Author: Gaurav

FONGAFALE: Tuvalu Battles for Maritime Boundaries Amid Sea Rise, Tuvalu and its 11,000 people, who live on nine atolls scattered across the Pacific, are running out of time.

Fukanoe Laafai would like to start a family. But she is struggling to reconcile her plans with rising sea levels that scientists predict will submerge much of her homeland by the time her children would reach early adulthood.

Tuvalu, whose mean elevation is just 2m, has experienced a sea-level rise of 15cm over the past three decades, one-and-a-half times the global average. 

By 2050, NASA scientists project that daily tides will submerge half of the main atoll of Funafuti, home to 60 per cent of Tuvalu’s residents, where villages cling to a strip of land as narrow as 20m in parts.

Life is already changing: Tuvaluans rely on rainwater tanks and a central raised garden for growing vegetables, because saltwater inundation has ruined groundwater, affecting crops.

A landmark climate and security treaty with Australia announced in 2023 provides a pathway for 280 Tuvaluans annually to migrate to Australia, starting next year.

On a recent visit to Tuvalu and in interviews with more than a dozen residents and officials, Reuters found anxiety about rising seas and the prospect of permanent relocation. 

Four of the officials revealed progress on an emerging diplomatic strategy to establish a legal basis for Tuvalu’s continued existence as a sovereign state – even after it disappears beneath the waves. 

Specifically, Tuvalu aims to change the law of the sea to retain control of a vast maritime zone with lucrative fishing rights, and sees two pathways to achieve that: a test case in the international maritime tribunal, or a United Nations resolution, Reuters reporting found. 

Frustration with the global response to Tuvalu’s plight, even after the breakthrough deal with Australia, had led Tuvalu’s diplomats to shift tactics this year, two of the officials said.

The new approach and methods have not been previously reported.

Tuvalu’s land amounts to just 26 square kilometres. But it is dispersed across a far-flung archipelago, creating an exclusive economic zone of some 900,000 square kilometres – more than twice the size of California.

In this close-knit and deeply Christian society, residents told Reuters they feared relocation would mean the loss of their culture.

“Some will have to go and some will want to stay here,” said Maani Maani, 32, an IT worker in the main town of Fongafale.

“It’s a very hard decision to make,” he added. “To leave a country, you leave the culture you were born with, and culture is everything – family, your sister, your brother. It is everything.”

For now, Tuvalu is attempting to buy time. Construction of sea walls and barriers to guard against worsening storm surges is occurring on Funafuti, which is 400 m at its widest. Tuvalu has built 7 hectares of artificial land, and is planning more, which it hopes will stay above the tides until 2100.

By then, NASA projects a sea-level rise of 1m in Tuvalu, or double that in a worst case, putting 90 per cent of Funafuti under water.

JAKARTA :Indonesia Launches Clearing House Next Week, Indonesia will launch a central counterparty clearing house (CCP) next week for foreign exchange and money market transactions, its central bank said on Tuesday, as it aims to deepen the capital markets of Southeast Asia’s largest economy.

The CCP should help integrate Indonesia’s currently fragmented and segmented money and foreign exchange markets, facilitating liquidity for banks by reducing default and other market risks, Bank Indonesia (BI) said.

“With CCP, transactions in (the) money market will be more efficient and transaction volumes will be higher,” Donny Hutabarat, head of the central bank’s Financial Market Development Department, told a media briefing.

He said the current setting of market prices was not efficient because big banks tend to make transactions with other big banks.

BI did not provide details on a target for the volume of DNDF transactions after the clearing house launch.The CCP’s shareholders are Indonesia Stock Market Clearing House, BI and eight banks: Bank Central Asia, Bank Rakyat Indonesia, Bank Mandiri, Bank Negara Indonesia, Permata Bank, Bank Danamon, CIMB Niaga and Maybank.

Each shareholder will pay four types of guarantee funds to the CCP that could prevent CCP from default, Hutabarat said.

Despite holding shares, BI will only act as regulator and as one of the supervisors alongside Indonesia’s financial services authority.

BI issued rules on CCPs in 2019 in response to a G20 resolution to control derivative risks after the 2008 global financial crisis. BI modelled its CCP on clearing houses in Japan and the UK

US Bond ETF Launches Surge 50% Year-Over-Year, Launches of bond-focused exchange traded funds have nearly doubled over year-ago levels in 2024, boosted by expectations of interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve, according to data from CFRA and Strategas.

