Entries
Saturday, 12 May 2007
CULTURAL POST FIVE:
Let Them Eat Cheese
By Rebecca Buckman
Far Eastern Economic Review
December 11, 2003
China is not a nation of cheese lovers. At least one company wants to change that, and Western supermarkets and fast-food chains are helping
For all the products streaming out of China these days, from furniture to TVs to United States quota-hit bras, Samir Kumar is cashing in on one that's not: cheese. Kumar, who heads the Hong Kong office of a small Australian food-distribution company, Frontier Foods, has nurtured a thriving imported-cheese business in a country better known as an export powerhouse -- and where few people can tell Cheddar from Camembert.
When privately-held Frontier Foods first moved into China several years ago, critics said he was crazy. Chinese can't digest cheese and don't like the taste, they said. Moreover, China's food-distribution system wasn't set up for a product with a short shelf life that had to be stored chilled in warehouses and delivered by refrigerated trucks.
"Pretty much everyone told us, don't do it," recalls Kumar, who is sometimes called "The Cheeseman" by associates because of his relentless devotion to the dairy cause. A U.S.-educated native of India who moved to Hong Kong in 1994, Kumar's office fridge is crammed with cheese--slices, blocks, even canned varieties.
Now the gamble is paying off. The rapid spread of Western-style supermarkets and fast-food chains such as McDonald's and Pizza Hut are giving increasingly wealthy Chinese consumers an unprecedented taste for cheese, and Frontier is generating 70% of its sales from China, up from nothing seven years ago. Kumar says Frontier's revenue roughly doubled last year, mostly due to the success of its China business strategy, which targets the country's burgeoning middle class. In the process, Frontier has become one of China's biggest cheese suppliers, even as giants like Kraft Foods International, part of the Altria Group, have pulled out of dairy joint ventures here.
To be sure, China's cheese market is still tiny, with annual sales of around $30 million, according to market researcher Access Asia, in Shanghai. But there's plenty of room to grow; sales have jumped more than 130% since 1996, Access Asia says. "Obviously, Chinese are eating cheese," says Kumar.
Kumar's big cheese-selling break came in 1996, when he cold-called a manager at the brand-new Wal-Mart Inc. branch in the southern city of Shenzhen and persuaded him to stock Frontier's cheeses. Frontier now also supplies other big chains operating in China, including France's Carrefour, Japan's Jusco and Chinese grocery Lianhua. Frontier has also set up a network of local distributors that store cheese in refrigerated conditions, instead of freezing it or allowing it to go mushy at room temperature.
Earlier this year, Frontier also won the contract to provide cheese slices for new breakfast sandwiches at Yum Brands Inc.'s KFC outlets in China. The Louisville, Kentucky-based chicken chain has more than 900 Chinese outlets. Yum also runs more than 120 Pizza Hut restaurants in China, though they buy their cheese from New Zealand's Fonterra Cooperative Group.
Frontier is "doing quite well," says Stephen Wu, who works in purchasing for Capital Lide Foods (Beijing) Co., which places Frontier's cheeses in Chinese supermarkets. Frontier's biggest imported brand is Bega cheese from Australia; it also ships processed Bega slices to a big Chinese dairy, called Shanghai Bright, which then sells the product under its own name.
Indeed, at Beijing's cavernous Carrefour supermarket recently, the refrigerator was filled with bright orange-and-yellow packs of Shanghai Bright cheese slices. They were on offer for 13.90 renminbi ($1.68). Young mother Zhang Ling tossed a pack into her shopping cart, explaining that it's often easier to give her 15-month old son a slice of cheese than a drink of powdered milk.
Dairy Drawbacks
Moments earlier, Li Huan, a 25-year old secretary, looked at a package of Bega shredded cheese and wondered if she could use it to make pizza for her boyfriend. Her friend, Qu Liqiu, piped up, "Is Pizza Hut using this brand?"
Frontier's deal with Shanghai Bright shows how foreign companies can find a lucrative niche in the Chinese cheese market, despite competition from big local dairies, Kumar says. Other companies also trying new approaches include Fonterra's New Zealand Milk Products unit, which sells Chinese dairies raw ingredients to help them make cheese, and France's Bongrain, which has set up a plant in Tianjin, outside Beijing, to process cheese.
