Flying Can Be Fun Again

Some airline passengers in the Caribbean, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates, according to trendwatching.com, can begin to anticipate the glamorous experience flying was in years gone by. In Turkey, they'll also meet a new friend, Nely.

     Vacationers touring in Barbados with Virgin Holidays will be able to put their casual flying clothes over their bathing suits and check out of their resort hotels early, because Virgin will pick them up, check their luggage, and take them to the beach. At oceanside, Virgin will provide boarding passes, a locker, beach towels, a showering facility, unlimited refreshments, and an air conditioned lounge area, while every last vacation moment merits a "Wish You Were Here" selfie home.

     Visitors to Singapore's Changi Airport have walked among animatronic, remote-controlled butterflies designed to resemble the Diaethria Anna species. For kids, the airport's five-story playground offers climbing nets, a pole to slide down, and more for use for 50 at a time.

     Before heading into the wild blue yonder from Dubai International Airport, passengers will be exploring the virtual  blue aquarium surrounding them as they walk through a security tunnel to their flights in Terminal 3. To use the tunnel instead of traditional procedures, passengers pre-register at 3D face-scanning kiosks located throughout the airport. Watching the fish is expected to relax and entertain passengers as 80 hidden tunnel cameras scan visitors' faces from different angles. At the end of the tunnel, cleared travelers are sent on their way with a "Have a nice trip" message or a red sign alerts security. Dubai's airports process 80 million passengers now. The tunnel was developed to handle the increased volume of passengers, 124 million, expected by 2020. It should be mentioned that Dubai's virtual aquarium receives the same legal challenges that other facial recognition systems face.

     At Turkey's Istanbul New Airport, a robot named Nely notes the expressions, ages, and genders of passengers before greeting them and making (or not making) small talk. Nely is, of course, travel-functional: booking flights for passengers, relaying information, and providing weather updates. Using AI, facial recognition, emotional analysis based on input from sociologists, voice capability, and a bar code reader, Nely even remembers passengers from previous interactions.

The Palm Oil Dilemma for Consumers

Before consumers buy products they are going to eat or drink, they are beginning to turn them around to check for the added sugars, genetically engineered ingredients, and high fructose corm syrup they want to avoid. The palm oil they find listed in snack foods, as well as in ice cream and other products, also is an ingredient in detergents and beauty products. Africans cook with palm oil, and a woman from Nigeria told me it could control high blood pressure. This widespread use results in a constant pressure to expand palm oil plantations and the following unintended consequences.

• Deforestation of rain forests means fewer carbon emissions can be absorbed to limit climate change.
• Deforestation destroys the tropical forest habitats of endangered species, such as orangutans, rhinos, tigers, and elephants in Sumatra, Indonesia. Plus, roads built into forests enable illegal logging and exporters to reach the rare birds that become part of the underground trade in exotic creatures. 
• Deforestation in parts of Indonesia helped cause floods, according to the World Bank.
• Fires used to clear Indonesian oil palm plantations in 2015 caused the smoke that resulted in respiratory problems in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore.
• Although corporations make commitments not to use palm oil from suppliers accused of illegal deforestation and from uncertified mills, they often only honor these commitments when an NGO or other groups uncovers a violation or local law enforcement acts.
• Labor is exploited; living and working conditions on plantations are bad. Migrant laborers from Bangladesh, for example, who work on the palm oil plantations in Malaysia often owe third party company recruiters debts they cannot pay. They find they are like prisoners working seven days a week after being forced to surrender their passports.
• Needed food production decreases when farmers switch to growing oil palm. Their debts rise as they purchase seed and fertilizer from the palm oil companies they supply.
• Expansion of palm oil plantations which encroach on village farm land and grazing pastures leads to conflict. 

Ravenous demand for palm oil from Indonesia and Malaysia, the countries that produce 80% of the world's supply, has not gone unnoticed in Brazil, where research shows almost half of the country's land area is suitable for growing oil palm. At the moment, most of Brazil's palm oil comes from the Amazon state of Para, where plantations employ about 20,000. As in Indonesia and Malaysia, an increase in palm oil production raises fears of illegal deforestation and endangering the biodiverse ecosystem. Rising land prices already have led to land ownership conflicts and even murder.

Relying on Indonesia's environmental laws, eco-warriors now identify illegal palm oil plantations on protected National Park land listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Spotters tell owners of illegal plantations to return the land to authorities or face prosecution. They then cut down each oil palm. In about five years, replanted seedlings begin to help forests recover unless sun burns out young plants or elephants trample them. Altogether, it can take 20 to 200 years for forests to reach their original growth.

Other palm oil players also are determined to combat the effect of deforestation on climate change and to protect endangered animals, birds, and plants. Besides groups, such as the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) that uses an oil palm symbol to identify "Certified Sustainable Palm Oil," the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), Greenpeace, the Rainforest Action Network, and Friends of the Earth, banks that finance palm oil plantation owners and investors in palm oil companies have begun to show greater concern about backing firms engaged in deforestation. When the Noble Group, owner of palm oil's Noble Plantations, prepared to issue a bond to finance clearing pristine rain forest in Papua, Indonesia, the HSBC bank involved in the bond issue asked RSPO to investigate charges that development on Noble's concession was about to violate RSPO standards. As a result, Noble's spokesperson announced work on Papua's plantations was on hold while sustainable analysis was pending. Other banks also have begun to require independent verification that palm oil borrowers comply with no deforestation, no peat, and no exploitation policies.

In the United States, the Ceres sustainability organization issued an "Engage the Chain" report to alert investors to the environmental and social threats posed by companies that rely on palm oil and other commodity suppliers.

