Palm oil fell on speculation that a
decline in exports from Malaysia, the world’s second-largest
producer, may expand stockpiles of the tropical oil used in
everything from noodles to detergents.
The contract for April delivery retreated as much as 0.5
percent to 2,546 ringgit ($763) a metric ton on the Bursa
Malaysia Derivatives and ended the morning session at 2,550
ringgit. Futures declined 3.8 percent in January, the first
monthly drop in four.
Shipments from Malaysia declined 11 percent to 1.28 million
tons in January from a month earlier, independent surveyor
Intertek said yesterday. Exports fell 11 percent to 1.27 million
tons in January, SGS (Malaysia) Sdn., said.
“Prices are down due to the weak exports data for January
and slower offtake during the festive holidays,” said Ivy Ng,
an analyst at CIMB Investment Bank Bhd. in Kuala Lumpur. Markets
were shut on Jan. 31 and Feb. 3 for the Chinese new year and a
local holiday. China, the second-biggest importer, is shut for
the Lunar New Year holidays until Feb. 6.
Stockpiles in Malaysia climbed to a nine-month high of 1.99
million tons in December, according to the nation’s palm oil
board. Exports fell for a second month to 1.51 million tons in
December, board data showed. Soybean oil for March delivery was little changed at 37.43
cents a pound on the Chicago Board of Trade, while soybeans
gained 0.3 percent to $12.9675 a bushel.
To contact the reporter on this story:
Swansy Afonso in Mumbai at
safonso2@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
James Poole at
jpoole4@bloomberg.net
Kerry Tells Senators That Obama Syria Policy Is Collapsing
Two prominent Republican senators say that U.S. Secretary of State
John Kerry told them -- along with 13 other members of a bipartisan
congressional delegation -- that President Barack Obama's administration
is in need of a new, more assertive, Syria policy; that
al-Qaeda-affiliated groups in Syria pose a direct terrorist threat to
the U.S. homeland; that Russia is arming the regime of Syrian President
Bashar al-Assad, and is generally subverting chances for a peaceful
settlement; that Assad is violating his promise to expeditiously part
with his massive stores of chemical weapons; and that, in Kerry's view,
it may be time to consider more dramatic arming of moderate Syrian rebel
factions.
Kerry is said to have made these blunt assertions
Sunday morning behind the closed doors of a cramped meeting room in the
Bayerischer Hof hotel in Munich, as the 50th annual Munich Security
Conference was coming to a close in a ballroom two floors below. A day
earlier, Kerry, in a joint appearance with U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck
Hagel on the ballroom stage, gave an uncompromising defense of the Obama
administration’s level of foreign engagement: saying that, “I can’t think of a place in the world where we’re retreating.”
Kerry's
presentation to the congressional delegation suggests that, at least in
the case of Syria, he believes the U.S. could be doing much more. His
enthusiasm for engagement and dissatisfaction with current policy, is in
one sense no surprise: Kerry has consistently been the most prominent
advocate inside the administration of a more assertive American role in
Syria. Who could forget his late August speech, overflowing with
Churchillian outrage, in which he promised that the U.S. would hold the
Assad regime accountable for the “moral obscenity”
of chemical weapons attacks? (This promise was put on hold after Obama
declined to strike Syria, and after the Russians negotiated the so-far
mainly theoretical surrender of the regime’s stockpile of chemical
weapons.)
According to participants in the meeting, Kerry spent a
good deal of time sounding out the members about their constituents’
tolerance for greater engagement in Syria. He was told, almost
uniformly, that there is little appetite for deeper involvement at home.
One congressman, Adam Kinzinger, a Republican from Illinois, told Kerry
that his August speech on the need to confront Assad was powerful, but
that the president subsequently “dropped the ball.”
Kerry’s
Sunday briefing was meant to be private, but the Senate’s two most
prominent Syria hawks, Republicans John McCain -- the leader of the U.S.
delegation to the security conference -- and Lindsey Graham provided a
readout of the meeting to three journalists who flew with them on a
delegation plane back to Washington: Fred Hiatt, the editorial page editor of the Washington Post; Josh Rogin, the Daily Beast's national security reporter; and me.
According
to Graham, Kerry gave the clear impression that Syria is slipping out
of control. He said Kerry told the delegation that, “the al-Qaeda threat
is real, it is getting out of hand.” The secretary, he said, raised the
threat of al-Qaeda unprompted. “He acknowledged that the chemical
weapons [delivery] is being slow-rolled; the Russians continue to supply
arms [and that] we are at a point now where we are going to have to
change our strategy. He openly talked about supporting arming the
rebels. He openly talked about forming a coalition against al-Qaeda
because it’s a direct threat.”
"I would not characterize what he
said as a plea for a new policy, but that, in light of recent, dramatic
developments, the administration is exploring possible new directions,"
said one Democratic House member who was in the meeting. "He wasn't
arguing so much that the administration needs a new policy, but that the
administration is considering a range of options based on recent
developments."