But Kumar claims it's easier to just import it, particularly with tariffs on cheese coming down as part of China's membership in the World Trade Organization. It's a point he says U.S. politicians should remember next time they criticize China for its export prowess, or accuse Beijing of unfair trade practices. "China cannot produce everything," Kumar says. "China has no competitive advantage in producing cheese."
Analysts and other dairy-industry executives concur that China has little local expertise in cheese-making. There is "almost zero" real cheese production in China, though an industry could develop if demand for cheese really catches on, says Sandy Chen, an analyst with Rabobank International in Shanghai. To make cheese, it takes a lot of milk. China doesn't have that: According to a recent report from Access Asia, "China's cattle-breeding industry is synonymous with small-business scale and low productivity." Chinese cows, on average, produce less than half the output of U.S. cows. An Australian cattle-industry group said last week that it could ship 50,000 head of dairy cattle to China next year to help the country meet its dairy needs.
Kraft discovered some of those drawbacks. Two years ago, Kraft got out of a joint venture with a Chinese dairy that was supplying cheese to hundreds of McDonald's restaurants in northern China, as well as making yogurt and other products. Strategically, it was not a fit for us," says Arjun Gupta, a Beijing-based Kraft vice-president and area director for Greater China. Now, all the cheese Kraft sells in Chinese retail stores, including Philadelphia cream cheese, is imported.
According to the National Dairy Council, Chinese consume only about 150 grams of cheese per person a year, compared with 14 kilograms in the U.S. and 24 kilograms in France. Gupta is not convinced that a bigger China cheese boom is in the offing, noting that many big-city supermarkets there still don't stock the product. What's more, most of the cheese that is selling is relatively bland, processed cheese -- "what you'd call lowest-common-denominator cheese," says Paul French, the publishing director for market-researcher Access Asia. In other words, Gouda and Roquefort are not exactly flying off shelves -- yet.
MY OPINION:
This ‘cheesy’ article is on both economical and cultural globalisation. However, I shall only cover the cultural aspect. All around the world, food cultures are exchanged and in this case it is China getting a taste of American food culture, specifically, CHEESE.
I went to China once, last year, to Tianjin and Beijing, and was rather surprised when I came across quite a few Carrefours around those areas. Moreover, they had the usual McDonalds, KFCs and even the Isetan departmental store.
China may not be much of a cheese lover, but hey, McDonalds and KFC are stationed everywhere, and burgers actually contain cheese. They may not add cheese in their usual food but they actually consume them while eating fast food. These days, China’s supermarkets sell everything you need. Oreos, Chips more, Dutch Lady Milk etc. Food products of the various countries can be found all around the world, which makes it more convenient. Foreigners can find their country’s food product elsewhere, so as to be able to adapt to a different environment, also, with many food products from all around the world, people can taste and understand different food cultures.
Take Singapore for example. We have all sorts of food from various countries, from Vietnamese to Iranian cuisine, and of course, our local cuisines. In secondary school, we learn Home Economics of which we learn how to cook and sew, learning domestic work as a whole and we learn the various traditions of food cultures. From these actions, we can actually infer that Singapore is trying to let the generations be more open to other cultures. Now, there is another category of food, fusion food, a mix of cultures, to produce new kinds of food.
Globalisation, in other words, fuses all the cultures into one, to generalise culture, let the entire world follow just one culture. And when globalisation takes place, everyone will live the same, wear the same, do the same, and eat the same.
RIMIKO signing off
- because there's really no need to, anymore...