The number of launches has spiked this month, with bond products making up 46 per cent of all ETF debuts, according to CFRA. New products run the gamut, from those offering municipal bond exposure to others focused on high yields and collateralized loan obligations.

“There are some issuers out there realizing that fixed income is going to be a really big trend in general, and that there’s a unique opportunity to add a product to the market that would be a more creative alternative to the big, broad bond index ETFs,” said Todd Sohn, head of ETF analysis at Strategas.

A key factor driving interest this year has been anticipation that the Fed will cut interest rates in 2024 – a process that began with a 50 basis point reduction last week. Officials have penciled in another 150 basis points in cuts by the end of 2025, according to the Fed’s latest Summary of Economic Projections.

Investors have also been eager to lock in yields near multi-decade highs before they fall.

Inflows for September stood at $22.9 billion as of Sept. 20, according to Trackinsight, a Paris-based firm that monitors the global ETF industry.

Aggregate Bond ETF and the Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF, each with about $120 billion in assets. These two passive bond funds track the Bloomberg U.S. Aggregate index and a float-adjusted version of that index, respectively.

“Fixed income investors have a long-standing preference for actively-managed products,” said Scott Davis, head of ETFs at Capital Group, noting that nearly 80 per cent of all fixed income mutual funds fall into that category.

BANGKOK : Thailand’s Car Production Falls for 13th Consecutive Month, Car production in regional automaking hub Thailand fell 20.56 per cent in August from a year earlier due mainly to weaker domestic sales amid tightening credit conditions, the Federation of Thai Industries said on Tuesday.

The figure compared with July’s 16.6 per cent year-on-year decline. It was the 13th straight month that production had contracted.

In the January-August period, car production contracted 17.69 per cent from a year earlier to just over a million units, the federation said.

Domestic car sales declined 24.98 per cent in August from a year earlier, after an annual drop of 20.58 per cent in July, it said.

Thailand is Southeast Asia’s biggest autos production centre and an export base for some of the world’s top carmakers, including Toyota and Honda, with pickup trucks among the key vehicles manufactured. It has recently attracted investments from Chinese electric vehicle makers.

Official data showed household debt was 90.8 per cent of GDP in the March quarter, or $484 billion.

In July, the federation cut its domestic sales target for this year to 550,000 vehicles from an earlier forecast of 750,000 units.

The Federation had also reduced its 2024 production target to 1.7 million units in July, down from at 1.9 million vehicles seen earlier. In 2023, Thailand produced 1.84 million vehicles.

THE HAGUE: Ukraine Accuses Russia of Violating Maritime Law, Ukraine accused Russia at an international court on Monday (Sep 23) of flouting sea law by trying to keep the Kerch Strait between mainland Russia and annexed Crimea under its sole control.

Kyiv began proceedings at the Hague-based intergovernmental Permanent Court of Arbitration in 2016 after Moscow began building the 19km Crimea Bridge link to the peninsula it seized from Ukraine two years previously.

The bridge is crucial for the supply of fuel, food and other products to Crimea, where the port of Sevastopol is the historic home base of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, and became a major supply route for troops after Moscow’s full-scale invasion in 2022.

Kyiv, which wants the bridge demolished and has targeted it with attacks, says Russia built it low to keep international ships out while allowing smaller Russian ones through the strait connecting the Sea of Azov and Black Sea.

“Russia wants to take the Sea of Azov and Kerch Strait for itself,” Ukraine’s representative Anton Korynevych told arbitrators at the opening of hearings.

Russia dismissed Ukraine’s case as groundless and hopeless.

Its representative Gennady Kuzmin denied any Russian interference with navigation and said anyway the arbitration court had no right to rule in the case. “Besides the lack of jurisdiction over these claims, they are simply wrong,” he said.

The Kerch Strait case is one of multiple proceeding at international courts and institutions that Ukraine is pressing against Russia.

JERUSALEM: Israel Strikes Hezbollah Targets Urges Safety, Israel unleashed its most widespread wave of air strikes against Hezbollah on Monday (Sep 23) and warned Lebanese citizens to evacuate areas where the armed group was storing weapons, moving closer to all-out war.

“We are deepening our attacks in Lebanon, the actions will continue until we achieve our goal to return the northern residents safely to their homes,” Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said in a video published by his office on Monday.

“These are days in which the Israeli public will have to show composure.”

He was speaking after the Israeli military targeted Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon’s south, eastern Bekaa valley and the northern region near Syria.