The delegation, which included such senators
as Republicans Roy Blunt and Kelly Ayotte and Democrat Sheldon
Whitehouse, as well as such high-ranking House members as Michigan’s
Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence
Committee, and New York’s Eliot Engel, the ranking Democrat on the House
Foreign Affairs Committee, met with Kerry for about 45 minutes,
immediately before both Kerry and the delegation left on separate planes
to Washington.
Late Sunday night, shortly after the delegation
plane landed, Hiatt, Rogin and I asked Jen Psaki, the State Department
spokeswoman, to respond to the senators’ characterization of Kerry’s
remarks. She e-mailed the following response: “Like [White House chief
of staff] Denis McDonough this morning on the Sunday shows, Secretary
Kerry has stated publicly many times that more needs to be done rapidly
by the regime to move chemical weapons to the port at Latakia, that we
need to continue doing more to end the conflict, and that he has pushed
the Russians to help in this effort.”
Psaki’s response continued,
“No one in this Administration thinks we're doing enough until the
humanitarian crisis has been solved and the civil war ended. That is no
different from the message Secretary Kerry conveyed during the private
meeting. The meeting was an opportunity to hear from and engage with
members of Congress and it is unfortunate that his comments are being
mischaracterized by some participants.”
In a separate e-mail sent
Monday morning, Psaki responded to the claim that Kerry is reintroducing
the idea of supporting arming certain rebel groups. “It’s no secret
that some members of Congress support this approach, but at no point
during the meeting did Secretary Kerry raise lethal assistance for the
opposition. He was describing a range of options that the Administration
has always had at its disposal, including more work within the
structure of the international community, and engaging with Congress on
their ideas is an important part of that process.”
On the matter
of Syria, the feeling at the Munich Security Conference, the world’s
premier gathering of security experts, was that of helplessness. On the
first night of the conference, Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations
special representative for Syria, said, “We’ve just had eight days of
negotiations in Geneva. … I’m sorry to report there was no progress.”
The
impotence of the West, as evidenced by the failure of Geneva II talks,
and by continued reports of mass murder committed by Assad’s forces,
prompted former State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter to
publicly compare the situation of Syrian citizens today to that of Jews
in World War II Europe. “In the United States, we often ask, ‘Why didn’t
Roosevelt bomb the trains?' We aren’t very different,” she said.
There
are many reasons a secretary of state -- particularly one who has been
more inclined to intervene in Syria than many of his colleagues in the
White House national security apparatus -- might see this particular
moment in the three-year-old Syria crisis as an inflection point. The
utter failure of the Geneva peace talks is one reason. Reports that
Syria is not complying with its promise to divest itself of its chemical
weapons stockpiles is another. Add to this the recent disclosure of
damning evidence that the Syria regime has tortured and starved 11,000
people to death (more than 130,000 people so far have died in the civil
war), and it is understandable why Kerry would believe it is time for a
new American approach.
But the main impetus for a dramatic new approach might be the claim
made last week by James Clapper, the director of national intelligence,
that one of the main jihadi groups fighting in Syria, the Nusra Front,
“does have aspirations for attacks on the homeland.” Clapper compared
parts of Syria today to the tribal areas of Pakistan, which have long
been havens for jihadi terror groups.
(In her e-mail this morning,
the State Department’s Psaki wrote that, “While Secretary Kerry
restated what we have said many times publicly about our concern about
the growing threat of extremists, he did not draw a direct connection to
the threat on the homeland or reference comments made by other
Administration officials. This is a case of members [of Congress]
projecting what they want to hear and not stating the accurate facts of
what was discussed.”)
If it is indeed true that the
al-Qaeda-oriented Nusra Front is seeking targets in the U.S., then the
Syria conflict must become, by necessity, a paramount national security
concern for the U.S. The impact of Clapper’s testimony could be
profound: If parts of Syria are becoming, in essence, al-Qaeda havens,
and if jihadis are plotting attacks on American targets from those
havens, then the Obama administration, which has made the fight against
al-Qaeda the centerpiece of its national security strategy, will have to
engage in Syria in ways it has so far tried to avoid. Such engagement
would be terribly complicated, because the U.S. would essentially be
facing two despicable adversaries in Syria that are battling each other:
Assad’s forces (and its Hezbollah and Iranian helpers) on the one hand,
and the al-Qaeda-inspired and affiliated foes of Assad, on the other.
This
is why McCain argued to us, on the flight from Munich, that it is all
the more important now to provide support to those rebel formations that
could plausibly be designated as “moderate.” He said: “All I can do is
hope that there is cumulative evidence, the failure of Geneva II, the
atrocities of the 11,000, the continued regionalization of the conflict
-- sooner or later, the president will decide this is in America’s
national security interest.”