11:48:00 pm
ECONOMIC POST 5.This is a quote I got from
a site which I think is very meaningful. "
Globalization is like "wondrous new machine,"that reaps as it destroys. "huge and mobile, "like the machines of modern agriculture, but vastly more complicated and powerful...running over open terrain and ignoring familiar boundaries. " As it goes, the machine throws off enormous mows of wealth and bounty while it leaves behind great furrows of wreckage".But, no one is at the wheel. "the machine has no wheel or internal governor to control the speed and direction. It is sustained by its own forward motion, guided mainly by its own appetites.[The machine is] modern capitalism driven by the imperatives of global industrial revolution, [creating] "the drama of a free-running economic system that is reordering the world" (Greider p 11)"
Cool eh? But that was just a sharing session of cool things you find on the web and I don't think it needs further explanation
right? (:
Today I shall talk about
immigrants. To date, there are 1,843,000 immigrants in Singapore which compose a whopping 42.6% of the Singapore population. Regardless of whether they are foreign scholars or workers, they have or will sure help our economy in one way or another.
Even though many do not think much of construction workers, they are indeed one of the major contributors to the Singapore we have today. If they were not there to help us with construction, who will do the job? Singaporeans are one pampered bunch who will not accept the nature of this job because of the long hours, the low pay and the poor living conditions.
Maids are also major contributors to our society. In most families, both parents work, living their children and parents under the care of the maid. If she was not around to help working adults, I assume the population pyramid will taper even more towards the bottom.
Foreign scholars will be a great help if they choose to stay in Singapore after their education. This is because they will add on to the limited pool of talents that Singapore has. In this way, more people will be able to drive Singapore on to greater heights. With the emergence of many new projects like the (Integrated Resorts) IRs, even more people are needed to take the lead and plan for these major projects as these will cause a great impact on the economy of Singapore if they are successful.
Hence we should accept these foreigners instead of writing into the Straits Times forum to complain about them "stealing" jobs. In the world today, only the best stay. So I think there is not an issue about unfairness in the working market. If you have better qualities than foreigners, I am sure companies will be more than willing to take you in. But it is just a fact that most of us are complacent and hence unknowingly lag behind these foreigners.
So, it is time to stop this arrogance and embrace these foreigners because they are the ones who will improve our economy in this globalising world.
DEBORAH SIM signing off
- because there's really no need to, anymore...
8:20:00 pm
Health and Environmental Post: Genetically modified food (GM food)Introduction:
Genetic Modification of food is said to be a relatively new technological development which promises to increase food production even more. It is the process whereby one or a few specific genes from another organism (plant, animal or human) which will be beneficial to the growth and development of the plant are added directly to the chromosome of a plant in order to create a plant with certain desired traits, such as being resistant to pests or herbicides.
However, in traditional selective breeding, farmers choose the seeds from the best crops and grow them the following year. Eventually, only a strain of crops which has a desirable trait is grown. Thus traditional breeding make use of the method that two plants are cross-bred to produce a crop with the best-mix of traits/characteristics. However, traditional selective breeding or cross-breeding require a long time before the best crop is produced. In genetic modification, the desired gene from one plant/organism can be selected and directly inserted into another plant to produce a plant with the desired traits. It is a more accurate and effective process than traditional methods
This emergence of use of GM food is closely related to globalization as GM has been a popular topic within every country internationally. Many countries, actually most of the countries in the world, have participated in debate of whether GM food should be encouraged in each country, and every countries have stated their stand about the issue on GM food. This can be seen from the map shown below: (You can visit the website for a clearer view of the picture and different stands of the countries.)
http://www.ifg.org/pdf/gmoworld.pdfIn 2003, countries which produce the most GM food were the United States (63%), Argentina (21%), Canada (6%), Brazil (4%), and China (4%), and South Africa (1%). Some of the most well-known GM food is: frost-resistant tomato, golden rice, corn and banana.
Frost-resistant tomato is created by adding ‘anti-freeze’ genes from a cold-water fish, called founder, to the tomato. After isolating these “anti-freeze” genes, the scientists inject them into a tomato cell. The anti-genes which still manage to work in the tomato cell enable the tomato to withstand frost.
Golden rice, on the other hand, has been genetically modified to produce beta-carotene, which is the pigment which forms vitamin A when absorbed by the body. In this case, the beta-carotene is taken from the genes of daffodils and this modification could prevent the occurrence of permanent blindness in 250 million people around the world who are at risk due to their diets which is low in vitamin A.