Negatives associated with palm oil create a search for alternatives. But when the Ecover cleaning company produced a new laundry liquid using oil from genetically modified algae, customers refused to buy it. In the UAE, experiments show a species of alga that grows in fresh and salt water naturally produces the fatty palmitic acid found in palm oil. The University of Bath is experimenting with a yeast that has properties similar to palm oil that can grow in municipal, supermarket, or agricultural waste rather than on land. To date, however, substitutes, including rapeseed and coconut oil, cannot compete with less expensive palm oil that sells from $500 to $1,200 a ton, unless customers begin to recognize the non-price benefits of avoiding palm oil.

When consumers turn around a product and spot palm oil as an ingredient, what might they do?

(Also see the earlier post, "Long Supply Lines Foster Abuses").

Better Cows for Africa

A recent trip to Australia sparked Bill Gates' interest in improving milk production in Africa. He writes about his discoveries, problems, and what might be done at team@gatesnotes.com.

It is staggering to find cows on US dairy farms produce nearly 30 liters of milk every day compared to the 1.69 liters produced by an average Ethiopian cow.  While sending Wisconsin cows to Ethiopia would expose them to tropical heat and disease, using artificial insemination to crossbreed an Ethiopian cow with bull semen from a genetic line that produces lots of milk could increase milk output. In the heat of Africa, the required task of keeping frozen semen frozen is not easy, however.

To read more about worldwide milk consumption and production, see the earlier post, "Dairy Cows on the Moove." The magazine,  Hoard's Dairyman (hoards.com), published by Hoard's dairy farm in Wisconsin, USA, has been an authority on the dairy industry since 1885. National and international subscribers can choose to receive print or digital copies.

  Qatar is showing how, out of necessity and under the right conditions, Holstein dairy cows can be moved successfully from Wisconsin to another country to provide milk and breed. After being accused of financing Muslim extremists, Iran, and the Muslim Brotherhood; and being told to stop broadcasts from its al-Jazeera news network; Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emerates, Bahrain, and Egypt imposed sanctions on June 5, 2017 that amounted to a blockade of Qatar's imports. Using riches from its natural gas exports, the Irish CEO of Qatar's Baladna farm complex began airlifting 300 cows to a warehouse in the desert north of Doha. Another 14,000 are expected by next year.

Throughout the world, food shortages and poor nutrition are causing countries to search for other new agricultural solutions. Some of these methods are mentioned in the earlier post, "Exotic Farming."

"Let There Be Peace on Earth

...and let it begin with me," advises a song's lyrics. I was reminded of this message, when I saw a suggestion Belgium newspapers had for restaurant goers after terrorist attacks. DeTijd and L'Echo urged diners to finish their meals by arranging cutlery on plates in a peace sign and then sharing their peace message in a hashtagged image of their plates on social media.

     Trendwatching.com went on to list the following ways companies promoted reconciliation among different genders, races, countries, religions and those with different economic advantages.

• In its "Share the Load" commercials, Procter & Gamble's Ariel India laundry brand dispelled the cultural assumption that there is such a thing as women's work and men's work.
• To emphasize the soul-destroying damage bullying does to kids perceived as different, Argentina's Bagley brand turned the smile on its Sonrisa cookies upside down.
• Attacking the distinction some stores make between beauty brands and ethnic brands for Afro-American women, Shea Moisture hair care brand's commercial noted its products are in the beauty aisle "where we all belong."
• Starbucks is helping overcome unemployment among teens and young adults in disadvantaged areas by providing in-store retail and customer service training in New York's Jamaica Queens neighborhood. The program is slated to roll out in 14 additional locations in the U.S.
• In connection with Mother's Day, HSBC, a bank in the UAE, not only provided a series of free workshops on resume writing and interviewing skills to help mothers return to work, the bank also helped kids make videos telling about the skills their mothers offered employers.
• JetBlue thought people could agree, if they had the right motivation. If passengers on a flight reached a unanimous agreement about where they wanted to go, they received free tickets to that destination on any US airline. Their choice and reward: a round trip to Costa Rica.

Thinking about gun violence in Chicago and terrorist attacks around the world, Sister Susan Quaintance, a Benedictine nun, spent one Saturday morning investigating what the psalms had to say about peace. She found references acknowledging our work alone is not sufficient. Believers can take comfort knowing, when it comes to peace, God helps. Psalm 4:9 says, "In peace I lie down, and fall asleep at once, since you alone, Yahweh, make me rest secure."

Falling Commodity Prices Spur Diversification in Emerging Markets

Commodity exporting countries that have depended on the Chinese market have been hard hit by the slide in China's economy. Zambia, for example, relies on copper exports to China, which consumes 40% of the mineral's global output, for 70% of its foreign exchange earnings and 25 to 30% of its government revenue. Like Nigeria, which has depended on petroleum exports that are declining in value, Zambia sees a new need for economic diversification.

Check out countries heavily dependent on commodity exports:

• Bauxite: Indonesia, Jamaica, Brazil
• Chromite: South Africa, Zimbabwe, Albania
• Coal: Indonesia
• Cobalt: Democratic Republic of the Congo
• Copper: Chile, Kazakhstan, Zambia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Peru
• Iron Ore: Brazil
• Lithium: Argentina, Chile, Bolivia
• Manganese: South Africa, Gabon, Brazil, Ghana
• Molybenum: Romania, Chile
• Nickel: (Indonesia banned exports to China), New Caledonia, Madagascar
• Petroleum: Saudi Arabia, Algeria, United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, Nigeria
• Platinum: South Africa
• Tin: Indonesia, Myanmar
• Tungsten: Myanmar, Bolivia
• Uranium: South Africa, Namibia, Niger, Kazakhstan
• Vanadium: South Africa
• Zinc: Peru, like Australia, has cut production and jobs