President Obama’s position on Syrian
engagement has been far-less forward-leaning than that of his secretary
of state. "All along John has wanted more vigorous action,” said McCain.
“I said to John on the way out, 'Don’t make it a half measure.’ I said
you’ve really got to do something to change the momentum.”
Obama
has never believed the more moderate rebel factions would be capable of
defeating the Assad regime (and it should be noted that these rebel
groups, despite McCain’s beliefs, are particularly weak today). McCain
opposed Graham’s suggestion that the administration begin using drone
strikes against al-Qaeda-affiliated militants in Syria. “Eventually
you’ve got to confront them, so to me, it’s a choice of, do we hit them
after they hit us, or do we hit them before they hit us?" Graham said.
"Because eventually we are going to engage these guys, and it seems to
me there’s an appetite growing among the Arab countries and even a
little bit [with] Russia quite frankly that we’ve got to change the
momentum when it comes to the al-Qaeda presence.” Update: On
Monday, Democratic Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Chris Murphy
responded with this statement: “We were both surprised that contents of
our off-the-record meeting with Sec Kerry were made public. The
characterizations reported on today do not reflect the conversation that
we heard. Neither of us recall the Secretary saying the policy of the
Administration in Syria was failing, nor proposing new lethal assistance
for Syrian opposition groups.” Their statement did not address the
other claims made by Senators McCain and Graham.
To contact the writer of this article: Jeffrey Goldberg at jgoldberg50@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this article: Zara Kessler at zkessler@bloomberg.net.
The Malaysian oil palm company Sime Darby
Plantation Liberia Incorporated or SDPL, looks forward to harvesting its
first crude palm oil here by September, 2015.
Chief Engineer Shamaruddin Abu Sarach said the mills installation for
processing of palm oil begins in April this year, and may be completed
in 20 months with each mill targeting 15 hectares of land.
The company has a 63-year lease agreement with the Government of
Liberia to cultivate over 300,000 hectares or 760,000 acres of land
otherwise referred to as the Gross Concession Area.
The Head of Region for Sime Darby Plantation Upstream Project Roslim
Azmy Hassan, said of the total amount of hectares needed for its
operations, a little over 10,000 have been plowed so far.
Land access seems to be a challenge to its expansion quest as local
residents sometimes become hesitant to give up their land to
concessions, which is their only inheritance. Between 2010 and 2011 the
company encountered resistance from local communities, who argued that
they had not been consulted.
But all seems to have changed considerably after meetings of
multi-stakeholders, including community dwellers, non-government
organizations, the Government of Liberia and the Sime Darby management
in an effort to allay all fears and let the citizens know what lies
ahead of them in a multi-million dollars investment that promises 35,000
employment opportunities.
Addressing a team of reporters over the weekend, Friday, 31 January
at one of the plantation sites in Bomi County just before leading
journalists on a tour, Head of Region Hassan said all of the land that
the communities previously withheld, has been turned over to the company
without any coercion.
"If you do bad, you will reap it, if you do good, you will reap it;
people have begun to see the good work of Sime Darby. We have a very
good relationship with the people, the government and the Land
Commission of Liberia", he said.
Hassan added that in expectation of next year's harvest, management
is engaging the National Port Authority, particularly the Freeport of
Monrovia to identify an area inside the port to station its buckets
where the finished products will be stored for shipment abroad.
In fulfillment of its social responsibility to locals, the company
provides free health services and free education. A 15-bedroom health
center runs by SDPL caters to over 2,000 patients daily, including
pregnant women, mothers and newborn babies. Officer-In-Charge Samuel T.
Moore said with three qualified midwives, about 22 babies are being
delivered there monthly with mortality rate falling from nine to two.
At the Liberia Intensive Group Training Center, nine university
graduates in agriculture discipline are being trained in plantation
operation and management by the company with the assurance of immediate
employment after completion of training. "My colleagues, we should study
hard because there is a future for us", said student Cooper A. Dennis.
SDPL is also constructing four modern estates, including the Matabo
Estate, Bomi Estate, Cape Mount Estate and Lofa Estate for its employees
as it expands the plantation.
The Matabo Estate has a total of 194 apartments with accommodate for
380 employees, according to Estate Manager Sam D. Karnwhine. Head of
Region Hassan put the cost for the estate at US$2.2 million.
NEW
DELHI: Crude palm oil prices up by 0.35 per cent to Rs 540.20 per 10
kg in futures trading after participants created speculative positions
following rising demand in the spot markets.
At the Multi
Commodity Exchange, crude palm oil for delivery in March rose by Rs
1.90, or 0.35 per cent, to Rs 540.20 per 10 kg in business turnover of
14 lots.
Likewise, the oil for delivery in February up by Rs 1.60, or 0.29 per cent, to Rs 535.30 per 10 kg in 12 lots.
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