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World top stories
Athletes, some wearing smogmasks, poured into BEIJING ahead of the Olympic games that begin on August 8th. A massive security operation was mounted in the Chinese capital, but there were several small demonstrations by homeowners who had their houses bulldozed to make way for the games and a protest (by four Westerners) over the status of Tibet. Earlier, 16 Chinese policemen were killed in an attack in the far western city of Kashgar. Officials blamed separatist Muslim militants.
The parties in PAKISTAN'S ruling coalition reached a provisional agreement to begin impeachment proceedings against the president, Pervez Musharraf, who stepped down as head of the army last November.
A Pakistani-born woman suspected of links to al-Qaeda was charged in a New York federal court with trying to kill American officials and soldiers in Afghanistan. AAFIA SIDDIQUI, a neuroscientist educated in America, was extradited from Pakistan, but there are conflicting accounts about when, where and by whom she was arrested.
MALAYSIA'S main opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim, was released on bail after pleading not guilty to charges of sodomy (which remains illegal in Malaysia). Mr Anwar was jailed ten years ago on similar charges before the guilty verdict was overturned.
Rumours of a landslide sparked a stampede down a narrow path from a mountaintop temple in northern INDIA, killing at least 145 people. Thousands had made the pilgrimage to the temple in the state of Himachal Pradesh for an annual Hindu festival.
Eleven climbers died, nine on their descent from the summit amid an ice avalanche, on K2, the world's second-highest mountain. It was the worst death toll on K2, in Pakistan's Karakoram range, since 1986.
VENEZUELA'S president, Hugo Chavez, issued 26 decree laws, the provisions of which could lead to a big increase in the role of state. They will allow the government to intervene in the food industry, add a new militia to the armed forces and create powerful regional officials to rival elected state governors. Meanwhile, Venezuela's supreme court upheld a government ban on dozens of candidates for November's elections for mayors and state governors, including Leopoldo Lopez, who had a strong chance of winning Caracas for the opposition.
Two miners were killed in clashes with police during a wave of protests ahead of BOLIVIA'S recall referendum, in which the country's socialist president, Evo Morales, hopes to renew his mandate and outwit his opponents in the country's eastern region. Mr Chavez and Argentina's president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, cancelled a meeting with Mr Morales in the gas-rich city of Tarija after protesters stormed its airport.
MEXICO'S government protested at the execution of one of its citizens in Texas. Jose Medellin, convicted for his part in the rape and murder of two teenage girls, was one of around 50 Mexicans on death row in the United States whom the International Court of Justice ruled should have their convictions reviewed as they were denied access to consular officials after their arrest.
America's congressmen began their summer recess amid a row over ENERGY POLICY. Some Republicans returned to an empty House chamber to demand that the Democratic leadership recall legislators so that a bill allowing the expansion of oil and gas drilling could pass. Barack Obama reversed his earlier position and said he supported expansion as part of a compromise.
The FBI presented evidence in its case against Bruce Ivins, a government scientist suspected of being behind the postal ANTHRAX ATTACKS that killed five people in the aftermath of September 11th 2001. Mr Ivins, a bioweapons researcher at the army's medical research institute, apparently committed suicide in late July.
A MILITARY COMMISSION concluded that Salim Hamdan was guilty of materially supporting al-Qaeda when he was a driver for Osama bin Laden, but found him not guilty of conspiring in terrorist attacks. The trial began only recently after four years of legal wrangling over the status of detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
A RWANDAN commission accused French officials, including the late president, Francois Mitterrand, and two former prime ministers, Alain Juppe and Dominique de Villepin, of actively supporting the Hutu GENOCIDAIRES who massacred 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994. The French foreign minister expressed outrage and rejected the accusations.
ZIMBABWE'S ruling Zanu-PF and opposition Movement for Democratic Change, currently holding talks in South Africa, issued a joint statement calling on their supporters to stop all forms of violence. It was suggested that a draft agreement was circulating at the talks that would put Morgan Tsvangirai, the MDC's leader, in charge of the country while allowing President Robert Mugabe to continue in a ceremonial role.
Mohammed Suleiman, a security adviser to SYRIA'S president, Bashar Assad, was assassinated at a beach resort. Mr Suleiman is thought to have been Syria's liaison with the Lebanese army and the Islamist militia group, Hizbullah.
America and the other five countries involved in talks with IRAN considered new sanctions after Iran gave a vague answer to questions about its nuclear programme. Iran said it was acting with "goodwill", and promptly announced a test of a new long-range anti-ship missile.
ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN, author of "The Gulag Archipelago", a dissident intellectual and fierce critic of the former Soviet Union who was imprisoned and later deported, died at 89. He had criticised the West during his two decades in exile and returned to Russia in 1994, where he became an admirer of Vladimir Putin.
