increasingly aggressive climate, poor quality of construction materials, lack of regular maintenance of infrastructure and location of homes in low-lying areas close to the sea make coastal towns especially vulnerable to the frequent hurricanes and tropical storms.

In the wake of Ike and Gustav, the National Housing Institute reported that only reinforced concrete roofs withstood the winds, and that the worst damages were sustained by homes with thatched roofs or roofing materials of wood or fiber-cement tiles, all of which are common in rural areas.

“We are going to try to lay the foundation for a construction materials industry, because until every house in this country has a solid roof, we will be replacing roofs over and over again,” said the president.

Earlier this year, the total housing shortage in Cuba was estimated at 600,000 units. A programme launched in 2005 was originally aimed at building 100,000 new dwellings a year, but the figure had to be scaled back to a more realistic number, and was cut in half, said the authorities.

 The Original November 07, 2008 posting that we cancell now:

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UNFCCC Tries To Wedge In Unto The G-20 Washington DC (the last Bush Summit) With Results From a Virtual Press Briefing November 14, 2008 - The Problem That They Allow Only Questions From The Akasaka/Fawzi/Fowley UN Sanctioned Journalists - A Sure Path To Irrelevance. Yvo de Boer Does Not Include Factors Critical Of UN Caused Inaction, And Thus Will Not Be Able To Lead When Finally There Will Be An Active USA Presidency. We Think Now That A Post-Kyoto I Regime Will Be Established Through Negotiations Outside The UN.

INVITATION:  UN Climate Change Secretariat virtual press briefing on the investment and financial flows required to finance the global response to climate change

Date and time:     Friday, 14 November 2008, 11:00 a.m. (Central European Time)

One day before the high-level meeting in Washington, DC on designing a post-Bretton Woods financial architecture, the UN Climate Secretariat in Bonn will hold a virtual press briefing on what is required to finance the global response to climate change.

This year’s update of the UNFCCC’s Investment and Financial Flows project will look at what kind of financial architecture must be agreed so that all 192 Parties to the UNFCCC are able to strike a deal on strengthened international action on climate change in Copenhagen next year, to follow on the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol.

UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer will speak to the long-term challenge of climate change, which must be addressed with a set of financial tools that are embedded as a part of any new global architecture, and present an opportunity to re-engineer future investment and business along sustainable paths of growth. He will also speak to the economic opportunities that acting on climate change can present.

The press briefing will be webcast from the <unfccc.int> web site, and journalists will have the opportunity to pose questions via a phone-in facility and to send in questions via e-mail in advance.

For further information, please contact:
Mr. Eric Hall, Spokesperson, tel.: (+49-228) 815-1398, mobile: (+49-172) 259-0443

To accredit and/or address interview requests, please contact:
Ms. Carrie Assheuer, Public Information and Media Assistant
Tel.: (+49-228) 815-1005 E-mail:  press at unfccc.int

<http://unfccc.int/files/press/news_room/press_releases_and_advisories/application/pdf/invitation_to_briefing_14_nov_financial_flows.pdf>

Fungus found to produce rich diesel
Carbon News and Info

Energy & biofuels

Wednesday, 5 November 2008
Scientists have found a substance growing in fungi in a South American rainforest that closely resembles diesel fuel, offering a new avenue in the search for sustainable biofuels.

The fungus, Gliocladium roseum, was found growing in the ulmo tree in northern Patagonia and containing a rich cocktail of hydrocarbons, including the eight most plentiful ingredients of diesel.

Publishing their findings in the science journal Microbiology, the researchers, led by Gary Strobel from Montana State University, said the fungus had been shown to feed on cellulose, meaning it could be grown using plant waste.

“This is the only organism that has ever been shown to produce such an important combination of fuel substances,” Strobel said in the study.

Dubbing this mix ‘mycodiesel’, its discoverers said the fungus that produced it could possibly be grown en masse in factories and its hydrocarbon-rich gases collected for liquid fuel.

The fungus appears to offer a much more efficient method of producing transport fuels than currently used. Fuels generally require large amounts of heat, pressure and chemical additives in their production, but much of this work is already done by Gliocladium roseum in producing mycodiesel.

Scientists are searching for new generations of biofuel sources and processes to overcome the problems of first-generation green fuels; where the use of food crops and arable land are said to have increased food prices and deforestation rates.

Agence France-Presse, Guardian, Discover magazine 4/11/08

UPCOMING MEETINGS IN AFRICA: November 2008
African Ministerial Conference on the Financial Crisis: 12 November 2008: Tunis, Tunisia: African Ministers of Finance and Central Bank Governors are meeting  to discuss the global financial crisis and its potential impacts on African economies.  Organized by the African Development Bank (AfDB), the African Union Commission and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, the Conference aims to mobilize Africans with a view to seeking an answer to the global financial crisis.
For more information, see:  http://www.afdb.org/portal/page?_pageid=…

African Conference of Ministers in Charge of Environment on Climate Change for post-2012: Algiers, Algiers; 19-20 November 2008: The African Conference of Ministers in Charge of Environment on Climate Change for post 2012 is expected to discuss and adopt outcomes related to: the Bali Action Plan: international Cooperation basis or obligation of the share of commitments; meaning  and scope  of the concepts of ” Comparable efforts” and   “Shared Vision” for developing countries; sectoral approach: impacts and consequences on African countries’  development; and  meaning and scope of the concepts of Measurable, Verifiable and Reportable (M.R.V) for developed and developing countries.
For more information, see: http://www.unep.org/roa

Meeting of the Executive Committee and Technical Advisory Committee of the African Ministers’ Council on Water (AMCOW): 24-28 November 2008, Nairobi, Kenya. The AMCOW Executive Committee (AMCOW-EXCO) and the AMCOW Technical Advisory Committee will meet to consider approaches to carrying forward the Sharm El Sheikh Declaration and Commitments on Water and Sanitation (adopted by the African Union Summit, Egypt, June 2008).
For more information, see:  http://wwww.amcow.org/

Ecological Agriculture: Towards Food Security and Sustainable Rural Development in Africa: 26-28 November 2008, African Union Headquarters, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. This conference is organized by the African Union, UN Food and Agriculture Organization and Ethiopian Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development,  in collaboration with the Institute for Sustainable Development, Ethiopia and Third World Network. The conference aims to raise the awareness of policy makers so that they can enhance the capacity of Africa’s smallholder farmers.
For more information, contact: African Union Commission, Box 3243, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Tel: 251 (11) 552-5844; Fax 251-11-552-5835; E- mail:  ahono_olembo at yahoo.com

Richard Sherman
Programme Manager, Africa Regional Coverage Project
International Institute for Sustainable Development- Reporting Services
300 E 56th  St Apt 11A New York, NY 10022 USA
US Mobile: 646 379 3250
E-mail:  richards at iisd.org
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International Institute for Sustainable Development http://www.iisd.org

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Further from IISD:

Dear AFRICASD-L Subscribers;
The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), in cooperation with the Secretariat for the Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), is pleased to announce the launch of the LAND-L announcement list.

To subscribe to the LAND-L list, please visit http://www.iisd.ca/email/subscribe.htm

This new distribution list, similar to IISD’s other announcement lists CLIMATE-L, FORESTS-L, WATER-L, CHEMICALS-L, MEA-L, OCEANS-L, ENERGY-L and AFRICASD-L, has been launched in conjunction with the new Comprehensive Communication Strategy of the