Word: palmes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Eighteen months ago, when the world was awash in asset bubbles, there was perhaps no market more overheated than commodities. Prices of everything from iron ore to palm oil to corn reached dizzying heights. Crude oil nearly quintupled in five years; rice tripled in only five months. World Bank President Robert Zoellick called rising food and oil prices a "man-made catastrophe" that had the potential to quickly erase years of progress in overcoming poverty. Pundits dusted off Malthusian theories that the planet was physically unable to support the burgeoning appetites of an increasingly wealthy global population...
...over the past several months, the prices of oil, copper, palm oil and others have rallied. This shouldn't be happening given the parlous state of the world economy. The International Monetary Fund in April cut its global growth forecast for 2009, predicting GDP would contract by 1.3%, the most severe recession since the 1930s. Yet oil is some 60% more expensive now than in December. Palm oil, which is used in a wide variety of manufactured foods, has surged more than 50% this year. "The only area of the world economy I know of where the fundamentals are improving...
...investment today causes tighter supply down the road. At the same time, there is every reason to believe that emerging markets such as China and India will continue to be ever more voracious consumers of iron ore, oil and food as their economies get bigger and their citizens richer. Palm-oil prices, for example, have been rising of late partly because demand from India, with its population of 1 billion, is holding up. In March, China imported a record amount of iron ore and coal, while imports of crude oil hit a 12-month high. The binge is being fueled...
...dissidents. Though he is tight-lipped about the particulars of his own ordeal, testimony from many other detainees tells of men dunked into the sea, forced to eat glass, kept in solitary confinement or left exposed in the sun for days, or doused in molasses and tied to palm trees, at the mercy of the inevitable insect swarm. "It was God's will that I didn't die," says Nasheed of his experience as a political prisoner, in an interview with TIME at his presidential office. "They wanted me to capitulate, but I just couldn't do it." (See pictures...
...been hunted and captured over the years, prised from the hands of their slain mothers, to sell as pets. Those who are spared this fate are left to cope with a habitat that is shrinking daily, as agribusiness firms continue their relentless drive to turn Kalimantan's forests into palm-oil plantations. "I cannot convey the horror of it," says Canadian primatologist Birute Galdikas, a protégé of the late naturalist Louis Leakey and the world's leading authority on orangutans...