The latest attacks came amid some of the heaviest cross-border exchanges of fire in a conflict raging alongside the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

Earlier, Israeli army spokesperson Avichay Adraee said that air strikes on houses in Lebanon, in which “Hezbollah hid weapons” were imminent.

Residents of southern Lebanon received calls from a Lebanese number ordering them to immediately distance themselves 1,000m from any post used by Hezbollah, a Reuters reporter in the south, who received the call, said.

Lebanon’s information minister Ziad Makary said his ministry had received a similar call ordering the building to evacuate, but said the ministry would do no such thing. “This is a psychological war,” Makary told Reuters.

A Lebanese person living in Beirut’s Manara area said her family received a call on their landline.

The Saudi embassy is very close, like two minutes walking distance from us, but apparently they are targeting everyone now. It was a long 30-40 second message.”

“Hezbollah is endangering you. Endangering you and your families,” Hagari said.

The UNIFIL peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon had “seen an intensification of bombardments throughout the area of operations, close to the Blue Line but also deeper south,” its spokesperson Andrea Tenenti told Reuters, referring to the line demarcating the Lebanese-Israeli border.

JOHANNESBURG: South Africa Aims to Reform Black Empowerment System, The head of South Africa’s flagship Black economic empowerment plans to introduce additional incentives and potential fines to improve corporate participation and curb exploitation of the system meant to tackle the country’s gross inequality, he said.

The African National Congress, which had ruled unchallenged for 30 years until it lost its parliamentary majority in May elections, is under intense pressure to improve the lives of Black people left disadvantaged by decades of white minority rule.

The empowerment law enacted in 2003 created a scorecard system that encourages companies to hire and promote Black people by offering them tax breaks and access to government contracts.

Two decades later, unemployment is five times higher for Black people than for white people and income inequality is the worst in the world, according to the World Bank, and critics say the empowerment policy has not worked.

“There’s no society that can be viable with (this) level of inequality,” Tshediso Matona, head of the Broad-based Black Economic Empowerment Commission told Reuters.

Under the voluntary programme, companies earn points in categories such as Black ownership, management control and skills development.

However, Matona says some companies inflate their scores by falsely listing Black people as managers, a practice commonly known in South Africa as “fronting”, a crime under the law.

The commission, which refers cases of infringement to state prosecutors, has received 1,348 complaints of fronting since 2017, said Matona. In 2022, only 141 of about 400 listed companies submitted a report.

Matona said he hoped to enhance company incentives for compliance while “naming and shaming” and possibly fining those which fail to submit the reports.

“On this one (Black empowerment), we are unequivocal,” Ramaphosa told reporters over a week ago, describing racial inequality as an “existential challenge” for South Africa.

BUENOS AIRES : Kremer Out for Rugby Championship Decider, Influential Argentina loose forward Marcos Kremer will miss his country’s decisive Rugby Championship clash against South Africa this weekend after hurting his knee in last Saturday’s home win over the Springboks, the Argentine Rugby Union said on Monday.

Kremer hobbled off midway through the second half of Argentina’s 29-28 home victory over the World Cup winners in Santiago del Estero and was left out of the 28-man squad for South Africa where the two countries meet again in Nelspruit on Saturday.

The experienced Kremer’s absence will be a blow to the Pumas’ hopes of another upset win as they need a bonus point victory at the Mbombela Stadium to snatch the Rugby Championship away from top of the table South Africa.

The Springboks have a five-point lead over Argentina in the standings going into the final round of this year’s southern hemisphere championship.

Kremer, who has 72 caps, is the only omission among the forwards from the squad for last week’s test but among the backs Ignacio Mendy, Matias Orlando and Justo Piccardo have been cut for the trip as the size of the squad is reduced to 28.

Squad:

Backs: Tomas Albornoz, Lautaro Bazan Velez, Gonzalo Bertranou, Mateo Carreras, Santiago Carreras, Santiago Chocobares, Lucio Cinti, Bautista Delguy, Gonzalo Garcia, Rodrigo Isgro, Juan Cruz Mallia, Matias Moroni

Forwards: Bautista Bernasconi, Ignacio Calles, Pedro Delgado, Thomas Gallo, Juan Martin Gonzalez, Santiago Grondona, Tomas Lavanini, Pablo Matera, Franco Molina, Julian Montoya, Joaquin Oviedo, Guido Petti, Pedro Rubiolo, Ignacio Ruiz, Joel Sclavi, Lucio Sordoni.