Comme je n'ai pas trop le temps d'ecrire, voici au moins de quoi lire pour vous.. thanks NYT et le copiage !
Competes With West in Aid to Its Neighbors
STUNG TRENG, — In the dense humidity of northern , where canoes are the common mode of transportation, a foreman from a Chinese construction company directs local laborers to haul stones to the ramp of a nearly completed bridge.
Nearby, engineers from the China Shanghai Construction Group have sunk more than a dozen concrete pylons across a tributary of the mighty Mekong River, a technical feat that will help knit together a 1,200-mile route from the southern Chinese city of Kunming through Laos to the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville on the Gulf of Thailand.
This is the new face of ’s foreign aid to poor Asian countries: difficult construction in remote places that benefits the recipient, and , too. “It is the favor of our government to the Cambodian people,” said Ge Zhen, 26, one of the more than 50 engineers and 250 other Chinese workers on the four-year project.
Flush with nearly a trillion dollars in hard currency reserves and eager for stable friends in Southeast Asia, is making big loans for big projects to countries that used to be the sole preserve of the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the and .
With the meeting of the World Bank on Sept. 19 and 20, , one of the bank’s biggest customers, is quietly shaking up the aid business in Asia , competing with the bank at its own game.
For poor countries like , and , and somewhat better-off countries like the , ’s loans are often more attractive than the complicated loans from the West.
The Chinese money usually comes unencumbered with conditions for environmental standards or community resettlement that can hold up major projects. The aid does not carry penalties for corruption that are being increasingly used by the World Bank president, Paul D. Wolfowitz. And ’s offers rarely include the extra freight of expensive consultants, provisions that are common to World Bank projects.
For its part, China benefits from the added infrastructure — roads, ports and bridges — in the underdeveloped but growing region around it, to help increase trade and to move natural resources from China’s periphery to its heartland.
Liqun Jin, vice president of the Asian Development Bank and a former vice minister of finance in Beijing, said in an interview at the bank’s headquarters in Manila that had carefully considered how to use its increasing wealth.
“ is attracting external capital, and as a balance wants to help developing countries in the region by financing infrastructure projects,” Mr. Jin said. “Helping your neighbors to have a good life is no sin.”
He added, “ makes no bones that we want a peaceful neighborhood to develop our own economy.”
The effects are likely to be enormous. Tom Crouch, country director for the at the Asian Development Bank, said, “Here comes a very large new player on the block that has the potential of changing the landscape of overseas development assistance.”
Already, in the past several years, has given aid to African countries, where it is buying oil and gas. They include some with repressive governments like , and .
Even during the cold war, spread aid around Africa, sometimes to counterbalance assistance from rival countries, which were being helped by . In the 1960’s and 70’s, for example, aided while helped neighboring .
In , Prime Minister Hun Sen boasts of ’s offer last spring of $600 million in “no strings attached” loans, made during a visit from the Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao. The money will help pay for two major bridges near the capital, Phnom Penh, that will link to a network of roads; a hydropower plant; and a fiber-optic network that will connect ’s telecommunications with that of and .
In contrast, Mr. Hun Sen points out that the traditional lenders together pledged just $1 million more than . And the money came laden with conditions, including World Bank anticorruption clauses.
Four World Bank programs in worth about $70 million were recently suspended by the bank after its investigators found corruption among Cambodian officials in the procurement process.
’s generosity to has caught Washington ’s attention. The United States Navy is planning a port visit to Sihanoukville early next year, a first since the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975.
In the , is also making a big splash, offering an extraordinary package of $2 billion in loans each year for the next three years from its Export-Import Bank.
That made the $200 million offered separately by the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank look puny, officials from those banks said, and easily outstripped a $1 billion loan under negotiation with .
Officially, the World Bank says it is not concerned about competition from ’s increasingly energetic aid program. “The more important impact of on these countries’ development is trade rather than aid,” said Homi Kharas, the bank’s chief economist for East Asia and the Pacific.
The aid, chiefly for infrastructure, was being focused by on the integration of trade in the region, a useful result for poor countries, he said.
But Western aid donors complain that is secretive about its aid projects, and that it declines to attend the traditional meetings presided over by the World Bank to coordinate aid activities in poor countries. They also say they doubt that always delivers the full value of the projects that it announces.
And Western aid officials said they were taken aback when the news of the $2 billion Chinese aid package came out at a lunch meeting of more than 100 aid donors in Manila last month. The size of the Chinese loans came as a shock, in part because the serves as the headquarters of the Asian Development Bank, a lender dominated by and the . is also a shareholder.
The secretary general of the National Economic and Development Authority in the , Romulo Neri, compared the Chinese aid package to those from other sources, and noted the appealing absence of the expensive consultant fees common to Western projects.
After being a favorite of the Bush White House, the Philippine president, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, fell out of favor when she pulled her country’s troops out of in 2004.
The Chinese appeared to have quickly filled the economic breach for the and, according to a memorandum from Mr. Neri’s office, a number of projects are expected to be completed when Mr. Wen visits Manila in December.
