MELBOURNE, Australia, Nov. 17--Financial stewards of the world’s wealthiest economies gathered Friday as demonstrators held a series of small-scale lightning protests ahead of a meeting due to focus on securing energy supplies, AP reported.
Chest-high metal fences were erected and hundreds of police deployed on the streets of the southern Australian city of Melbourne in preparation for anti-globalization protests when finance ministers and central bankers meet Saturday and Sunday as the Group of 20.
Several groups of shouting protesters entered and briefly occupied the lobbies of 14 commercial and government buildings in Melbourne, Victoria state Police Assistant Commissioner Gary Jamieson said.
Protest organizers said they hoped to draw 10,000 people, and were urging those who came and police alike not to be confrontational. Police said demonstrations would be allowed, but illegal actions would not be tolerated.
Reform of the International Monetary Fund, rising interest rates, the Chinese and Japanese currency levels and efforts to economically isolate nuclear-armed North Korea are also likely to come up at the two-day, closed-door meetings.
IMF Managing Director Rodrigo de Rato, who is attending the meetings, expressed satisfaction with the global economy.
“We would also like to sustain, and enable countries to benefit from, this period of unparalleled world growth--likely to approach 5 percent next year--and low inflation,“ he wrote in Melbourne’s The Age newspaper Friday.
The annual G-20 meeting brings the Group of Seven advanced countries--Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States--and the European Union together with other political and economic heavyweights including China, Brazil, India, Russia and South Korea.
Surging demand for oil and minerals from fast growing economies China and India have benefited commodity powers like Australia, while fanning concerns over the emergence of unstable supplies and market distortions.
Australian Treasurer Peter Costello, the meeting’s chair, said he hoped delegates would reach common ground on energy security that would avoid destabilizing the global economy by nations “locking up“ resources from other nations.
The demand and supply effects of China and India’s voracious appetites for oil and other energy-producing resources will be a key topic in delegates’ minds.
Protesters acknowledge the world is getting richer, but say the issue is one of more equitable distribution.

HANOI, Vietnam, Nov. 17--China will step up reforms of its economy to counter politically contentious trade imbalances, President Hu Jintao told world business leaders attending an economic conference in Hanoi on Friday.
According to AP, Hu, in Hanoi to attend the annual summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, was to meet with US President George W. Bush amid mounting criticism of China’s surging trade surplus with the US, which is projected to jump 12 percent to US$228 billion this year.
Pressure on Bush’s administration over China’s surplus is expected to increase following the opposition Democratic Party’s capture of Congress in elections last week.
Hu pledged to “accelerate the transformation of the pattern of trade growth and improve trade structure to ensure balanced growth of imports and exports.“
He also reiterated China’s promises to improve protection of intellectual property, such as copyrights and trademarks, and to further open the economy to foreign investment and trade. But he gave no details on how China would begin to redress its mounting surpluses with many countries.
China’s Commerce Ministry forecasts that the country’s overall trade surplus will soar to a record US$150 billion this year, nearly 50 percent above the 2005 level.
Exports are expected to total US$960 billion this year, with imports reaching US$810 billion.
Hu urged business to do more to fight global poverty and said development aid should come with “no strings attached.“
Hu made the call, which highlighted China’s greater emphasis on the non-state sector and its growing focus on ties to the developing world, while addressing several Hundred business representatives gathered in Hanoi.
Enterprises could provide capital, technology and other help critical to accelerating growth in developing countries, said the president, in Vietnam for the annual summit of the 21-member Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum.
“We should increase official development assistance with no strings attached to developing countries,“ Hu said.
Western criticism of China’s role in Africa has typically zeroed in on a practice of allegedly extending loans without any conditions in terms of better governance or curbs against corruption.

