India's environment ministry has given conditional approval to South Korean company Posco's plan to build a steel plant in the eastern state of Orissa. The ministry has also cleared the plant's captive port and power plant if certain conditions are met. The $12bn plant is India's largest foreign investment project. Last year, a government panel said that environmental clearances for the plant be scrapped. Critics say the project will exhaust iron deposits in...

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) today notified veterinary and border authorities in Asia of a major outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the Republic of Korea, urging them to be on the look-out for livestock showing signs of infection by the highly contagious animal disease. Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) affects cloven-hoofed animals, including cattle, sheep, goats and pigs, causing high fever. It is characteristic by lesions in animals' mouths and...

Fast-growing emerging nations are taking increasingly aggressive actions to beat back rising food prices as they grow more worried of threats to stability if prices don't start to retreat. Developing-market governments have unveiled a laundry list of measures—including price caps, export bans and rules to counter commodity speculation—to keep food costs from disrupting their economies as price spikes that some had hoped were temporary have stretched into the new year. Some...

After announcing food prices had reached record levels last week, the United Nation’s (UN) Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is now trying to play down concerns about shortages. The FAO’s representative for Asia and the Pacific region, Hiroyuki Konuma, admitted that food supply and demand were tight but said there were sufficient grain stocks to feed populations. Though certain foods such as sugar, meat, corn and soybeans are selling at a...

There is more trouble in store for South Korean steel maker Posco’s Orissa project. Shoreline surveys have found the state’s coastline to be highly erosive. Worse still, 50%, that is 4.8 km of the 9.3 km coastline along the proposed captive port site at Jatadhari is eroding. This is likely to put a spanner in the works for the South Korean company, which has been insistent on a separate captive...