Even corn has also been genetically modified and there is this particular type of corn developed that is able to produce its own pesticide. This thus enabled the crops of corn to be resistant to pests and weeds. Some of the bananas in South Africa are also genetically modified with cholera vaccine. Now, whoever eats it is vaccinated from cholera or has a lower risk of contracting the disease. One such example is to reduce the spread of cholera.
However, despite the several advantages of different GM-food, various controversies surrounding GM foods and crops also exist; commonly focus on human and environmental safety, labeling and consumer choice, intellectual property rights, ethics, food security, poverty reduction, and environmental conservation.
http://www.non-gm-farmers.com/news_print.asp?ID=486Health aspect: Good and Bad
GOOD:
It is said that genetic engineering could lead to larger and more nutritious crops of staple foods, such as rice, cassava, maize, wheat, yams, sorghum, and sweet potatoes. This will address the lack of food availability in LDCs which leads to food insecurity.
Crucial vitamins and minerals could also be added to wheat and other crops. For example, the golden rice as mentioned beforehand. Being a genetically modified type of rice which contains beta-carotene, golden rice is said to be able to help combat Vitamin A deficiency in LEDCs. This is due to the fact that Beta-carotene can be converted by the human body into Vitamin A. Thus more nutritious food can be made available in LDCs and food security can be improved.
BAD:
It has been pointed out that Genetic modification creates more allergy attacks. Some food such as wheat, legumes, milk, eggs, shellfish, and some varieties of nuts contain allergens, and they cause human being to have allergic reactions that could include hives and breathing difficulties.
During genetic modifications, genes from food which are known to contain allergens may be moved between species to improve the quality of other food. This may cause the creation of new allergenic proteins and also allow more food to contain allergens which may be difficult to identity. Thus, this causes people to be unknown of the food which may cause them to suffer from allergic reaction, and hence cause allergies to occur more frequently within human.
Controversies have also included that Genetic modifications cause genetic pollution. This is due to the spread of seeds and pollen by the nature factors such as insects, birds, wind, and water. The occurrence of genetic pollution was proven not long ago where eleven out of twenty “GE-free” products are tested to contain tiny amounts of GE ingredients, while five were loaded with them. Some other factors that may result in the genetic pollution may be due to the process where seeds are being stored and shipped. Mix of seeds between different species may occur, thus causing “GE-free” products to contain GE ingredients.
One of the effects of the genetic pollution is that farmers will not be able to market their crops as organic due to the GE corns sprouted in the nearby fields. This invasion thus destroy the opportunity for farmers to market their crops as organic as US prohibits genetic engineering for organic food standards.
One such examples of the effect of the genetic pollution are shown in 2002. Parts of southern Africa were so afraid of the genetic pollution that they did not dare to accept the GE corns donated by the US to them when famine struck. This fear for GE products is due to the leaders of Africa, wanting to prevent the possibility of losing the ability to sell produce to Europe, where shoppers are highly skeptical of GE produce and where many countries require it to be labeled. Temporary suffering and even death of some of their people from famine, the leaders thought, was better than losing money in trade with Europe and risking permanent poverty.
Environmental Aspect: Good and Bad
GOOD:
Breeding crops which are pest and disease resistant can reduce the use of agrochemicals e.g. pesticides, insecticide, so less pollution or damage will be done to the environment. There will also be no problems of pesticides being washed into the rivers, hence causing illnesses and diseases to people who drink it.
With GM crops that have shorter growing seasons and produce higher-yields per hectare, each piece of land is more productive. We can probably produce enough food to feed the world in the present arable areas without having to carry out more deforestation (to make space for agriculture by clearing forests).
Crops can be genetically modified to grow on land which used to be unsuitable for agriculture – for example regions which are very dry or have saline soil. Again, this means that we may no longer have to carry out deforestation to clear more land for agriculture.
BAD:
There is a fear that the genes from GM crops may escape into the wild and wind-up in non-GM organisms, resulting in what that is called the genetic pollution. This could mean, for example, that the herbicide resistance in the crop could be transferred to "weeds" and create "superweeds" which would need to be controlled by even more powerful and therefore more toxic herbicides. This may have severe consequences on the biodiversity of the area.
