CANBERRA, Australia, April 3--Australia and China signed a nuclear safeguards deal on Monday that set the stage for huge uranium exports to Beijing for its power industry, but Canberra said the trade was unlikely to start for some years, according to Reuters.
Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer and his Chinese counterpart, Li Zhaoxing, signed the nuclear safeguards deal in the presence of visiting Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and Australian Prime Minister John Howard.
“Given China’s high projected growth in electricity demand over the coming years, there are clear environmental benefits in diversifying from fossil fuels to low greenhouse-emission technologies such as nuclear power,“ Downer said in a statement.
China is expected to build 40 to 50 nuclear power plants over the next 20 years and needs steady supplies of uranium. Its own uranium stocks are dwindling, not very rich and difficult to extract.
Australia has about 40 percent of the world’s known uranium reserves, but it will only export to countries that have signed
the UN Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and who also agree to a separate bilateral safeguards deal.
India also wants to buy uranium from Australia, but has not signed the NPT and Howard has said he was not planning to change his strict uranium trade policy just because New Delhi signed a nuclear technology deal with the United States.
The US-India deal agreed last month requires New Delhi to separate its military and civil nuclear facilities and open civilian plants to inspections in return for U.S. nuclear fuel and technology, but still needs approval from the US Congress.
Australia only has three operating uranium mines, owned by BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and General Atomics of the United States, and Resources Minister Ian Macfarlane has said big uranium exports to China were unlikely to start until 2010.
Macfarlane said China’s predicted uranium consumption was estimated at 20,000 tons a year, while Australia currently produced only about 10,000 tons a year from its existing three mines. He said extra capacity would be needed to supply China.

BELO HORIZONTE, Brazil, April 3--Bolivian President Evo Morales headed to a key economic forum Sunday to press the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to forgive at least some of the $3.5 billion owed by the Andean nation and four other poor Latin American countries, AP said.
But Latin America’s two biggest powerhouses--Brazil and Mexico--won’t support the debt relief package for Bolivia, Haiti, Honduras, Guyana and Nicaragua unless richer nations foot the bill, Brazilian Planning Minister Paulo Bernardo told reporters.
Bolivian Finance Minister Luiz Alberto Arce said Morales, a leftist and Bolivia’s first Indian president, will push for the debt relief package at the IDB’s annual meeting for top Latin American and Caribbean economic officials in this southeastern Brazilian city.
Arce did not say how much IDB debt Bolivia would seek to have forgiven, but the proposal is sure to be a major theme at the meeting, which ends Wednesday. Bolivia owes $1.6 billion, and Bernardo said Bolivia wants all of its obligations forgiven.
The 47-nation bank is owned by its member countries, mainly from the Western Hemisphere, but also including some from Europe, as well as Japan and South Korea.
Mexico supports the debt relief idea but doesn’t want to pay for it through its IDB ownership stake, said Mexican Finance Minister Francisco Gil.
Delegates at the meeting agreed Sunday to form a special committee chaired by Brazil that will be charged with coming up with a financing solution for a debt relief package by the end of the year, said Clay Lowery, the Treasury Department’s assistant secretary for international affairs.
Lowery said the U.S. delegation is proposing a complicatedly structured financing arrangement that will lead to debt relief while not negatively affecting the IDB’s balance sheet.
Another prickly topic expected to come up on the sidelines of the meeting is Bolivia’s plan to nationalize its vast natural gas resources and how that will affect Petroleo Brasileiro SA, Brazil’s state-owned petroleum company.
Delegates at the IDB meeting, one of Latin America’s most important annual economic forums, were also discussing how the bank can improve the region’s crumbling infrastructure, boost economies and promote regional integration.