ITALY began deploying 3,000 soldiers, some wearing battle fatigues and carrying assault rifles, into city streets across the country to guard embassies, train stations and other areas. The policy remains in effect for six months and was ordered by the centre-right government of Silvio Berlusconi, who won elections in April in part by vowing to crack down on crime. - See article
Global business news
Following their American counterparts, European banks took their turn in reporting quarterly earnings. Net profit at BNP PARIBAS, France's biggest bank, fell by 34% compared with a year earlier; at SOCIETE GENERALE, it tumbled by 63%. FORTIS, a Dutch-Belgian financial company, posted a 49% drop in profit. Britain's BARCLAYS said its pre-tax profit in the first half of the year decreased by 33%, to GBP2.8 billion ($5.5 billion), and at HSBC pre-tax profit in the first half was down by 28% at $10.3 billion. The banks reported their earnings a year after the beginning of the credit crunch.
AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL GROUP continued to count the cost from its bad investments in the subprime-mortgage market. The world's biggest insurer recorded a quarterly loss of $5.4 billion.
America's Justice Department uncovered the largest case yet of IDENTITY FRAUD, involving the theft of more than 40m debit- and credit-card numbers from retailers' computer systems. Eleven people, including several from eastern Europe, were charged.
The board of directors at GENERAL MOTORS reiterated its support for the company's chief executive, Rick Wagoner. The carmaker reported a $15.5 billion loss for the second quarter as it booked $9.1 billion in charges and write-downs amid a slump in the North American market. Ford also recently posted a huge net loss, of $8.7 billion.
CHRYSLER'S lending division concluded negotiations with banks over its annual refinancing, and was left $6 billion short. Chrysler Financial had originally sought to renew $30 billion in short-term debt, but could raise only $24 billion. The division, which provides loans to dealers and retail customers, said it was pleased with the deal it had obtained.
Detroit's big carmakers were not the only ones to suffer from adverse trading conditions. BMW issued a substantive profit warning and said its quarterly profit had dropped by 33% compared with a year ago. The German company made several adjustments to its sales strategy, including diverting some vehicles intended for sale in America to other countries.
YAHOO! held its annual meeting. The company was somewhat embarrassed when it had to issue a new tally of the vote given in support of Jerry Yang, the chief executive, and Roy Bostock, the chairman, after an institutional investor annoyed at Yahoo!'s rejection of Microsoft's takeover bid complained that a glitch in the voting system had not properly captured the "protest" vote. The revised count showed that investors representing 34% of votes cast withheld their support from Mr Yang, and 40% from Mr Bostock.
BERTELSMANN agreed to sell its 50% stake in SONY BMG to SONY, its partner in the venture. The alliance was formed four years ago, so creating the world's second-biggest recorded-music company; the German media group is rejigging its business and the agreement was due to expire next year. Sony BMG will be renamed Sony Music Entertainment. It retains some well-known labels, such as Arista and Columbia, and a stable of stars, including Alicia Keys and Bruce Springsteen.
INDIA'S Department of Telecommunications said it would hold electronic auctions to sell space on the airwaves (spectrum) for "third-generation" (3G) mobile-phone networks. The government hopes to raise almost $10 billion from the auctions, which will be open to new entrants, including foreign bidders.
America's UNEMPLOYMENT rate in July crept up to its highest level for four years. Meanwhile, America's ECONOMY in the second quarter grew by 1.9% at an annualised rate, helped in part by the government stimulus payments posted to households in May.
XSTRATA held good to its intention of diversifying its metals business by launching a $10 billion unsolicited takeover bid for LONMIN, a big producer of platinum.
The PRICE OF OIL closed below $120 a barrel on August 5th for the first time since early May.
Steep oil prices helped boost profits at oil companies, offsetting weak performances in production and refining. CHEVRON reported quarterly net income of $6 billion, as did France's TOTAL. EXXON MOBIL made a record corporate quarterly profit of $11.7 billion.
WHOLE FOODS MARKET announced a much-reduced quarterly profit and said it would open fewer new stores than it had intended over the next year.
The natural-food retailer's nickname is Whole Paycheck, but sales have slowed as customers forgo ingredients for their arugula and fennel salad so that they can afford to fill their cars.
Vietnam halts new domestic bank licences
Vietnam's central bank said Friday it would temporarily halt licensing new joint stock commercial banks - a move that appeared designed to rein in credit growth and rampant inflation.
The State Bank of Vietnam (SBV) said it was acting on the request of Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung, who had asked the SBV "to adjust in an appropriate manner the criteria on the establishment of domestic commercial banks." "While the new criteria have not been published, the establishment of new commercial joint stock banks is temporarily put on hold," the SBV said in a brief statement on its website.
Communist Vietnam has five state-owned banks - as well as 37 so-called joint stock commercial banks, which have been set up by state and private companies, individuals and other groups.
The rapid growth of Vietnam's banking sector has been blamed for fueling credit growth that has boosted liquidity and contributed to galloping inflation that topped 27 percent in July year-on-year. The communist government has this year also ordered state-owned enterprises to focus on their core businesses.
Vietnam illegal wildlife trade eats away at biodiversity: reports
Vietnam's appetite for illegal wildlife meat and demand for traditional medicine is devastating animal and plant species within and beyond its borders, experts warn in two new reports. Vietnam has been one of Southeast Asia's most biodiverse countries, but some species may be lost before they are known to science due to an illegal global trade believed to be trailing only drugs and gunrunning.