They include two toll roads and a water supply system for Manila, and further financing for a rail project already under way to connect northern Manila with four provinces.
In some countries, like , ’s construction projects seem clearly aimed at helping to assure ’s access to natural resources.
Western diplomats and aid officials in Phnom Penh said they believed that had recently granted the rights to one of five offshore oil fields that could yield as much as $700 million to $1 billion a year. Chevron already has an agreement for exploratory drilling at one of the Cambodian fields.
Washington does not know yet, and would like to know, whether plans to offer loans for an often-discussed deep-sea port at Sihanoukville that would allow a convenient delivery point for its Middle East oil imports.
In resource-rich , the former , Beijing’s only real competitor on the aid front is . has built dams and roads connecting the interior of the country to ’s southern flank, and is currently reported to be working on a deep-water port on ’s west coast. is in deep arrears to the World Bank, which said it had no loan program there. The offers no official aid, either, because of the repressive nature of the government.
In , has built a major road up the spine of the country, and has been influential as much by the prospect of what it might do, than by what it has actually accomplished.
After years of study on the impact on the environment, the World Bank broke ground on a environmentally controversial major dam, known as Nam Theun 2, in last year, because it knew that was ready to step in to build the dam, bank officials say.
Beyond its no-strings approach, is often appreciated as a lender by poor countries because it is willing to take on complicated projects in distant areas that others are not.
The bridge that Mr. Ge, the engineer, and his colleagues have sweated over during the last four years — the temperature creeps up as high as 106 in April — is in one of the most underdeveloped corners of Southeast Asia , the area where the Khmer Rouge first took power.
Running from the bridge is a new, smooth 130-mile road built by Mr. Ge’s team that connects Kratie, a village to the south of Stung Treng, to the Laotian border.
“When we came here four years ago, we would leave at breakfast time from Kratie and we would arrive here for dinner — eight hours,” Mr. Ge said. “It now takes two hours.”
The Ascent of Wind Power
KHORI, India — Dilip Pantosh Patil uses an ox-drawn wooden plow to till the same land as his father, grandfather and great-grandfather. But now he has a new neighbor: a shiny white wind turbine taller than a 20-story building, generating electricity at the edge of his bean field.
Wind power may still have an image as something of a plaything of environmentalists more concerned with clean energy than saving money. But it is quickly emerging as a serious alternative not just in affluent areas of the world but in fast-growing countries like and China that are avidly seeking new energy sources. And leading the charge here in west-central and elsewhere is an unlikely champion, Suzlon Energy, a homegrown Indian company.
Suzlon already dominates the Indian market and is now expanding rapidly abroad, having erected factories in locations as far away as Pipestone, Minn., and Tianjin, . Four-fifths of the orders in Suzlon’s packed book now come from outside .
Not even on the list of the world’s top 10 wind-turbine manufacturers as recently as 2002, Suzlon passed Siemens of last year to become the fifth-largest producer by installed megawatts of capacity. It still trails the market leader, Vestas Wind Systems of Denmark, as well as General Electric, Enercon of Germany and Gamesa Tecnologica of .
Suzlon’s past shows how a company can prosper by tackling the special needs of a developing country. Its present suggests a way of serving expanding energy needs without relying quite so much on coal, the fastest-growth fossil fuel now but also the most polluting.
And Suzlon’s future is likely to be a case study of how a manufacturer copes with , both in capturing sales there and in confronting competition from Chinese companies.
Suzlon is an outgrowth in many ways of ’s dysfunctional power- distribution system. Electricity boards owned by state governments charge industrial users more than twice as much for each kilowatt-hour as such customers pay in the — and they still suffer blackouts almost every day, especially in northern .
Subject to political pressures, the boards are often slow to collect payments from residential consumers and well-connected businesses, especially before elections. As a result, they often lack the money to invest in new equipment.
To stay open and prevent crucial industrial or computer processes from stopping, a wide range of businesses — including auto parts factories and outsourcing giants — rely on still more costly diesel generators.
With natural gas prices climbing as well, wind turbines have become attractive to Indian business. The Essar Group of Mumbai, a big industrial conglomerate active in shipping, steel and construction, is now working on plans for a wind farm near Chennai, formerly Madras, after concluding that regulatory changes in have made it financially attractive.
“The mechanisms didn’t used to be there; now they are,” said Jose Numpeli, vice president for operations at Essar Power. The electricity boards “know how to cost it, they know how to pay for it.”
Roughly 70 percent of the demand for wind turbines in comes from industrial users seeking alternatives to relying on the grid, said Tulsi R. Tanti, Suzlon’s managing director. The rest of the purchases are made by a small group of wealthy families in , for whom the tax breaks for wind turbines are attractive.
Wind will remain competitive as long as the price of crude oil remains above $40 a barrel, Mr. Tanti estimated. To remain cost-effective below $40 a barrel, wind energy may require subsidies, or possibly carbon-based taxes on oil and other fossil fuels.
Mr. Tanti and his three younger brothers were running a textile business in Gujarat, in northwestern , when they purchased a German wind turbine — only to find that they could not keep it running. So they decided to build and maintain turbines themselves, starting Suzlon in 1995 and later leaving the textile business.