There is a concern that the creation of pest-resistant plants could result in the evolution of ‘superbugs’ – pests which are more resistant to toxins, which could pose a major threat to environment and could chomp off (destroy) the GE foods with ease. All of this could increase, rather than decrease, farmers' dependence on pesticides, resulting in more pollution to our environment.
Conclusion and link to globalization
In conclusion, there are both benefits and controversies in GM-food. Although GM food has several benefits like reduces maturation time, increases nutrients, yields, and stress tolerance, improved resistance to disease, pests, and herbicides, it also has potential human health impact such as allergens, unintended transfer of transgenes through cross-pollination, unknown effects on other organisms (e.g., soil microbes), and loss of flora and fauna biodiversity. To be exact, specific effect of GM food on human beings and ecosystems has not been discovered yet. Hence, there are various concerns on the safety of GM food as some people suspect that there could be possible unforeseen toxic effects caused by the GM food. Thus, this explains the following statistics and graphics below:
http://www.sacbee.com/static/live/news/projects/biotech/imgs/grfx_c5_2.gif
According to the result of a survey released in June 2000 on consumer reaction to GM foods by "Angus Reid Group," Japanese consumers hold the most negative views of GM foods among the eight countries polled. It concludes that 82 percent of Japanese consumers hold negative views. The percentage of consumers holding negative views in the other countries polled are also high and even in the United States and Canada, over half of the responding consumers are negative.
Another recent survey, which was conducted by researchers of a university in Japan, also shows a trend of declining positive views of GM crops/foods in general. According to this survey, supporters for pest-resistant GM crops has dropped from 52% in 1997 to 33% in 2000, and supporters for GM foods has dropped from 45% in 1997 to 31% in 2000.
The above mentioned trend is confirmed by the other survey by the Tokyo metropolitan government. Reluctance to eat GM foods obviously increased during the last two years. Approximately ninety percent of consumers are unwilling to eat GM foods.
http://www.s.affrc.go.jp/docs/genome/APEC/apec.htmIn issue of GM food, it has shown one of the effects of globalization, as several countries have often come together to solve this problem where technology and advancement in our present world is the main factor of this issue. Science and technology might improve our lives, such as those benefits that GM-food brings, but there are always the “side-effects”, and in GM-food, the negative impacts on health and environment have been shown.
However, in my opinion, I feel that the health of mankind should always be placed as the priority. We should not risk our human lives just because the GM food has gains in the health and environmental aspects. We should further investigate in this issue, make sure that there is no more doubts, and confirm both its advantages and disadvantages to mankind before we decide whether or not to take GM food as one of our alternatives as food. Hence, if I were to have a choice, I would support the people who does not agree with the establishment of GM food and hope the scientists would carry out further experiments and hence come up with an effective and healthy food for man.
Websites Visited:
http://www.choice.com.au/viewArticle.aspx?id=100255&catId=100288&tid=100008&p=1&title=GM%3a+Genetically+modified+foodhttp://www.foodfuture.org.uk/farming_intro.aspxhttp://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/gmfood/overview.phphttp://www.globalautonomy.ca/global1/glossary_entry.jsp?id=CO.0006http://www.eubios.info/EJ123/ej123g.htmhttp://www.sevananda.com/issues-with-organic-the-effects-of-genetically-modified-food.htmlhttp://www.carleton.ca/ces/PolicyBriefings/2006-11-06-Briefing-PatentsPlantsPower.pdfRONG QI Signing Off
- because there's really no need to, anymore...
3:46:00 pm
ECONOMIC POST 4.The tiny
red dot. She was once a fishing village and now a bustling city which will make much more progress in the near future. She will be the proud owner of the Singapore Flyer, she will be housing the next Grand Prix F1 race, she will have the very first double helix bridge and she will build two casinos at one shot. She has also been described as the country with the most intellectuals per unit area, she has also won top spots for people who walk the fastest.
She isn't just that tiny red dot anymore, she has been opened her doors to the world and it is globalisation that drove her this direction.