Two new reports spell out that, despite Vietnam's international commitments to combat the trade, the smuggling of tigers, monkeys, snakes, pangolins and other animals to and through Vietnam is booming. "Vietnam's illegal trade in wildlife continues unabated and affects neighbouring countries," wrote Nguyen Van Song of the Hanoi Agricultural University in the Journal of Environment and Development. "Wildlife in Vietnam has become very scarce." The study estimated that up to 4,000 tonnes of live animals or meat, skins, ground bones and other illegal products are trafficked into and out of Vietnam per year, generating more than 67 million dollars in revenues.
Species are mostly sourced from Vietnam's national parks and neighbouring Laos and Cambodia, to be consumed in Vietnam, China, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan, according to the study based on hundreds of interviews. The largest volume of illegal wildlife goods is smuggled across the Vietnam-China border, with an estimated 2,500 to 3,500 kilogrammes (5,500 to 7,700 pounds) flowing daily through the two major border gates, it said. There have been high-profile crackdowns. In a case last week, Vietnamese police seized more than two tonnes of live snakes and 770 kilogrammes of tortoises from Laos en route to China.
But the report estimated that the total value of confiscated wildlife accounts for only three percent of the illegal trade, and that authorities are at a disadvantage when a forest ranger polices an average of 1,400 hectares (3,500 acres) of forest at a monthly wage of about 50 dollars.
Smugglers connected to "influential people" -- shorthand for gangsters -- bribe or threaten officials and hide their contraband in trucks, ambulances, wedding and funeral cars and prison vans, the report said. The capital Hanoi is Vietnam's largest market for illegal wildlife meat, with revenues of over 12,000 dollars a day, the report said. "Hanoi is the cultural and political centre of Vietnam where wildlife protection and conservation policies are issued and implemented," said the report. "This suggests that the gap between policies and implementation of wildlife protection is still big."
The most popular species served in Hanoi were snakes, palm civets, monitor lizards, porcupines, leopards, pangolins, monkeys, forest pigs, hardshell turtles, soft-shell turtles, civets, boas and birds. The other market fuelling the trade is traditional Vietnamese and Chinese medicine, said a report by the wildlife monitoring network TRAFFIC.
Surveys found that "many high-profile animals of global conservation concern (such as tigers, bears or rhinos) can still be bought on the market, provided prior notice is given and that the price negotiated is high enough." Informants had told TRAFFIC that live tiger cubs, tiger skeletons, raw materials and processed medicinal products were brought from Cambodia, Laos and as far as Malaysia to supply the Vietnamese market.
Traders in Ninh Hiep commune near Hanoi had offered to supply investigators with "any type of medicinal animal if ordered sufficiently in advance" -- including a frozen tiger, rhino horn and wild bear gall bladder. The shop-owners who offered the illicit goods, the TRAFFIC report found, were "well organised, each claiming that they were shielded from investigations through protection by enforcement personnel."
Vietnam Golden Tuna field output seen at 20,000 bpd
Vietnam's Ca Ngu Vang (Golden Tuna) offshore oilfield, which came on stream on Friday, is expected to produce up to 20,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil, the field's operator said on Monday. SOCO International and its partners, Petrovietnam and PTTEP Hoan-Vu, said the first flow of crude oil and wet gas from the offshore field, on block 9-2, occurred last Friday. "The field is expected to be in production for the next 20 years," the operator Hoan Vu JOC said in a statement. The crude will not be sold separately but will be fed into the Bach Ho stream as to minimise development costs and as Vietnam's flagship field is pumping far below its capacity, traders said.
Bach Ho output has shrunk to around 140,000 bpd from a peak of about 240,000 bpd as the field, on stream since 1987, has matured. Golden Tuna will help sustain output at the field, whose Bach Ho output has been falling by an average 21,000 bpd per year between 2005 and 2014. Petrovietnam officials have said the new production from Ca Ngu Vang would help lift the country's daily crude production, which stood at 294,000 bpd in June.
Some traders wondered how the two crudes would be mixed and marketed. "Because of the blending, the price of Bach Ho may increase or decrease. One party may have to compensate the other party and that will be complicated," a trader with a refiner said. But others said they did not expect Bach Ho's characteristics to be much changed.
Thailand's PTT Exploration and Production PTTE.BK (PTTEP), a subsidiary of energy company PTT PP.BK said production averaged 8,000 bpd of crude oil and 20 million cubic feet per day (mmscfd) so far. Wet gas production from Ca Ngu Vang is forecast to be between 25 and 50 (mmscfd), operator Hoan Vu JOC said in its statement. The offshore Vietnam 9-2 project is the first block Soco and PTT have in Vietnam that has started production.