To minimize land costs, wind farms are typically in rural areas, chosen for the strength of the wind there as well as low prices for land. But that can mean culture shock.
“There were no big changes until the turbines came,” Mr. Patil said, pausing from plowing here with his father in this remote, hilly, tribal area 200 miles northeast of Mumbai, where oxen remain at the center of farm life and motorized vehicles are uncommon.
Doing business in rural areas of the developing world carries special challenges. The new Suzlon Energy wind farm in Khori is a subject of national pride. More than 300 giant wind turbines, with 110-foot blades, snatch electricity from the air. But it has also struggled with the sporadic lawlessness that bedevils .
S. Mohammed Farook, the installation’s manager, was far from happy one recent afternoon. At least 63 new turbines, worth $1.3 million apiece and each capable of lighting several thousand homes when the wind blows, could not be put into service because thieves had stolen their copper power cables and aluminum service ladders for sale as scrap.
The copper or aluminum fetches as little as $1 from black-market scrap dealers. But each repair costs thousands of dollars in parts and staff time, in a country that is desperately short of electricity and technicians.
“I am crying inside,” Mr. Farook said.
Despite such problems, Suzlon has expanded rapidly as global demand for wind energy has taken off. Its sales and earnings tripled in the quarter ended June 30, as the company earned the equivalent of $41.6 million on sales of $202.4 million.
The demand for wind turbines has particularly accelerated in , where installations rose nearly 48 percent last year, and in , where they rose 65 percent, although from a lower base. Wind farms are starting to dot the coastline of east-central and the southern tip of , as well as scattered mesas and hills across central and even Inner Mongolia .
Coal is the main alternative in the two countries, and is causing acid rain and respiratory ailments while contributing to global warming. accounted for 79 percent of the world’s growth in coal consumption last year and used 7 percent more, according to statistics from BP.
Worried by its reliance on coal, has imposed a requirement that power companies generate a fifth of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020. This target calls for expanding wind power almost as much as nuclear energy over the next 15 years. already leads in wind power and is quickly building more wind turbines.
Chinese and Indian officials are optimistic about relying much more heavily on wind.
“I believe we may break through these targets — if not, we should at least have no problem reaching them,” said Zhang Yuan, vice general manager of the China Longyuan Electric Power Group, the renewable-energy arm of one of China’s five state-owned electric utilities, China Guodian.
Kamal Nath, ’s minister of commerce and industry, was even more enthusiastic. “ is ideally suited for wind energy,” he said. “The cost of it works well and we have the manufacturing capability.”
International experts are more skeptical that wind will displace coal to a considerable extent, saying that while electricity production from wind is likely to increase rapidly, the sheer scale of energy demands suggests that coal burning will expand even more.
Suzlon still sees plenty of opportunity in and has decided to build some of its latest designs in for the market there, despite the risk of having them copied by Chinese manufacturers.
“Being an Asian leader,” Mr. Tanti said, “we cannot afford to ignore .”
A dozen Chinese manufacturers have jumped into wind-turbine manufacturing as well. They have struggled with quality problems and have limited production capacity so far, resulting in long delivery delays.
But the Chinese producers already have an edge on price over imported equipment, according to Meiya Power of Hong Kong, which owns and operates power plants in and across Asia, and is considering a wind farm in windswept Inner Mongolia .
Mr. Tanti said that rapid innovation and design changes would allow Suzlon to stay ahead of copycats. “It’s a time-consuming process,” he said, estimating that it would take two to three years for rivals to clone Suzlon turbines because they use unique or proprietary parts.
Suzlon manufactures its turbines at two factories in , but has begun test production at a just-completed turbine-blade factory in Minnesota , where it already supplies turbines for a wind farm operated by the Edison Mission Group and Deere & Company. It has also begun test production at a Chinese factory that will make both turbines and blades.
To reach the Suzlon wind farm here, the huge rotors travel by night on special trucks for a 300-mile journey from northwestern on a succession of paved and dirt roads.
Squatter huts have had to be removed along the way to allow the long trucks to turn; Suzlon is not required to pay compensation but often makes donations in these cases, Mr. Farook said.
The truck crews also carry wooden poles to prop up electricity wires across the road and pass underneath. The trucks sometimes attract gawkers, and live wires occasionally burn bystanders.
“With human error, it may touch human flesh,” Mr. Farook said. “In that case, we have to pay compensation.”
Villagers in Khori said that thievery and even robberies by rock-throwing gangs were nothing new, and were a problem long before Suzlon began setting up wind turbines. The company’s response — stepping up patrols by security guards — has reduced everyday crime. That has made villagers more willing to rent land at the edge of their fields for the turbines.
At first, “we were really confused about what was going on,” Mr. Patil said. “But now we’re O.K. on it.”
Et la plantation de piments de la compagnie Vanduzi, avec son unite (ultra?)moderne d'emballage des produits. Tracabilite, hygiene, tout est la pour les consommateurs anglais. A quand la France ? Les Etats Unis?