Should we rejoice or whine?Whine for the influx of other cultures, whine for the coming of foreign talent (who
apparently steal jobs), whine for the faster pace of life that we are continuously trying to keep up with? I think globalisation has guided us the right way. We are not self-sufficient, we do not have the resources and enough talent by ourselves. We have to rely on others.
Coming out with new gimmicks to attract foreign dollars has become rife in today's society. With Singapore unrolling her plans to construct two casinos, Taiwan has also started discussions on having four.
The globalised world today is a continuous rat race, only the fittest survives.
By attracting tourists to the enclaved red dot, we are tapping into the economy of other countries. The world is not becoming smaller physically, but physocologically. You know that you will have to take a twenty hour flight to New York, but you can buy the shares of any listed company without having to go there personally.
Talking about stock exchanges, they can be said to be the most economically globalised area. By buying a few shares from a company overseas, you are a shareholder of the company, or in other words, you own part of the company. Buying and selling shares is actually a virtual action, yet this is one of the greatest cause of bankruptcy. In addition,
IF the US stock exhange Dow Jones crashes, the world will be left in dire straits. Yes, this is the power of globalisation, economic globalisation.
Back to the topic of the little
seemingly insignificant red dot. She has globalised, but in a good way
, hopefully. Free trade agreements with other countries all over the world has led her onto the track of promotion to being a developed country. She is prosperous, and I believe she will continue to, thanks to economic globalisation.
DEBORAH SIM signing off
- because there's really no need to, anymore...
3:40:00 pm
Sunday, 6 May 2007
Environmental Post: PollutionPollution is everywhere, as long as industrialization and advancement exist in any part of the world. This is due to the explosive growth of the global economy which threatens the natural systems that sustain life on Earth. Despite some significant successes in reducing industrial pollution and increasing efficiency, globalization is devastating natural habitats, speeding global warming, and increasing air and water pollution. Hence, the issues of pollution as an indication of the effect of globalization will be discussed in this post.
As we all know, pollution is a topic which covers a very large area, and the main groups are: air pollution, water pollution and land pollution, and some of the most concerned effects of pollutions by people are depicted in the cartoons below:
Water Pollution:
http://www.starfish.govt.nz/science/facts/fact-pacific-traditions.htmAir and Water pollution:
http://www.grinningplanet.com/2006/12-05/water-cartoon.htmWater, Air and Land Pollution:
Air and Land pollution:
http://www.hagencartoons.com/cartoons_506_510.htmlIn an article, “Asian air pollution can reach U.S., study says” by Lisa Stiffler, Seattle Post-intelligencer Reporter, it was commented that
Along with toys, clothes and electronics, air pollution is being exported from Asia to the West Coast in amounts that could be harmful to people and the environment, according to research presented yesterday by scientists in Seattle.
In Asia, carbon monoxide, tiny bits of toxic materials, dust and ozone are drawn high into the atmosphere and whisked around the globe. The plumes of pollution are frequently detected by ground monitors in the Northwest and by airplanes. About once a year, enough is carried over to potentially be problematic.
"Does it really matter for air quality over here?" asked Daniel Jaffe, an environmental science professor at the University of Washington's Bothell campus. "It does, sometimes."
Jaffe presented his research on airborne pollution at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, which runs until Monday.
The concern is that when local air quality is bad, an influx of pollution from overseas can nudge the amount over levels set to protect human health.
Interest in this area of research has increased in the last few years as equipment has improved, allowing for more sensitive detection, scientists said.
"Global-scale pollution is something we now know happens in many, many places," Jaffe said. "The scientific community is starting to understand ... that pollutants can get mixed around."
Large-scale events that spread pollution, such as last summer's forest fires in Siberia and the April 2001 windstorms in Mongolia's Gobi Desert, have piqued the interest of researchers and health officials.
The fires raised the levels of ozone in Western Washington beyond federal limits. Ozone can cause breathing difficulty, coughing and throat irritation, plus trigger asthma attacks.
The windstorm increased nationwide the amount of fine particles in the air. The dust particles can bind with minute bits of toxic substances, researchers said.
