- News – The Ecologist

From India and Indonesia to Colombia and Costa Rica, the number of bamboo plantations worldwide is rising as quickly as the fast-growing crop itself. Some of the world’s most impoverished countries are realising the potential of this versatile tree-like tropical grass, which in so many respects seems worthy of its nickname: ‘green gold.’

Because it can reach full, harvestable maturity within five years, it is being touted as an alternative to dwindling timber supplies. Its success could mean hectares of hardwood forest being saved from the chainsaw.
Strong and cheap, bamboo construction projects are already repairing shattered communities in countries like earthquake-prone Haiti – but its cohesive properties work on an organic level too. Growing out of a tangle of carbon-sequestering underground stems, it can help reforest landscapes denuded by development or natural disasters, binding topsoil to prevent erosion.

The UN’s TECA platform (technologies and practices for small agricultural producers) has given the income-generating potential of single-family-run ‘homestead’ plantations the thumbs-up.

India, China and Burma, with almost 20 million hectares of bamboo forests and plantations between them are already zeroing in on its cash potential, and last month the crop made its debut on the world’s financial stage, with the launch of asset-backed ‘bamboo bonds’. EcoPlanet Bamboo, the company behind them, expects the global market to be worth $20 billion by 2015.

‘Our objective to provide an alternative to timber currently sourced from natural forests is unilaterally positive,’ says Camille Rebelo, vice-president and co-founder of EcoPlanet Bamboo, which operates two of Nicaragua’s biggest plantations, totalling just under 3,000 acres. She insists the company is ‘only converting degraded pastureland into healthy, fully functioning ecosystems, and developing all plantations under the strictest certification standards’ (it intends to obtain Forest Stewardship Council and Climate, Community and Biodiversity Alliance accreditation, but hasn’t yet). Profits from the bamboo bonds will be used to develop another 4,450 acres of plantation in Panama and the Dominican Republic within the next 12 months. Investors are promised returns of up to 503 per cent over 15 years.

Bamboo too has power potential: US company
Clenergen operates a bamboo-chip biomass power plant in the Philippines
and has ambitions to become a major fuel supplier in southeast Asia. ‘Bioenergy
– not only biofuels, but biomass-based energy in general – [is]
boosting demand for all kinds of biomass,’ says Christoph Thies. ‘This
will be an issue for bamboo and many other tree and plant species.

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- Bloomberg

Billionaire Sam Zell said he is entering the real estate markets in Colombia and India in the next two weeks as he continues to favor international investments over U.S. property deals.

Zell, chairman of Chicago-based Equity International, will invest in real estate in Colombia and will eventually move on to residential projects, he said in an interview today on Bloomberg Television. In India, he plans to open hotels.

“Colombia is the next star of Latin America,” Zell said on “In the Loop” with Betty Liu. “In India, we’re doing a hotel/motel program like Residence Inn at Marriott and we hope to build a chain across the country.”

Technorati Tags: india, colombia, real estate

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trying to bring more transactions under the purview of the taxman
iNewsOne

In India cash still continues to be the predominant payment mode. This can be gauged from the fact that value of bank notes and coins in circulation as a percentage of narrow money is very high at 60.07 percent for the year 2009-10 as compared to 18.51 percent in South Africa, 18.83 percent in China and 39.14 percent in Mexico.

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livemint.com

Commerce secretary Rahul Khullar will lead a business delegation of engineering companies to Colombia and Panama on a five-day visit from Monday, “with an eye to explore the possibility of bilateral trade agreements” with the Latin American nations and to encourage India’s trade and investment in the region, a commerce ministry official said, requesting anonymity.

“Colombia and Panama are crucial for us as we are aiming to increase our trade ties with the Andean Community of Latin American countries,” the official said. The Andean Community is a customs union comprising the South American countries of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.

India already has a preferential trade agreement (PTA) with the Mercosur bloc comprising Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay that came into effect in 2009 and covers around 900 products. A similar trade pact with Chile has been effective since 2007.

Exports to Latin American countries rose 72.5% in 2010-11 to $10.7 billion (Rs.49,327 crore), according to latest commerce ministry data. However, India shares a trade deficit of $3.2 billion with the continent, with imports growing at 34% to $14 billion during the same year. 

Technorati Tags: india, latin america, trade

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 Seeking Alpha

Goldman Sachs, in a recent report, estimates the aggregate gap between the BRICs and the G6 in electricity, telecoms, and rails as approximately $10 trillion. This is more than twice the BRIC’s current GDP, and the closing of this gap could last 25 years. The four countries are similar only in their need for increased infrastructure spending. Using World Bank data, India appears to be the least developed, lagging the other three in mobile phones, per capita electricity consumption, and access to sanitation facilities.

In addition to the immense need for increased spending, companies within the sector can rely on a portion of their revenues even during harsh economic times. Since a portion of government spending must be budgeted to maintain sanitation and transportation network, the infrastructure space is somewhat insulated from economic volatility. High barriers to entry and often nationalistic favoritism to domestic companies help to argue the case for investment.

