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This column covers "developing stories" meaning that you can expect additional stories on the same subject in the near future. The material that follows was written using much of the same language as your Bangkok Post writers use in their stories.
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LOCAL/INTERNATIONALUtter catastropheWhen the death toll here in Thailand is finally determined weeks or months from now, it is likely that more than half of those who perished were tourists, most of them Europeans who came here to escape the brutal cold of winter. What they found, of course, was far worse. One reason that the casualty toll has been so high is that the disaster was so unexpected. The deep underwater trenches that ring the floor of the Pacific oceans are largely absent from the Indian Ocean area, so tsunamis are rare and sophisticated warning systems are nonexistent. In fact, the only significant deepwater trench in this region is where the earthquake that spawned the tsunami occurred – off the southern coast of Indonesia. Experts knew of the earthquake within minutes, but its actual magnitude was not confirmed until after the waves began to batter India and Sri Lanka. The agency most equipped to evaluate the danger of a tsunami, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii, lacked the data from the Indian Ocean region to issue a warning. It did issue an alert within fifteen minutes of the quake, however, but this is what it said: THIS MESSAGE IS FOR INFORMATION ONLY. THERE IS NO TSUNAMI WARNING OR WATCH IN EFFECT. AN EARTHQUAKE HAS OCCURRED … LOCATION -- OFF THE COAST OF NORTHERN SUMATRA EVALUATION: THIS EARTHQUAKE IS LOCATED OUTSIDE THE PACIFIC. NO DESTRUCTIVE TSUNAMI THREAT EXISTS BASED ON HISTORICAL EARTHQUAKE AND TSUNAMI DATA. Thus, it doesn’t seem fair to blame local officials, who had less information than the officials in Hawaii, for failing to issue a warning. There is little question that they will be soon be much better equipped for dealing with a similar disaster in the future. Elsewhere in the region, it was largely a case of miscommunication. Those with advanced warning that something was badly amiss had no way of getting the information out or felt they lacked the authority to do so. The best account I have read so far of what happened came from Barbara Demick of the Los Angeles Times. You should still be able find her story on their website. www.latimes.com. The worst hit area in the region was Aceh province in nearby Sumatra, not coincidentally the land area closest to the earthquake’s epicenter. There, the response has been almost totally different that what we have seen here in Thailand. Now, over a week after the disaster, aid is only beginning to reach survivors on a large scale. Many of the people there are on the verge of starvation. A big reason, of course, is the sheer scale of the death and destruction – up to 100,000 dead and hundreds of square kilometres completely devastated. But clearly complicating matters is the fact that Aceh has been the scene of a long and bloody civil war and its development has lagged the rest of the country. Thus, foreign relief agencies were poorly represented there and the true extent of the problem only became known relatively slowly. When aid did arrive in large quantities, distribution proved a huge bottleneck and supplies continued to pile up at the airport of provincial capital Bandar Aceh for several days. U.S. helicopters from the giant aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, each able to carry more than 3,000 pounds of supplies, became a lifesaver for many in the remotest regions. Here in Thailand, the grisly task of finding and identifying the corpses of victims is likely to continue for many weeks to come. As of the weekend, the list of the missing still exceeded the list of the bodies collected so far.
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xMuch of coastal Sri Lanka has been decimated by last week’s tsunami which left more than 10,000 people dead and a million displaced from their homes. Now, that battered country may have to take an economic hit as well. This has little to do with the massive waves that ravaged its shorelines, however. Instead, it has to do the January 1st ending of the quota system (known as Multi-fiber Arrangement on Textiles or MFA) that allowed its textile factories to compete in the international cloth and clothing industry. Altogether, apparel accounts for half of Sri Lanka’s export earnings. Now Sri Lanka and other textile exporters, including Thailand, will have to compete on even terms with powerhouses like China and India. Sri Lanka has a five-year strategy aimed at shifting into high-quality products and focusing on markets close to home, but this is clearly an uphill effort. Everyone expects China to be the main beneficiary of the MFA’s demise. The World Trade Organization estimates that China will control half the world’s textile market by 2007, up from 17% in 2003. Experts say China has advantages that no other country can match – cheap and highly productive labour, huge cost-saving factories and a good infrastructure able to hurry its products abroad. Fearing a sudden surge in imports from China, some countries, like the US, have won agreements for anti-dumping quotas until 2008. On China’s part, the government is clearly concerned about its image and it is imposing tariffs on textile exports. But they are not high enough to make a great difference, experts say. Some experts say worries that China will sweep its competitors out of the way are overblown. Wages are finally rising in China and other large textile manufactures like India and Bangladesh are rapidly modernising their industries, they say. The same is true of Thailand, says Suchart Chantaranakaracha, chairman of the executive board of the Thai Garment Development Foundation. Thai textile exporters are investing over 50 billion baht in hardware and software to improve production capacity, he says. Mr Suchart believes that Thai apparel exports will actually grow up to 15% next year. Less efficient companies will definitely lose out, however, he says. In fact, up to 20% of the country's 2,700 textile and garment factories could be forced out of business in the face of intensifying competition. Watch to see if he is right on both counts.
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Last modified: January 3, 2005