NAIROBI, Kenya,
Nov. 17--Environment ministers from around the world were wrapping up a 12-day climate summit on Friday, but struggled to agree a blueprint for negotiating the next round of carbon pollution curbs under the UN’s Kyoto Protocol.
According to AFP, the talks gathered members of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the offshoot of the 1992 Rio Summit, which identified global warming as a peril and launched the Kyoto process to try to tackle the fossil-fuel gases that cause the problem.
Delegates met into the early hours in Nairobi to try to overcome obstacles threatening to overshadow negotiations, due to start next year, on how to deepen cuts in carbon emissions when Kyoto runs out in 2012.
Kyoto requires all countries that have signed and ratified it to do all they can to avert man-made global warming. But only rich countries are obliged to make legally-binding pledges to curb their emission.
They have to reduce their share of global emissions by around five percent by the end of 2012 compared with 1990, Kyoto’s benchmark year.
But scientists say climate change is already on the march. As big developing countries, led by China, are eagerly burning oil, gas and coal to fuel their economic rise, carbon pollution is now scaling new heights each year.
To achieve the target would require cuts in global emissions--not just by industrialized countries--of some 50 percent by 2050 compared with 1990 levels.
So to achieve this, the post-2012 format of Kyoto must somehow encourage greater cuts by the big developing countries, yet without prejudicing their economic growth, and also further tighten the screw on industrialized countries.
It must also find a way of establishing closer cooperation with the United States, which by itself accounts for a quarter of carbon pollution today but has refused, like Australia, to ratify Kyoto.
The problems dogging the Nairobi talks focused on the scope of a review of the Protocol.
Developing countries want the review to have a narrow focus, suspecting it could draw them into binding cuts in emissions.
But the European Union, backed by others, wants a thorough reassessment that would include emissions goals as well as the Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which encourages low-carbon projects in poorer countries.
One area of discord has been whether carbon storage--taking carbon dioxide (CO2) at source from power stations and pumping it into geological chambers underground, rather than releasing it in the air--should be included in the CDM.

Afghan families in Bamiyan who cannot afford to live in houses live in ancient caves which were once homes to Buddhist monks before the coming of Islam. (Reuters File Photo)

KABUL, Afghanistan, Nov. 17--The UN World Food Program (WFP) renewed calls Friday for urgent funds to buy food for millions of Afghans facing shortages this winter, with drought taking hold in some parts of the destitute country.
“Our stocks are empty,“ a spokesman for the United Nations program, Ebadullah Ebadi, told AFP.
The world body needed 30 million dollars for its winter food delivery to 3.5 million Afghans who relied on its help, he said.
Another three million who were not covered by the WFP were also “severely and chronically affected“ by food shortages, Ebadi said. “In addition to this, 1.9 (million people) have been affected by drought,“ he said.
The WFP has received only 34 percent of the funds it requested for programs that include food distribution across the war-ravaged country, he said, adding though the shortages did not mean the population faced starvation.
The world body this month cut one of its programs--providing enriched food to school children--because of a lack of money, Ebadi said. The program also covers women in refugee camps and remote inaccessible areas during winter.
Trying to recover from nearly 30 years of war, Afghanistan is heavily dependent on aid in every arena, from fighting the resurgent Taliban movement toppled from government in 2001 to rebuilding its shattered infrastructure.
Drought in the south and west has meanwhile almost entirely wiped out the rain-dependent wheat harvest in some areas, the Christian Aid agency said in September.
The UN said last month that around 20,000 families--some 100,000 people--had also been displaced by conflict in the south, which sees the worst of clashes between the Taliban and foreign and Afghan security forces.
The country’s population is estimated at between 26 and 30 million, with the last official census taken in 1979.

HANOI, Vietnam, Nov. 17--Vietnam has signed three deals with US companies worth US$1.64 billion, officials said, underlining the increased foreign investment in one of Asia’s fastest-growing economies, AP said.
The deals come as 1,200 international business executives gathered for a CEO Summit on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, held this year in Hanoi.
State-owned Vietnam Coal & Minerals Corp., or Vinacomin, signed a contract Thursday with global power producer AES Corp., based in Arlington, Virginia, to build a coal-fired power plant at a cost of US$1.4 billion, a Vinacomin official.
“This is the first and largest coal-fired to be built by a US company (in Vietnam), and it is expected to start operating in 2010,“ Nguyen Duc Thao, director of Vinacomin’s electricity department. Vinacomin will contribute 10 percent of the total fund, while AES will contribute 90 percent for the plant which has an operational license for 30 years, Thao said.
The 2,000-megawatt plant, located in coal-rich Quang Ninh province about 250 kilometers (150 miles) east of Hanoi, will be built under a contract in which investors build infrastructure, run it for a given period of time, then hand it over to the government.
In another deal signed Thursday, state-owned Vietnam National Shipping Lines, or Vinalines, agreed to form a US$100-million container terminal joint venture with Seattle-based SSA Marine.
The joint venture will build three large wharves at Cai Lan port, about 200 kilometers (120 miles) east of Hanoi, said Bui Van Chung, director of Vinalines’ international business department.
Chung said this was the first joint venture formed with a US company to build a Vietnamese port. It is expected to become operational in 2008. Vinalines will contribute 51 percent of total funding for the facility, with SSA Marine providing the balance. The joint venture has a 50-year operating license, Chung said.
“Vietnam needs to improve its infrastructure to facilitate exports,“ he added.
Vinalines plans to raise 51 trillion dong (US$3.2 billion) between 2006 and 2010 to invest in its shipping fleet and upgrade its ports.