Sanyo to build huge Vietnam plant, hire 12,000
Japan's Sanyo Electric Co. said Friday its subsidiary in Vietnam will build a new plant and hire up to 12,000 workers as it steps up production of optical pickups for DVD recorders and other devices. Construction of the factory in Bac Giang Province will begin in September, with operations expected to start in April next year, a company statement said. "We expect the total investment in the new firm to be around 95 million US dollars," said a spokeswoman for Sanyo, which already produces optical pickups in Japan, China and Indonesia.
The new firm operating the plant will have capital of 10 million dollars, Sanyo said, adding that sales are expected to reach 300 million dollars for 2012. "With the growth of the developing markets such as China and with the widespread use of next generation DVDs, Sanyo will gear up to expand share in the ever-growing optical pickup business," it said. The new firm will be wholly controlled by Shenzhen Sanyo Huaqiang Optical Technology Co. of China, which is 60 percent owned by Sanyo, with the remaining 40 percent held by its Chinese partner.
Sanyo has slashed thousands of jobs and sold non-core operations as part of a massive overhaul in recent years, while increasing its focus on rechargeable batteries and environment-friendly technology. The restructuring appears to be paying off, with Sanyo reporting in May its first annual net profit in four years.
Japanese former consultant arrested over Vietnam aid project graft allegations
Prosecutors said Monday they arrested Masayoshi Taga, former president of Pacific Consultants International, as well as three other current and former officials of the Tokyo-based construction consultancy firm, over allegations that they bribed a Vietnamese official in connection with a Japanese government official development assistance project in the Southeast Asian country.
The Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office suspects that the four gave a total of $820,000 (around 90 million yen) to a senior Ho Chi Minh City government official in connection with a road building project in violation of the unfair competition prevention law that bans bribing a foreign official. The three others are Kunio Takasu, 65, a former managing director of PCI, Haruo Sakashita, a 62-year-old executive, and Tsuneo Sakano, 58, a former head of PCI's Hanoi office.
The arrests were the first since provisions banning the bribing of foreign officials were established in the law's 1998 revision. Takasu is believed to have played the role of passing the cash to the official in the public works bureau of the Ho Chi Minh City People's Committee - the municipal government, investigative sources said. Takasu was quoted as saying that he "received an order" from Taga. Investigators suspect that the entire company may have been involved in the bribery. PCI is based in the city of Tama, a suburb of Tokyo.
The senior Vietnamese official admitted to receiving the cash when he was questioned by Vietnamese law enforcement authorities on the request of their Japanese counterparts, the sources said. In 2001 and 2003, PCI won orders totalling 3.1 billion yen for consultancy services related to a road construction project executed by the Ho Chi Minh City government and financed by Japanese official aid, the sources said.
In August 2006, Takasu, who was then an executive in charge of marketing, allegedly gave $220,000 to the local government official in person on the instructions of Taga. In December 2003, the same Vietnamese official was allegedly given $600,000. Both sums were intended to reward the official for the order won by PCI, the sources said.
Takasu was then head of a company set up by PCI in Hong Kong with the aim of running operations for PCI to win orders for projects in Southeast Asia financed by loans from the Japanese government. Taga has been indicted for fraud in connection with a Japanese government-financed project in China aimed at disposing of chemical weapons abandoned by the former Imperial Japanese Army at the end of World War II.
Vietnam revokes press cards of youth newspaper journalists
The Ministry of Information and Communications has revoked seven journalists' press cards for their alleged violation of professional operations, including two for corruption.
A decision, signed on August 1 by Deputy Minister of Information and Communication Do Quy Doan, said Thanh Nien (Young people) newspaper's Deputy Editor-in-Chief Nguyen Quoc Phong and Editorial General Manager Huynh Kim Sanh were found to have seriously violated regulations on media operation and information.
Tuoi Tre (Youth) Ho Chi Minh City newspaper's Deputy Editor-in-Chief Bui Van Thanh and head of the Hanoi Representative Office Duong Duc Da Trang, as well as the Khoa hoc va Doi song (Science and Life) newspaper's journalist Tran Dinh Dung have also had their press cards revoked under the same charge.
Meanwhile, Nguoi Cao Tuoi [Elderly] newspaper's Deputy Editor-in-Chief Nguyen Thi Thanh Thuy and journalist Hoang Tuyet Oanh are facing police's investigation into alleged charges of corruption and lack of responsibility causing serious consequences.
Territorial conflicts ignite as demand for fuel grows
East Asia's thirst for oil and natural gas to fuel economic growth, and a new generation of deepwater oil drilling vessels, are intensifying moves to control a vast swath of the South China Sea that is disputed by six regional countries. Australia and the United States are watching the power play with concern. For both allies, the South China Sea is important for military and commercial reasons. A significant part of Australia's trade with Asia passes through the South China Sea. The US also has the interests of some of its leading energy firms to protect.
Two of the world's largest oil companies, Exxon Mobil Corp of the US and Britain's BP, appear ready to ignore a challenge by China, which recently confirmed that it had told Exxon to cancel planned oil exploration ventures off the coast of Vietnam with the state oil group, PetroVietnam. Evidently following a similar warning from China, BP last year halted plans to carry out exploration work off southern Vietnam, citing territorial tensions.
