Farming technology innovations

Modern agriculture is practised away from the cities. The world’s agricultural land is rapidly eroding. About 40 per cent of it is already degraded, and a substantial portion of the rest will be gone by 2050. So in 40 years, the earth may not have enough land to feed its large population. Transport of food uses up a considerable portion of the world’s energy production. Scientists have shown that plants actually do not need the soil to flourish, as long as they have an anchor and a source of water and nutrients. In fact, it turns out that plants anchored in the air — as in aeroponics — need only 10 per cent of the water used by those in farms.

Businessworld
Hari Pulakkat
By situating farms inside cities, we may reduce the need to transport food long distances. This trade-off may contribute to the economic viability of vertical farms. In Singapore, for example, aeroponics is commercially viable now for temperate climate salad greens. Another innovation in farming is hydroponics where crops grow on water. Neither hydroponics nor aeroponics systems would need to use pesticides in large measure.

Renminbi valuation dispute

The renminbi, estimated to be undervalued by 25-40 per cent, is a major point of dispute between China and the US. The artificially low currency, which acts as an effective subsidy to Chinese exporters, has raised complaints in the past, but since the havoc caused by the 2008 financial crisis, it has shot to the top of Washington’s list of concerns. With 15 million officially jobless, reviving the US economy and especially exports, has become the most critical issue.
Businessworld
Chinese mercantilist policy is increasingly seen as a major obstacle to the US recovery. Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman has made a ‘back-of-the-envelope assessment’, which concludes that the negative shock resulting from the Chinese policy to rest-of-the-world net exports is loss of 1.4 per cent of GDP. He calculates that it translates to 1.5 million lost jobs in the US alone. Whether accurate or not, in the months leading to the 2010 mid-term Congressional elections, China is certain to be held responsible for some of America’s economic distress.
China Daily:
If Washington uses trade protectionist measures as a tool to pressurize Beijing, it would jeopardize its own interests, top legislators said during the ongoing sessions of the National People's Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). "It is not right for the US to blame China for its economic problems," Sun Zhenyu, a CPPCC member, told China Daily.

The US has imposed a series of trade remedy measures against Chinese products and attacked China's exchange rate policy. International investment banks, for example the US-based Goldman Sachs, are playing up the benefit of quicker and bolder renminbi revaluation. However, Li Ruogu, former vice-governor of the central bank and president of the China Exim Bank, warned that Beijing should not bow to pressure from other countries given the still unstable economic recovery. Although exports are rising, growth prospects remain unclear.

Telecom Towers valuations and mergers

In India the pioneer of shared telecom towers infrastructure was GTL. Then Indus Towers was formed by a merger of the telecom towers built by three GSM operators: Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Essar and Idea Cellular. Sharing telecom towers leads to cost savings in site acquisition, civil works, annual site rent, transmission and operational costs for running the site. Setting up independent towers has led to overlapping and congestion, specially in urban areas, which has caused a fall in valuations. "Of more than 250,000 towers present today, 100,000 are unshared," says Manoj Tirodkar, chairman of GTL. Recently GTL Infrastructure paid Rs 48 lakh for each of Aircel’s 17,500 towers, which were valued at Rs 2 crore just two and half years earlier.

Buying towers brings readymade tenants. Moreover, towers have a life of 50 years. These facts, coupled with low valuations has led to a spate of mergers and acquisitions in the telecom tower business. Quippo Telecom transferred 5,000 of its towers to WTTIL. American Tower bought 100 per cent stake in Transcend, owning about 325 wireless sites for Rs 95 crore, while earlier it had acquired XCEL for $100 million. Unitech struck a Rs 6,120-crore deal with TTSL-Quippo. Tata Teleservices (TTSL) signed a passive infrastructure sharing deal with BSNL.
Businessworld