Tan had set up a new company to manage a shopping mall and weekend market named Kluay Kluay, to give the impression that nothing is impossible.

Kluay kluay is Thai slang to suggest a task that can be done with ease. Kluay means "banana", one of the easiest fruits to find in Thailand. Tan also used the name Kluay Kluay to represent the English version of his company.

However, when unwary foreigners try to pronounce the Thai word kluay, then their tone could suggest something completely different.

We won't tell you what it is.

What we will give away is that Tan decided to rename the English version of his company to Banana Square.

Next threat to rain forests

You may think that biofuel is the future for world energy. But some environmentalist groups suggest otherwise, especially when it comes to biofuel from palm oil.

A recent article in UK-based The Guardian newspaper reported that although palm oil for biofuel was seen as a solution to save the planet from greenhouse gases and global warming, a huge number of trees in tropical rain forests would likely be torn down to make way for palm-oil plantations.

There's no easy solution here, especially when it is expected that within 15 years, 98 per cent of the rain forests of Indonesia and Malaysia will be gone.

Rise prices for imported crude oil have prompted many countries, including Thailand, to find alternative sources of energy from home-grown products.

For instance, the Thai government is researching ways to generate fuel from tapioca and sugar to replace imported oil. In Thailand, the debate over the ingredients of biofuel is more over the price of sugar or tapioca, which have been rising in line with anticipation over a higher demand for plants to produce biofuel.

However, in Indonesia and Malaysia, there are increasing concerns over the decline of rain  forests.

The fear is that Indonesia's aim of almost doubling its 6.5 million hectares under palm-oil plantation in the next five to eight years and tripling them by 2020 to meet skyrocketing world-wide demand will afford ever greater opportunities for timber thieves. An estimated 2.8 million hectares of forest are already lost every year, said The Guardian.

If this is the case, conservationists fear the palm-oil monoculture won't be able to support a rich diversity of wildlife and would leave the environment vulnerable to catastrophe, while local people dependent on the crop could be left high and dry if it fell out of favour.

Makes you think nuclear energy might not be so bad after all.

busdsk@nationgroup.com