But on July 22 the same day that a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said China opposed any activities that "infringe on our sovereignty and territorial integrity in the South China Sea" a BP spokesman in London told reporters that the company's local partner, PetroVietnam, had resumed surveying activities in the block contested by China. It is about 370km offshore, between Vietnam and the Spratly Islands, a widely scattered chain of dozens of islets and rocky outcrops in the South China Sea.
China, Taiwan and Vietnam claim all of the Spratlys and surrounding waters. Malaysia, the Philippines and Brunei assert sovereignty over some of the islands closest to their shores. Although all the claimants, except Brunei, have military garrisons in the disputed zone and there have been several armed clashes and standoffs in the past couple of decades with the main encounters involving China and Vietnam the South China Sea dispute has been managed quite successfully through ASEAN, the Association of South East Asian Nations.
But keeping the underlying territorial conflicts on the back burner is becoming more difficult as regional demand for oil and gas rises, and new technology provides the means to find offshore fields in ever deeper waters and depths beneath the seabed.
Canada's Husky Energy says it will soon move a deep-sea drilling rig built recently in South Korea into the South China Sea next month. In September, the rig is expected to drill the first of four wells to delineate a giant gas field which Husky and its Chinese partner, CNOOC, the listed arm of state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corp, announced they had found in June 2006 in the northern sector of the South China Sea. Husky, controlled by Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing who has close ties to China, said the Liwan field could contain up to six trillion cubic feet of recoverable resources, adding about 7 per cent to China's total gas reserves. Significantly, it was China's first deepwater petroleum discovery. The exploration well was drilled 250km south of Hong Kong at a depth of 1500m. Among hydrocarbon explorers, deepwater drilling is usually considered to mean working in depths of 750m or more.
While most of the South China Sea covers the Sunda Shelf and has a depth of less than 200m, the northern part includes a basin that in some areas is more than 5000m deep. Much of this zone is now within drilling reach of the most modern offshore rigs. Indeed, Xiao Zongwei, CNOOC's head of investor relations, said in February that the company had a good chance of discovering further big oil and gas reserves in the deepwater zone of the South China Sea where geological conditions were similar to the Liwan field. He added that CNOOC planned to explore by itself 140,000 of the 210,000sqkm of China's offshore area, where the waters were more than 300m deep. It would seek partners to explore the remaining 70,000sqkm.
Will these partners, presumably foreign energy giants or service companies with the skills and equipment to find and extract offshore oil and gas at great depths, have to choose between working in China or in South-East Asian states that contest Beijing's sweeping claim to control much of the South China Sea? Unlike the position in the 1980s or 1990s, China may now have the military muscle to enforce its territorial claims against rivals in the region, should it decide to do so. But at what cost to its international reputation, to stability in the maritime heart of South-East Asia and to its relations with ASEAN?
China seems to be confronting Exxon Mobil, the world's largest publicly traded oil company by market capitalisation, and BP with the choice of pursuing their offshore plans in Vietnam or jeopardising their already substantial investments in China, potentially the world's biggest energy market. However, China would argue that it is Vietnam that should exercise restraint.
China may back off at least for the time being after restating its South China Sea claim. While China is building its own deepwater drilling rigs, the first is not due to be finished until 2011. China has publicly declared its preference for joint development of energy resources in contested offshore zones and in June reached such a deal with Japan in the East China Sea. But reaching a workable arrangement in an area like the South China Sea, where there are multiple claimants, would be much more difficult. Meanwhile, pressure within oil- short China to tap oil and gas in the offshore areas it claims is intensifying as its onshore production fails to keep pace with burgeoning demand.
Vietnam's Agribank loans up 9 pct so far in 2008
State-run Agribank, Vietnam's largest lender by assets, said on Wednesday its outstanding loans have risen 9.2 percent so far this year to around 252 trillion dong ($15.3 billion) and it would lend more to rice businesses. The Hanoi-based unlisted bank has extended 70 percent of its loans to agricultural production, rural development, and farmers, it said in a statement.
The bank, with total assets of nearly $21 billion at the end of May, has said loans last year rose 24 percent from 2006 to 230.8 trillion dong.
Agribank's lending so far this year has stayed tuned with a policy by the State Bank of Vietnam, or the central bank, which aims to curb the country's credit growth this year at 30 percent to help subdue inflation, after a surge of 54 percent last year. On Tuesday the central bank said Vietnam's loans in July edged up 0.7 percent from June, slowing from monthly growth of 1.22 percent in June, while outstanding loans in the first seven months of this year rose 18.36 percent from the end of 2007.
Agribank statement said it has added 10 trillion dong to its lending portfolio for the agricultural sector, aimed mainly funding companies to buy rice, aquatic products from farmers and sell them fertiliser. It did not say how much of the extra funds would go to rice buying, a measure to help stop Mekong Delta paddy prices from falling as the summer-autumn crop harvesting there has peaked but export firms slowed their purchase partly due to fund shortages.
Paddy prices in the Delta have fallen by more than 9 percent from early July to 4,600-4,700 dong (27.9-28.5 U.S. cents) per kg this week as farmers have harvested more than 60 percent of the crop.