DUBAI, UAE, April 3--The Dubai flagship airline carrier Emirates has said it was delaying until a further notice the delivery of 20 Airbus A340-600s because it was waiting for a modified and more economical version.
“We are looking to defer the delivery of these orders until the manufacturer comes back with a clearer plans about an enhanced version of the aircraft,“ an Emirates official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
But “Emirates order for the A340-600s still stands,“ the official added Sunday.
The order was put in 2003 at the value of 4.2 billion dollars and the first of the jets was expected to be delivered in 2007.
In Paris, the European aircraft manufacturer confirmed that Emirates has decided to delay until a further notice the date of receipt for the A340-600s.
The future of the four-engined A340 is in danger due to its high consumption of fuel in comparison with the twin-engined rival Boeing 777, which sold ten times more than the Airbus A340 last year as airlines seek to reduce their fuel bills.
“There is a slip in the level of orders,“ acknowledged an Airbus spokesman in Paris.
As of November 2005, Airbus had sold a total of 370 aircraft to clients in the Middle East while Boeing had sold 357.
Both aircraft makers have set their sights on the Middle East and hope to land major orders from airlines in the region which are expected to need about 1,000 new planes in the next 20 years.
Emirates is the fastest growing airline in the Middle East. The Emirates Group made net profits of 708 million dollars for the financial year ended March 31, 2005, 49 percent over the previous year.
Emirates is the biggest client of the long-haul A380 Airbus with an order of 43 planes--nearly a third of total orders of the giant aircraft.

Sitting on a clear bole of their yard, some Madagascan ringtail lemurs (lemur-catta) look at the camera at the Nyiregyhaza zoo. (AFP File Photo)

WASHINGTON, April 3--China’s pandas and Madagascar’s lemurs have found unexpected new allies in a handful of mining companies and oil firms.
According to AFP, though natural-resource-consuming big businesses may seem unlikely champions of environmental conservation, a few are actually in the vanguard of a program protecting forests and endangered species in Asia, Africa and around the world.
“It’s actually good business for them to be part of conservation; it’s not just philanthropy,“ said Glenn Prickett, executive director of the Center for Environmental Leadership in Business (CELB).
In the five years since its creation by Conservation International (CI) and Ford Motor Company, CELB has signed up 45 corporate partners and won support from various donors, governments and nongovernmental groups. It works with businesses to develop solutions to environmental problems industry can cause, such as deforestation and pollution.
CELB’s efforts appear to be making some strides on the greener side.
In China and Madagascar, it has designed programs to sequester carbon, a method of offsetting carbon dioxide emissions by capturing CO2 and storing or absorbing it in trees or soil.
With a three-million-dollar grant from manufacturing conglomerate 3M, CELB hopes to sequester a million tons of carbon and restore three million hectares (7.4 million acres) of degraded forest in China’s Hunan and Sichuan provinces.
Those are ambitious goals, but David Skelly, an ecology professor at Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, said they are right on target.
Working with oil companies BP, Shell, Chevron and Norway’s Statoil, CELB also developed guidelines for incorporating biodiversity protection into oil exploration and drilling activities. The guidelines were eventually adopted by industry associations as the new industry-wide standard.
CELB and coffee powerhouse Starbucks also teamed up to brew CAFE, or Coffee and Farmer Equity, a program that gives coffee growers an incentive to employ environmentally sound practices and pay farm workers better.
The center also has partnered with the US forestry industry to create a voluntary standard for protecting biodiversity in 34 areas designated as “biodiversity hotspots“ by CI.
As a result, firms adopted the standard, vowing not to harvest or buy timber harvested in any of these hotspots--areas such as southwestern China and Madagascar, which are rich in endemic species and endangered animals, such as the giant panda, the red panda and the lemur, but which have lost upwards of 70 percent of their original natural vegetation.

