Posts tagged under Malaysia
Modern day slavery in Southeast Asia: an uncomfortable reality
Daniel offering his insight to LKY students on working with and for migrant workers
Last week we had an inspiring visit from Daniel Lo, the Country Manager for the Malaysian arm of the Coalition to Abolish Modern Day Slavery in Asia (CAMSA). CAMSA is a relatively young organization, formed in February 2008 through the joint efforts of BPSOS (formerly known as Boat People SOS), and the International Society for Human Rights (ISHR) in Frankfurt Germany. CAMSA international members now consist of BPSOS, ISHR, the Vietnamese Canadian Federation and Tenaganita in Malaysia. CAMSA’s mission is to rescue and protect trafficking victims, punish traffickers through economic and legal measures, and engage in advocacy with the governments of source and destination countries to enact and enforce anti-trafficking laws and policies. They now count four bases in Southeast Asia and Taiwan, focusing on labor trafficking elimination and refugee protection. Daniel is a partner at his law firm and he also takes care of the operations and management of CAMSA – the only anti-trafficking coalition working in Malaysia.
Video of the “Rising Asia, Growing Inequality” Roundtable
The Roundtable on “Rising Asia, Growing Inequality”, which was attended by a full house of about 220 guests, students and media, saw a lively debate on the nature of inequality witnessed today and the sense of injustice amplified by the social media, which is in turn facilitated by rapid technological change.
Watch the exciting debate among the six panelists moderated by Dean Kishore Mahbubani here. The first video features the only debate, further below you will find the Question & Answer Session.
Roundtable panelists:
- Professor Kishore Mahbubani, Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (Chair)
- Dr. Judith Rodin, President of the Rockefeller Foundation
- Dr. Anies Baswedan, President, Paramadina University and one of Indonesia’s leading public intellectuals
- Professor Fu Jun, Executive Dean, Peking University School of Government
- Mr. Gideon Rachman, Chief Foreign Affairs Columnist, The Financial Times
- Mr. Karim Raslan, writer and consultant based in Indonesia and Malaysia
Senator Ton Nu Thi Ninh, President, Founding Committee of Tri Viet University, Vietnam
We would like to express our gratitude to the Rockefeller Foundation, New York and the Centre for Strategic Futures, Singapore for their generosity in supporting this Roundtable event and the Asian Trends Monitoring Project.
Pre-Christmas Southeast Asia energy security links
The energy security team will soon begin their Christmas hibernation, but wanted to provide you a pre-Christmas energy security link special. We look forward to being back in full service come the New Year, and wish you all Happy Holidays in the meantime.
- Malaysia plans to reduce carbon emissions 40% by 2020
…and also plans for 2 1,000MW nuclear plants to come online by 2022
- Southeast Asia’s largest hydropower plant, in northwestern Vietnam, began sending electricity to the grid and will be fully operational in 2012
- Bangchak Petroleum Plc to invest 5 billion baht in renewables, to focus on solar and ethanol production
Southeast Asia energy: weekly review
Filipino sugarcane farmers are opting to send harvests to sugar production where they’ll fetch more income than if the cane was converted to ethanol. Farmers and their politicians have been demanding the passage of a 20% ethanol tariff, previously set at 1%, which would stabilize the investment environment. Yet another example of consumers versus producers in the quest for grabbing social welfare.
Vietnam’s first foray into the wind turbine business took off last Friday with the inauguration of a $61 million factory that received support from General Electric. The plant will primarily produce 1.5MW turbines and various components.
Malaysia’s elusive feed-in tariff should be tabled “for first reading between the October and December session” of Parliament. If all fares well, it and the Renewable Energy Act as a whole would enter force before next June.
Would the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT) say anything less? As the major power purchaser for Nam Theun 2, a 1075-MW hydropower plant in central Laos, any grievances associated with community relocation should be papered over. Laos will be hosting an inauguration in December, even though commercial electricity sales began in March.
Clean Development Mechanism in Southeast Asia
...and of course, China in the lead.
In recent weeks, I’ve kept coming across the claim that Malaysia boasts the largest number of CDM projects in the region (especially pronounced in Malaysian newspapers), but hadn’t seen any stats on just how many that means or how many CERs are expected from them. Since IGES regularly updates their CDM Project Database, I’ve taken their data to be the best that’s currently available in a user-friendly format. We could obviously head over to the CDM portal at UNFCCC for some descriptive statistics; after all, they’ll help you create this fab pie chart which shows that Malaysia’s 83 registered projects exceeds Indonesia’s 48 (runner-up), but IGES’ datasheet provides a lot more to chew on.
First off, there’s a slight mismatch in registered tallies. According to UNFCCC, total registered projects amount to 2,273 whereas IGES counts 2,349. Using the 2,349 count, 1,737 are based in Asian host countries with China home to 867. Looking only at ASEAN countries whittles that down to 245 with a CER estimate through 2030 of 266 MTCo2.
The complex world of trade protectionism and environmental standards
Challenges ahead
The EU and the top two palm oil exporters - Malaysia and Indonesia – may butt heads at the WTO.
The EU’s Renewable Energy Directive requires Biofuels and Bioliquids achieve a minimum Greenhouse Gas (GHG) saving of 35 per cent to qualify for tax-excise exemptions and other trade benefits. Under Annex V, Palm Oil’s GHG saving is calculated to be 19 percent, below the 35 percent threshold.
See these recent articles from Xinhua and the Jakarta Globe, and this excellent article by Fredrik Erixon from the European Centre for International Political Economy for more commentary.
By the way, did we mention that the EU and ASEAN nations are working towards more bilateral Free Trade Agreements?
How can we reconcile ‘Green Incentives’ and Free Trade? This will be a big challenge going forward.