Brazil’s build out to host the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016 could still drive significant gains in the sector within the country. Thus far, bottlenecks and poor planning have plagued the country’s hopes to be ready. Of the estimated $20.9 billion needed in infrastructure spending, only about $3.3 billion has been invested as of April 2011. To help with the drive, the government has begun a process of privatization for three of the 66 state-owned airports. The three airports: Sao Paulo, Campinas, and Brasilia account for approximately 43% of the estimated airport infrastructure spending needed.

Technorati Tags: india, brazil, infrastructure

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In Latin America, the soft power Indian gurus exert over the literati and intelligentsia is considerable.
With most Indian business houses controlled by families, this affords a natural affinity for Latam business groups with similar ownership structures. Given survey results, Indian business has better long-term prospects in mostly democratic Latin America than in authoritarian African countries.
Sadanand Dhume in WSJ.com

Earlier this month, the industrialist Anand Mahindra donated $10 million
to support the teaching of the humanities Harvard, the
largest gift to the program in the university’s 374-year history. Barely
two weeks later, the $70 billion salt-to-steel Tata Group plonked down
$50 million for Harvard Business School, the biggest international
donation since the school’s founding. In recent years, Indian corporate largesse has also benefited, among others, Yale, Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania. But these gifts also illustrate a broader phenomenon: India’s growing soft power.

The most obvious signs are hard to miss. In recent years, Bollywood-themed dances have invaded wedding celebrations from Sydney to San Francisco. In Britain, curry houses employ more than 100,000 people and generate about £3.5 billion ($5.5 billion) of business each year. And if Yoga Journal is to be believed, an estimated 15.8 million Americans can tell a corpse pose from a downward-facing dog. Indian-born CEOs head such iconic global companies as PepsiCo, Citigroup and MasterCard. In the arts, reports of Indian writers scooping up literary prizes and directors helming big ticket-movies in Hollywood have almost become commonplace.

Scholars and journalists alike tend to make much of China’s vaunted “charm offensive.” It turns out, however, that when it comes to winning hearts and minds—at least democratic hearts and minds—China’s top down state-led model is not much of a match for India’s decentralized private effort.

In terms of goodwill, India bests China in both Western and Eastern democracies. For instance, according to a poll released last month by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Americans place India in the same ballpark as long-term allies South Korea and Israel. China elicits only about as much warmth as Venezuela and Mexico.

A recent BBC World Service poll of 28 countries says more or less the same thing. On average, more than half of Americans, Britons and Canadians feel “mainly positive” about India; only about one in six feel “mainly negative.” With China the numbers are reversed. Barely one in three from the Anglophone countries feel mostly positive about the Middle Kingdom; for more than four in 10 the emotions evoked are negative. Similarly, more Japanese, Indonesians and South Koreans feel positively than negatively toward India; with China it’s the opposite. Read the rest of this entry »

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In LatAm, Indian manufactured products in 2 wheelers, plastcis, low-end engineering products are not cost-competitive with their Chinese counterparts. Again, unlike Chinese offerings, Indian manufactures don’t benefit from any government subsidy – instead have to bear higher costs in power, cost of capital etc.

No large developed currently got to be that way without building a strong manufacturing sector.
Zorawar Daulet Singh in Business Standard

Why does India’s manufacturing sector lag its peers? Manufacturing, especially in labour-intensive sectors, is underpinned by fundamental prerequisites that apply to most successful manufacturing locations: a basic literacy in the workforce upon which further skills can be imparted, physical infrastructure (i.e. power, roads, railways and access to ports), access to financial capital and, crucially, policies that encourage the allocation of resources towards export-oriented manufacturing. Since all these structural attributes are absent in India’s case, it does not receive the amount and type of investment that the rest of Asia has witnessed over the decades.

India’s services sector, in contrast, has performed relatively better because it had access to the nation’s small pool of qualified workers and did not require too much physical infrastructure. Thus, while India’s share of services in overall gross domestic product (GDP) has increased from 37 to 49 per cent in the last two decades, the share of manufacturing has remained at 16 per cent. In contrast, the share of China’s manufacturing sector to its GDP is 35 per cent; it is 30 per cent for South Korea, Malaysia and Indonesia; even Argentina and Brazil’s manufacturing sectors contribute 24 per cent to their national economies.

Services inherently require a skilled workforce and, therefore, cannot absorb the majority of the “youth bulge”, thus, laying the burden of job creation upon the manufacturing sector. This developmental pattern has historical precedence: the rise of the European great powers, America at the turn of nineteenth century, Russia in the first half of the twentieth century, East Asian tigers after the 1960s, Japan in the 1980s, and China in recent times. All these economies demonstrated manufacturing growth that restructured the erstwhile agrarian polity.

China’s manufacturing juggernaut is buttressed by massive implicit
subsidies in the Chinese economic system that have lowered the
opportunity cost of the major factors of production — the value of the
yuan, financial capital, electricity, transport infrastructure, natural
resource use and labour costs. Competing with such a system requires a
combination of superior innovation, strong public policy support for
labour-intensive manufacturing sectors and a commitment to address
India’s infrastructure woes.

Technorati Tags: India, manufacturing

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