BRUSSELS, Belgium, April 3--China’s “economic miracle“ has been based on the exploitation of its workers, who will only suffer more under Beijing’s liberalization plans, AFP quoted an international union group as saying on Monday.
In the report to be released ahead of the first World Trade Organization (WTO) review of Beijing’s trade policy since China joined the global body at the end of 2001, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) attacked the assumption that more liberalization was good for the Asian giant.
“A majority of Chinas population has already lost from the country’s membership of the WTO and stands to lose from further trade liberalization,“ the ICFTU said in the report.
“China’s competitiveness is based on the exploitative wages paid to its workers.
“The people have 60-70 hour working weeks, live in dormitories with eight to 16 people in each room, earn less than the minimum wages which go as low as 44 dollars, and often their only prospect if they should get injured at work is unemployment.“
The WTO report said economic openness had enabled China to increase its per capita Gross Domestic Product nine fold since 1978 and reduce by one third the number of people living on less than one dollar a day.
It said reforms were given added steam when China joined the WTO, whose trading nation members, currently 149, set the rules of global commerce.
“Notwithstanding these remarkable achievements, a number of challenges remain,“ said the WTO report, stressing that China should do more to liberalize its services industry, crack down on piracy and loosen its exchange rate policy.
But the ICFTU criticised the WTO’s optimism regarding the likely benefits of further liberalisation and presented its own figures showing growing wealth inequality, persistent chronic unemployment and dreadful work conditions.
It said that two decades of cautious market opening in the communist state had created “one of the most unequal countries in the world.“
“China’s experience shows that trade liberalisation alone and success in export markets doesn’t ensure social progress and development,“ it said.

MOSCOW, April 3--Russia has failed to hit its inflation targets in the past two years, despite progress earlier in the decade, the finance minister said Monday.
Alexei Kudrin also told a Finance Ministry board session that the inflation base-rate for February stood at 1.2%.
According to Ria Novosti, he said the government should share anti-inflationary functions with the Central Bank, but added that “the targets established by the government for increasing the money base have been breached“ and said that the amount of surplus liquidity absorbed should increase as prices go up.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov Monday warned government departments that they should stick to the financing plans laid out in the country’s budget.
“It would not be a mistake to say that the dynamics of budget-funding usage over the course of the year are still far from ideal,“ Fradkov told a Finance Ministry board meeting.
He said that currently some departments are hoarding surplus budget funds and using them unevenly.
“We have to avoid the influence on price growth of low budgetary discipline,“ Fradkov said.

PARIS, April 3--On the heels of its merger with Lucent Technologies of the United States, the French telecoms giant Alcatel is hoping this week to announce a space satellites partnership with the Thales defense electronics group, AFP reported.
Sources close to the partnership negotiations said Sunday that the door would be left open for the European Aeronautic, Defense and Space Company NV (EADS) to join the satellites group.
According to the sources, a deal has been initialed by which Alcatel would take a 25-30 percent stake in Thales, compared to 9.5 percent at present, in return for handing over its satellite business. Alcatel would then become the second investor in Thales after the French government, which owns 31.3 percent of the defense company.
Alcatel said it was looking for a “reinforcement of its present partnership“ with Thales, but sources said differences remained over the degree of participation of EADS in the partnership.
EADS, a predominantly French and German partnership, is seeking a 15-20 percent share in Thales in exchange for its Astrium satellites business.
The sources said some kind of a deal could be announced Tuesday if it is approved by the Thales board.
However, following its merger with Lucent, announced on Sunday, Alcatel is now effectively a Franco-American company, causing concern about possible foreign influence in a group that is considered key to France’s strategic interests.
Alcatel has made it clear that it would ring-fence its partnership with Thales.
A deal between Alcatel and Thales has been on the cards for some time, but has led to infighting within the French government. The finance ministry and the office of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin have supported a bilateral deal between Alcatel and Thales, according to sources close to the talks.
However, negotiations to this effect have been stymied by EADS’ demands, which have the support of President Jacques Chirac, according to the sources.
EADS, the parent company of the Airbus civilian airline manufacturer, has reportedly rejected the idea of joining the satellites partnership at a later stage, fearing that this would leave it in a weaker negotiating position.
The marriage between Alcatel and Lucent is pushing the French government to find a solution as quickly as possible to securitize Alcatel’s satellite business, which is considered crucial to France’s defense interests.