Agribank said it could further cut lending rates to better serve the agricultural sector. It did not elaborate. Since July 17 Agribank has reduced interest rates twice for both dong and dollar loans. It now charges dong loans at 19.8 percent per annum, from 21 percent previously, while rates on dollar loans have been cut to 7.2 percent from 10 percent. ($1=16,491 dong)
Vietnamese women wed foreigners to help family
Nearly 70 young Vietnamese women swept past in groups of five, twirling and posing like fashion models, all competing for the hand of a Taiwanese man who had paid a matchmaking service about $6,000 for the privilege of marrying one of them. Sporting jeans and a black T-shirt, 20-year-old Le Thi Ngoc Quyen paraded in front of the stranger, hoping he would select her. "I felt very nervous," she recalled recently as she described the scene. "But he chose me, and I agreed to marry him right away." Like many women from the Mekong Delta island of Tan Loc, Quyen had concluded that finding a foreign husband was her best route out of poverty. Six years later, she has a beautiful daughter and no regrets.
From the delta in Vietnam's south to small rural towns in the north, a growing number of young Vietnamese women are marrying foreigners, mostly from Taiwan and South Korea. They seek material comfort and, most important, a way to save their parents from destitution in old age, which many Vietnamese consider their greatest duty. Quyen has not gotten rich — her husband earns a modest living as a construction worker — but the couple have paid off her father's debts.
Young women have become Tan Loc's most lucrative export. Roughly 1,500 village women from the island of 33,000 people have married foreigners in the past decade, leading some to call it Taiwan Island. Women in Tan Loc and other delta towns began marrying foreigners in the 1990s, when Vietnam opened up economically and many Taiwanese and South Korean firms set up operations in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam's southern business hub. Poverty and the close proximity of foreign businessmen seem to be major reasons for the trend. The biggest complaints come from women's groups, who consider it demeaning, and from young village men for whom the pool of potential brides is shrinking.
With money from foreign sons-in-law, many residents in Tan Loc have replaced their thatch-roof shacks with brick homes. They have also opened small restaurants and shops, creating jobs in a place where people have traditionally earned pennies a day picking rice and other crops in the blistering sun. The luckier families received enough to build ponds for fish farming. Western Union has opened a branch to handle the money sent by newlyweds. "At least 20 percent of the families on the island have been lifted out of poverty," said Phan An, a university professor who has done extensive research in Tan Loc. "There has been a significant economic impact."
Not all the marriages work out, of course. Dam Psi Kin Sa went to Taiwan nine years ago, at the age of 20, and married a Taiwanese car wash owner more than twice her age who had been divorced three times. She met him through a matchmaking service. Five years later, her husband demanded a divorce and locked her out of the house. Even though she had learned his language, Mandarin Chinese, the couple had trouble communicating. "We were angry at each other in a quiet way," she said in Taipei, where she has remained to be close to her daughter.
Over the past year, one Vietnamese bride was beaten to death by her South Korean husband, another jumped out a 14th-story window and a third hanged herself on Valentine's Day, leaving behind a diary full of misery. "A marriage that is not based on love often brings problems," said Hoang Thi Thanh Ha of the Vietnam Women's Union. "How can you live happily ever after when you met your husband three weeks before the wedding?"
Nevertheless, most young women in Tan Loc seem eager to marry a foreigner. Le Thanh Lang recently went to the town hall to get papers confirming she is single and eligible to marry. "Any country will do, I'll take anyone who will accept me," she said, waving the papers. "I need to send money to my parents."
Besides the marriage broker's fee, the groom gives about $300 to his bride's family, Lang said. After that, if all goes well, her husband may send up to several thousand dollars a year to her family — depending on what he can afford. Many Tan Loc families with married daughters abroad have big homes with color TVs, new furniture and karaoke machines. Their neighbors live in huts. Tran Thi Sach's concrete home, with four large rooms and shiny green tile floors, is a mansion by island standards. "Since my daughters got married, I've retired," said Sach, 59, who used to toil in the rice fields with her husband. "We lived in a shack," she said. "We had to work no matter how hot it was, no matter how much it rained, from 5 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon. Sometimes we could only afford rice porridge."
When her daughter Tho first said she planned to go to a marriage broker, Sach objected. What if her in-laws abused her? Where would she turn for help? Tho married six years ago, and her younger sister Loi two years later. "Their husbands are gentle, handsome and hardworking," Sach said. "They are really fine men."
Next door, Nguyen Thi Chin lives in a two-room shack with the roof so leaky that when it rains she must move from spot to spot to avoid getting wet. Each of her seven children married a Vietnamese, all of them poor. At 70, she is still working, pulling mussels from the muck in the Mekong River. "I could never have a house like that," Chin said, glancing next door. "It's my destiny to be poor. If I had another daughter, I'd ask her to marry a foreigner."