"They get lodged in your lungs and stay there, and the pollutants they carry along with them get lodged in your lungs," said David Parrish, a research chemist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colo., who also presented work.
"It's not fundamentally that different from cigarette smoke," Jaffe said.
A couple of years ago, the Environmental Protection Agency enlisted Jaffe to investigate the contribution of airborne mercury in fish contamination.
But air pollution remains largely a local problem, regional air-quality officials said.
Occasionally, pollution from overseas is cause for concern, said Alice Collingwood, a spokeswoman for the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency. But, she added, "It's not a major continuing source of pollution in our region.
"It's really still just about us."
From this article, we can see that air pollution is able to be transferred from one country to another even though the neighboring countries are not involved in the process of producing the pollution. We can tell from the article that industrial pollution from the haze and “black smoke” produced from factories has resulted in environmental degradation in several countries, and this might be due to the lack of concern within countries about environmental problems produced as development occurs.
This is believed to be a similar case in the Indonesian’s slash and burn workers who burn down trees in forests to create more land for industrialization and advancement to take place. As we know, the haze and pollutants from Indonesia does not stay stationary in the country, but will be brought to the neighboring countries such as Singapore and Malaysia. Hence the transboundary air pollution will affect the environment, ecosystem (animals and plants) and people in the countries.
The main concern of the pollution is that it not only affects the environment, but also the health of people and animals in the countries affected. It has been a fact that cases of breathing problems and lung-related illnesses will rise as air pollution gets more severe in countries.
This is similar to water pollution. Water is an essential need in human as it ensures the health of people and is often used in our daily activities. However, due to problems of oil leakages from oil tanks, sewages, industrial wastewater, and many more, water pollution has occurred in several countries, and is spread worldwide due to the movement of water from one place to another.
This resulted in the lack of access in usable water in poor countries and result in deaths and illnesses, especially in children. Some of the frequent diseases related to poor water supply and sanitation are: Diarrhoea, Intestinal worms, Trachoma, Schistosomiasis, and Cholera. They are world-wide health problems occurred due to the consumption of contaminated water, or water which are not suitable for human use. In the case of diarrhea, it was stated that about four billion cases of it per year has caused about 2.2 million death, and for Trachoma, which is a disease caused by the lack of water combined with poor hygiene practices, it has caused about six million people to be blind from it.
Fortunately, people has finally realized that their human activities have been harming the environment, and in another way, themselves (the pollutants result in diseases and illnesses). Sustainable development, which is the integration of environmental protection work and human and technological advancement, has then been established world-wide so as to ensure that human society is still living in harmony with Earth, gaining a firmer footing which is both better for mankind and less harmful to our environment. Several rules and regulations have been established in different countries, and a large range of precautions and devises have been produced to ensure that the resulted pollution in the society is at its minimum.
From
http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/statistics/inlwater/kf/iwkf11.htm:
Water pollution incidents: 1993-2005
England and Wales
*Category 1 and category 2 pollution incidents have the most serious impact on river water quality. The other two categories are for those incidents that are relatively minor or have no impact.
One of the examples which show that sustainable development has succeeded and that pollution to society has decreased is shown from the above. As we can see from the graph, the number of category 1 and 2 incidents from agriculture decreased from 115 in 2004 to 112 in 2005, while the number of incidents from the sewage and water industry rose from 137 to 157. In 1998 the number of prosecutions for water pollution fell to a third of the 1993 prosecutions. Since 1998 prosecutions have risen to 231 in 2005, only a fifth lower than 1993. Generally, there is a huge decrease in water pollution in England and Wales since 1993 till 2005, as inferred from the graph.
However, despite some success in reducing the amount of pollution in some countries, pollution is still increasing in most of the countries. Hence, in today’s modern world, pollution, which is still a problem to all countries globally, is one of the negative impacts of globalization in the world. But it is believed that global environmental standards and performance-based environmental protection have the potential to create a win-win situation by making corporations more efficient, reducing pollution, and protecting the public interest.
RONG QI Signing Off...
- because there's really no need to, anymore...
6:48:00 pm
