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Published on April 22, 2008

Supalak Ganjanakhundee

The Nation

Accra

Foreign Minister Noppadon Pattama, who joined the event chaired by Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Chang (IPCC), yesterday said the climate-change issue was now part of Thailand's national agenda to reduce potential damage.

The IPCC and former US vice president Al Gore won last year's Nobel Peace Prize for championing climate-change awareness.

The Thai government will support energy saving and alternative energy, as well as effective energy use, Noppadon said.

Thailand also supports the clean-development mechanism (CDM), he said. CDM is an arrangement under the Kyoto Protocol allowing industrialised countries with a greenhouse-gas-reduction commitment to invest in projects that reduce emissions in developing countries as an alternative to more expensive emission reductions in their own countries.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in the opening session of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) that worldwide food production had been affected this year by drought and natural disasters.

The reasons for the crisis were ascribed to not only a simple trade-off between biofuels and agriculture, but also high growth in consumption, especially rapid economic growth in Asia. Financial speculation could also be blamed, he said.

The UN chief raised concerns about the skyrocketing price of food, saying if it was not handled properly, then the crisis "could trigger a cascade of other problems affecting economic growth, social progress and even political security around the world".

Ban called for countries to take measures to ensure the world's food security and increase agriculture production.