As China’s voracious demand for iron ore rises, the country demands a more stable, long term pricing policy from India.  India which currently meets 16 percent of China’s iron ore demands sells iron ore on a spot basis, allowing the price to fluctuate as demand grows. India is China’s third largest supplier, after Australia and Brazil, who supply over 60 percent of their iron ore to China at contract prices, which allowed shipping costs to remain ‘relatively stable.’

‘Last year India’s spot sales to China led to additional costs of US$838.3 million for Chinese steel makers,’ Luo Bingsheng, executive vice chairman of the China Iron and Steel Association told Forbes.

Now, China plans to take serious action to make sure iron ore prices are more stablized. China will have to consider reducing purchases of iron ore from India if Indian suppliers do not moderate their ‘over-reliance’ on spot sales, he added.

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By Pamela Priya Mathews 

Growth of Asia’s factories are turning forests into grasslands and both booming China and India are to blame for this mass erosion of green cover. Forest experts have warned the soaring demand for timber, food, energy and commodities are all great contributors to the depletion of rainforests in Asia.

More recent reports show that the loss of forest continues to grow in Indonesia, Cambodia, Myanmar, Australia and Papua New Guinea amongst others. Although new forests in China, India and Vietnam have been planted to reduce the loss of forest, ecologists say this will not aid the problem.

New forests are being noted as man-made and therefore are said to lack the natural varieties of plants found in forests as well as species which are extremely endangered due to the heightened demand for logging. “Many plantations, in terms of biodiversity, are green concrete,” said Peter Walpole, head of the non-profit Asia Forest Network.

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Its been a long march since Thomas Friedman declared the world to be flat. Now, it seems as economies grow larger and countries struggle to gain control of depleating natural resources national  barriers are rising.  

A story by the wall street journal says that the global economy appears to be entering an epoch in which governments are reasserting their role in the lives of individuals and businesses. Once again, barriers are rising. Call it the new nationalism.

The report goes on to say: Just a decade ago, Asia, Latin America and Russia were on financial life support from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. The U.S. was planning yet another round of global trade negotiations. The European Union was writing a constitution to shift power to Brussels from member nations.

Now borrowers shun the IMF and World Bank. Trade talks are shelved. Barriers to foreign investment are rising around the world. State-owned companies are expanding, particularly in oil and gas. Public support of immigration restrictions is growing in countries from the U.S. to India.

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Numbers: (1.1,0.048)

The quest for natural gas has brought age old enemies India and Pakistan to seek an agreement, allowing a pipeline from Iran to bring energy to Pakistan and India.”I am very optimistic about the IPI (Iran, Pakistan, India) pipeline as it would go a along way in meeting India’s energy requirements in the long run,” Petroleum and Natural Gas Minister Murli Deora told The Hindu on Sunday. The US$7.4 billion , 2,700-km-long pipeline is scheduled to be completed by 2011 and would initially carry 600 million cubic metres of gas per day.

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Long before Oxford, Harvard or MIT ever made their mark on the global academic stage, Nalanda University in Bihar, (north-east India) attracted students from across Asia. Founded in 427 in northeastern India, not far from what is today the southern border of Nepal, and surviving until 1197, Nalanda, meaning Giver of knowledge in Sanskrit was one of the first great universities in recorded history. It was devoted to Buddhist studies, but it also trained students in fine arts, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, politics and the art of war.

The university was an architectural and environmental masterpiece. It had eight separate compounds, 10 temples, meditation halls, classrooms, lakes and parks. It had a nine-story library where monks meticulously copied books and documents so that individual scholars could have their own collections. It had dormitories for students, perhaps a first for an educational institution, housing 10,000 students in the university’s heyday and providing accommodations for 2,000 professors. Nalanda was also the most global university of its time, attracting pupils and scholars from Korea, Japan, China, Tibet, Indonesia, Persia and Turkey.

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Numbers: (7.62,5.34)

After almost a year of negative growth, India’s textile and clothing industry’s exports to the U.S. grew by 8.26 percent in February this year, even as exports from China, the largest textile and clothing exporter to the U.S. (worth $32.3 billion or a third of US’ total T&C imports in 2007) slowed down registering a negative growth (-2.57%) in exports to the US in Jan-Feb 2008.

So what has led to this flux in the global T&C business?  it’s a repeat of history say analysts. In its evolution, the global textile industry has seen continual shifting of its base. As the economy grows beyond a level, it becomes unfit for the labour-intensive T&C sector. It happened earlier with Japan, and even earlier with the U.S. and EU .

Now, it’s China’s turn to cut its textile industry. And for other competitive textile producers like India, Vietnam and Indonesia, this is an opportunity. In India’s case, this is true for the next two decades at least (before it also finds textile production incompatible with the economy) reported The Economic Times.

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Emerging countries India, China, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa - the outreach countries of the G8 met in Beijing yesterday ahead of the G8 summit to be held in Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido in July. The outreach countries, also permanent invitees to the G8 are meeting to discuss multilateral trade and climate change issues.  The discussions will be centered around developing a coordinated approach before the annual summit of G-8 leaders in Japan in July.

India’s Foreign secretary and ex Ambassador to China, Shiv Shankar Menon is in Beijing on a three day visit and met Chinese Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs He Yafei and Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi. Menon’s visit is a precursor to India’s External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee’s visit to Beijing, likely in June, and comes on the heels of the successful relay of the Olympic torch in New Delhi.

During the meetings Menon pitched for the principle of equity in global climate change negotiations and reiterated India’s position of collective but differentiated responsibility between developed and developing countries in reducing greenhouse gas emissions - a point of view that found echo among officials of the four countries, official sources told Thaindian in New Delhi.

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The International Energy Agency in Paris said that China, India, Russia and the Middle East for the first time will consume more crude oil than the U.S., burning 20.67 million barrels a day this year, an increase of 4.4 percent.

Bloomberg reported that economic growth of more than 8 percent in China and India, coupled with increasing car ownership among the countries’ combined populations of 2.45 billion people, will more than compensate for falling U.S. demand. Oil use worldwide will increase 2 percent this year to 20.38 million barrels daily because of growth in emerging markets.

Oil demand in both China and India will rise by 4.7 percent, according to the IEA. China, the world’s second-biggest energy user, will consume 7.89 million barrels of oil a day this year. India will use 2.92 million barrels of oil a day in 2008, more than is pumped by OPEC member Venezuela.

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