More than 100,000 Vietnamese women have married Taiwanese men over the last 10 years and the numbers are rising, said Gow Wei Chiou of the Taiwan representative office in Hanoi. In the same period, roughly 28,000 Korean men married Vietnamese, according to the Vietnam Women's Union. As more Taiwanese and Korean women move to cities to work, many men in those countries, especially those from rural areas, face increasing difficulty finding wives, said Chiou. "Taiwanese women want to get married when they are much older, and they are also very opinionated," said Lin Wen-jui, 39, who met his Vietnamese wife through a Taiwanese friend in Ho Chi Minh City. She has since taken a Taiwanese name, learned Mandarin and opened a restaurant.
The overseas marriage trend has been boosted by online matchmaking services such as the Singapore-based Mr. Cupid, which offers a "comprehensive Vietnamese marriage package" and five-day matchmaking tours. "No one ever came on our trip without finding their dream bride," the site boasts.
In 2002, not long after Quyen went through her paces for her Taiwanese future husband, the Vietnam government outlawed commercial matchmaking services. Vietnamese media were reporting the phenomenon in vivid detail, and authorities said they were concerned that the business could be a cover for trafficking women into prostitution. "They take hundreds of women at a time to a hotel and line them up for the men," said Nguyen Thi Ngoc Hanh, vice chairwoman of the Ho Chi Minh City Women's Union, a government agency that supports women. "It's very disrespectful."
But although driven underground, the practice continues, abetted by village matchmakers and secluded meetings with suitors. Half the brides in such marriages are under 21, half the grooms between 40 and 60. "Sometimes the men ask them to pose naked," Nguyen said "It's inhumane." Quyen still has vivid memories of going to the matchmaker's house in Ho Chi Minh City, a 120-mile bus ride and a world away from Tan Loc. "I was scared," she said. Quyen made the final five. Speaking through an interpreter, the man asked a few simple questions: How many brothers and sisters do you have? How far did you go in school? They had dinner and Quyen agreed to marry him on the spot. "My life in Taiwan is good," she said during a visit to Tan Loc. "My husband and his family treat me well."
Life is not so good, however, for the young men in Tan Loc who watch the exodus of marriage-aged women with despair. "If all the girls leave," said Nguyen Hoang Mong, 19. "there won't be anyone left for us. Marriage shouldn't be about money. It should be about love."
Vietnam: A moving story
Ho Chi Minh City in southern Vietnam is a metropolis on the move. The commercial hub of Asia's newest tiger economy teems with motorcycles and scooters; there are 3.15 million of them officially registered, with about a thousand new scooters being signed up every day. They flow along the streets en masse, 24/7, like criss-crossing shoals of fish. From what I can tell, the average occupancy of these machines is about 2.2. Three-up is common; four-up, not unusual. On a couple of occasions, I think I saw five-up including toddlers.
In a tapering 1,500km-long country like Vietnam, a sense of nationhood has been something of a struggle to come by. However, the motorcycle could be riding to the country's rescue. This is a nation that lives in the saddle. It eats, sleeps, holds neighbourly conversations (at 70kph, with just a few inches separating interlocutors as they buzz down the street), reads newspapers, carries washing machines, walks the dog, transports pigs, chickens and ducks, and works on laptops, all on motorbikes. If you see a pile of furniture tottering down the street, that'll be someone moving house on their motorbike. Crossing the road in Ho Chi Minh City requires faith. Step out and let the stream eddy miraculously around you, and be sure not to panic halfway across and change direction. That could be fatal.
Until crash helmets became mandatory earlier this year, motorcycles were notching up horrific casualties: one thousand motorcyclists a month, apparently. Now, crash helmets are bona fide fashion items. Even when not saddled up, young Vietnamese flaunt them about town, emblazoned as they are with colourful designs. Face masks, too. You find surgical white masks being worn, as well as coloured scarves wrapped around the face, Lone Ranger-style. The women complement the look with elbow-length silk gloves to prevent their arms getting sunburnt. The effect of the gloves, masks and helmets is to transform Vietnamese women into ninja Catherine Deneuves caught in a dash from operating theatre to movie premiere.
The Caravelle Hotel is the place to shake off jet lag. Opened in 1959, with bullet-proof glass, it was the base for The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC and CBS during the Vietnam War. Journalists and armchair strategists covered the closing exchanges from the top floor bar.
The hotel overlooks the opera house, the Hotel Continental, where Graham Greene wrote The Quiet American, and the twin spires of Notre-Dame cathedral, legacies of French colonialism whose imprint is still clearly visible on this haphazard city. Every side-street shows the accent of pre-war France in its shutters, balconies and Art Deco flourishes. Elsewhere, a less romantic, more hard-edged version of Ho Chi Minh City is taking over, as newly minted skyscrapers reach upwards like a graph of soaring capitalist growth.
What should one see? The Reunification Palace, where the president of South Vietnam lived, is a 1966 building eerily reminiscent of the Royal Festival Hall. Its occupation by communist forces on 30 April 1975 marked the end of the Vietnam War. The tanks that smashed through the gates that morning are still in the grounds, as tourist attractions. The palace shows, if nothing else, what frightful taste the presidents of South Vietnam had: featureless concrete vistas offset with the most hideous soft furnishings. Goodness knows how it ever past the feng shui man.