SEOUL, South Korea, Nov. 17--An international consortium including South Korea will next week sign a formal agreement to build an experimental nuclear fusion reactor in France by 2015, officials said Friday.
The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) consortium will finalize the deal on Tuesday in Paris after nearly 10 years of informal and preparatory talks by South Korea, Russia, China, the European Union, the United States, India and Japan, the Ministry of Science and Technology said.
ITER, a fusion energy project worth some 10 billion euros (12.8 billion dollars) and expected to run over 30 years, will be built at Cadarache in southern France. It aims to provide a clean and limitless source of energy that can replace fossil fuel. South Korea joined the project in June 2003 and is expected to pay about nine percent of the five billion dollar construction cost, Yonhap news agency reported.
It will be represented by Science Minister Kim Woo-Sik at the signing ceremony, to be hosted by French President Jacques Chirac.
“The country’s participation is significant, as it is a sign of South Korea securing a foothold in core thermonuclear power technologies,“ the ministry said in a statement.
South Korea’s interest in ITER reflects its efforts to secure alternative energy sources. It depends heavily on oil imports for energy.

MANILA, Philippines, Nov. 17--Five former Soviet republics have launched a 1.4 billion-dollar program funded by development lenders and aid agencies to halt and reverse the spread of deserts in Central Asia, AFP quoted the Asian Development Bank as saying Friday.
Over the next 10 years Philippines-based ADB will coordinate overall activities of the Central Asian Countries Initiative for Land Management involving Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, a bank statement said.
Land degradation from overgrazing, soil erosion, salt damage to irrigated land, and desertification is a serious problem in these countries, directly affecting the livelihood of nearly 20 million rural inhabitants, it added.
Farm yields are reported to have plunged 20 to 30 percent across the Central Asian region since the five countries achieved independence more than a decade ago, it said.
Data showed that about 70 percent of the total area of Turkmenistan has become desert, while salinized irrigated areas account for 50 percent in Uzbekistan and 37 percent in Turkmenistan.
“This project brings together a unique blend of partners involving countries and donor agencies to tackle land degradation, one of the most critical environmental problems in Central Asia,“ said Monique Barbut, chief executive of the Global Environment Facility, a United Nations fund which is providing 20 million dollars in grant financing.
ADB said about 155 million dollars in funds had been committed to the project up to end-2008.
The project includes management of biodiversity conservation, pasturelands, sustainable agriculture on irrigated land, and forest and woodlands; and capacity building in land use planning.

TOKYO, Nov. 17--Russia is committed to providing oil and gas to Asia but wants “fair“ deals, AFP quoted President Vladimir Putin as saying in remarks published Friday, amid growing concern about his attitude to foreign energy investors.
“As a major supplier of energy to world markets, Russia is open to cooperation in this sphere,“ Putin said in a column in Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun ahead of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Hanoi.
“We are going to propose and implement a number of specific infrastructural projects, specifically, the construction of oil and gas pipelines to supply Asia and the Pacific with hydrocarbons from eastern Russia,“ Putin wrote.
But he added, “We are convinced that the terms should be beneficial for all partners.“
“They should rest on the mutual responsibility of energy producers and consumers, a fair distribution of risks between them and an exchange of assets in the energy sector.“
Russia, enjoying a windfall from recent high oil prices, has taken an increasingly hard-nosed approach to foreign investors and aroused suspicions it is using energy supply as a diplomatic card.
The Russian government in September threatened to cancel the 20-billion-dollar Sakhalin oil and gas project, for which resource-poor Japan would be a major market.
Russia alleged the project violated environmental regulations but foreign companies suspected Moscow may be trying to hand over at least part of the project to domestic firms.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who is due to meet Putin in Hanoi, warned before taking office in September that scrapping the deal would hurt relations