Everywhere in Ho Chi Minh City you see war relics - a gun, a tank, a military vehicle, an aeroplane - memorialised into tourist attractions or civic amenities. The War Remnants Museum is a refreshingly harrowing exhibition of the horrors of war, rendered in photographs, installations and military hardware. It makes the grisly Imperial War Museum in London look like Disneyland. For a people that saw off the French and the Americans within the space of
21 years, the Vietnamese are a remarkably friendly lot, and welcome visitors of all nations, including Americans and the French. If this was England, you'd never hear the end of it: the Vietnamese, in contrast, have a wonderful calm acceptance of the past and seem focused solely on the future. This is a quality that the West secretly admires. Ho Chi Minh is worth a day or two, but it is good to get out of the city.
Two hundred miles to the north-east, you find Ninh Van Bay, the jewel of the 3,260km Vietnamese coastline. Arcs of honey-coloured sand, a warm sea studded with coral reefs, a fan-shaped cluster of islands to keep off tsunamis, a mountain rampart to guard against typhoons, and the sunniest climate in Vietnam... these are what make Ninh Van one of the most beautiful bays in the world. Nha Trang, the main town, spreads out behind the beachfront promenade, where every morning thousands of Vietnamese perform t'ai chi among the topiary. Hailing a trishaw, I plunged into the massing scooters of the rush-hour traffic to find the beating heart of the town, Nha Trang market. This must rank as among the culinary wonders of the world. There are more varieties of fruit, vegetables, herbs, spices and pulses here than you can shake a chopstick at, along with several things in the meat and fish section that would give a society for the ethical treatment of livestock a collective heart attack. I spent a morning dodging bicycle panniers laden with pomelos, ducking beneath crates of mangos on vendors' heads, sidestepping porters balancing swing-basket yokes filled with rice, and puddle-jumping between stalls selling fish and seafood kept alive by having water splashed on them. The narrow alleys were filled with delivery men, fresh ingredients, the noise of motorcycles and horns, and customers dawdling or catching up on gossip. You could hear the haggling for miles.
Vietnamese cuisine is a close cousin of Chinese, thanks to China's occupation of Vietnam for the thousand years up to the 10th century. But the Vietnamese tend to use more fresh herbs than the Chinese, and they love soups and steamed fish. However, once you have covered the basic rice/soup/fish combinations, Vietnamese cuisine goes way off-piste. Very few species of animal in Vietnam escape the meat cleaver, u o wok and burner. Just about every animal in the country has a dish devoted to it, and sometimes a restaurant, too. This flair for gastronomic improvisation is a legacy of war. Faced with destroyed fields and nothing to plough with, Vietnamese cooks were reduced to experimenting with bat, cat, rat, dog, seahorse and the celebrated 18-inch mouse-eating Vietnamese centipede.
"In the Mekong delta [southern Vietnam], you eat a lot of snake, gecko and turtle," said Trung, my guide. "Cobra is a favourite. The blood is served with rice wine. The heart you knock back in one, while still beating - bang-bang! - and the meat is served both grilled and as a soup." Snake is the chicken of south-east Asia. If you've travelled in this part of the world, you've probably eaten snake several times without knowing it. Since December last year, airport officials at Hanoi have uncovered at least two consignments of smuggled snakes. One was labelled "seafood". It contained one ton of live rat-snakes. My rickshaw driver parked outside what looked like a motorbike shop. A palisade of new scooters gleamed outside. Upon closer inspection, the premises resolved into a cafi. This was Bac Hai, Nha Trang's premier pho opportunity. Pho, a noodle soup, is Vietnam's national dish; it may have originated from French pot-au-feu - whose last syllable it shares. The interior of Bac Hai is as basic as a beer crate. You sit on red plastic stools and eat off metal trestle tables, with what look like betting slips for napkins. The noodles are served in a soup with chunks of beef or pork or sna... sorry, chicken. With lemon and chopped Vietnamese basil, a bowl of pho makes one of the most rewarding ways of spending a dollar.
Every fifth shop in Nha Trang appears to be a coffee shop. In fact, the whole country is on a caffeine high, as you might expect from the world's second biggest exporter of coffee (after Brazil). Coffee is a Vietnamese ritual. Hot water drips through a tin filter placed on top of a glass. Once the water has seeped through, ice and condensed milk are added and the concoction is stirred and served. It tastes like coffee ice cream and is the perfect antidote to Vietnam's perennially sweltering climate.
Nha Trang is primarily a market town and beach resort. It is also the birthplace and home of a local cultural icon: Long Thanh, the photographer whose black-and-white images capture the soul of the Vietnamese people, set against moody landscapes. His Hoang Van Thu Street gallery is well worth a visit. Thanh wanders around town and the hinterland taking extraordinary shots of archetypal Vietnamese scenes of bicycles, baskets, rickshaws, women in their conical hats, crones and moments of every day life, images that have merited Thanh more than 57 international shows - and there isn't a single war-scene among them.