Day: June 27, 2017

A boycott imposed by four Arab nations that accuse Qatar of supporting terrorism is squeezing the tourism sector, and Doha’s hotels, which would normally be full in the Eid al-Fitr holiday, have seen steep falls in their occupancy rates.

A Reuters survey of five major hotels found average occupancy was around 57 percent at the start of the Eid festival on Sunday, which marks the end of the Ramadan fasting month, when friends and families eat and pray together and take holidays.

“We’re usually packed with Saudis and Bahrainis, but not this year,” a staff member at a five-star hotel said.

But Qatar’s official news agency QNA cited officials and managers in the hotel sector reporting hotel occupancy over the holiday period stood at more than 95 percent and denied reports of lower rates.

“They pointed to high tourist flows from the Sultanate of Oman and the State of Kuwait and a significant increase in demand from domestic tourism,” QNA said.

Free night at some hotels

QNA said an offer by some hotels to offer guests staying two nights at hotels a third night free had helped win high occupancy and that the sector has shown its ability to “diversify away from traditional markets.”

Aviation analyst Will Horton estimated Hamad International Airport, one of the Middle East’s busiest, would handle 76 percent as many flights in early July compared with the same period last year, a loss of about 27,000 passengers a day.

The airport said in a statement Tuesday that it had experienced a “very busy” Eid period with 580,000 passengers passing through between June 19 and June 25. It did not give comparative figures for last year’s Eid.

Visitors from the rest of the Gulf Cooperation Council usually account for almost half of all visitors to Qatar. So a decision by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt to cut diplomatic and transport ties on June 5 hit traffic hard.

“Doha in early July, assuming the restrictions remain, will have less capacity than a year ago — a confronting figure for a region where every month sets year-on-year records,” said Horton, senior analyst at Australia’s CAPA Centre for Aviation.

There is no breakthrough in sight for the crisis, in which the four Arab nations issued an ultimatum to Doha to close Al Jazeera television, curb ties with Iran, shut a Turkish base and pay reparations. A defiant Doha has denied accusations of supporting terrorism and says the demands are unrealistic.

Airport losses

Hundreds of weekly flights to and from Qatar have already been canceled because of the dispute. Hamad airport stands to lose fees paid by airlines and passengers, as well as terminal revenue from duty free shops and restaurants.

Air links suspended by the four Arab states represented around 25 percent of flights by state-owned Qatar Airways, one of the region’s big three carriers.

Qatar Airways, whose hub is Hamad airport, said on Tuesday that 510,949 of its passengers had traveled through the airport in the past seven days. It did not give comparative figures.

Qatar Airways Chief Executive Akbar al-Baker had said on June 14 the majority of its operations had not been affected by restrictions imposed by the four Arab states.

Elsewhere in the tourist sector, hotels, restaurants and other facilities have had to find new sources of services and goods — in some cases, at higher cost — because of the boycott, said Rashid Aboobacker, senior director at TRI Consulting in Dubai.

“A substantial drop in visitor arrivals is likely to force hotel and real estate developers to re-evaluate their strategies and priorities, potentially causing delays to some of the ongoing [tourism] projects,” he said.

Qatar’s 2022 FIFA World Cup organizing committee has said sanctions have not affected preparations for the tournament, and that alternative sources for construction materials have been secured.

Qatar has said 46,000 rooms will be available to host fans by the time of the World Cup. In March, it had 119 hotels with 23,347 rooms, according to the tourism authority.

Developing business and leisure tourism is part of Qatar’s drive to develop its economy away from reliance on oil and gas revenue.

Doha aims to raise the tourism sector’s contribution to GDP to 5.2 percent by 2030 from around 4.1 percent now, while raising the number of people employed by nearly 70 percent to 127,900.
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U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said Tuesday that the United States and the European Union should have a free trade agreement, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel called for work on such an accord to resume.

President Donald Trump has withdrawn the U.S. from an agreement with nations around the Pacific, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but the fate of a proposed trade deal with the EU has been less clear. Merkel vowed recently not to give up on that accord, the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.

Ross told a conference in Berlin attended by Merkel that the U.S. had made a “conscious decision not to walk away from TTIP” when it ditched the Pacific accord. That, he said, signaled Washington’s receptiveness to trade negotiations with Europe.

“I stand before you tonight to say this in a more explicit fashion: We, as major trading partners of each other, should have a free trade agreement,” Ross said. He addressed the event, organized by a group linked to Merkel’s party, by video link after canceling a trip to Berlin on short notice.

“In contrast to the behavior of some other nations, the relatively small number of trade disputes between our countries augurs well for the enforceability of any such agreement,” Ross added.

The Trump administration sees “little point in negotiating treaties that will not be honored,” he said. “We believe that we have in Europe a good counterparty with whom we have had, and will continue to have, productive discussions that benefit all.”

He didn’t specify when talks should be held on an accord.

Merkel, speaking after Ross, said that “we should resume work on a trade agreement between the EU and the United States.”

“The multitude of problems that arise … can only be dealt with in structured trade negotiations with each other,” she said.  

The Trump administration’s “America First” approach to trade has caused widespread concern in Europe and beyond. Trump also has criticized Germany for its sizeable trade surplus with the United States.
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President Donald Trump on Thursday will lay out his plan for reducing regulations to boost already-abundant U.S. production of oil, natural gas and coal and export it around the world, creating American jobs and helping allies.

Trump will deliver an address on his administration’s new mantra of “energy dominance” at the Energy Department, officials told reporters. They declined to give details on how he would tweak existing regulations that have not stopped a surge in exports.

“We’ve gone from the age of scarcity now to the age of abundance when it comes to American energy,” Mike Catanzaro, a White House energy policy aide, told reporters.

“We want to use those abundant resources for good here at home and for good abroad as well,” Catanzaro said.

Trump’s speech comes a week before he meets in Warsaw with leaders of a dozen central and eastern European nations who are eager to see more U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) in their markets as an alternative to Russian gas.

Trump is stopping at the summit on his way to the G20 in Hamburg, Germany, where he is expected to meet face-to-face for the first time in his presidency with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Shipments of LNG will play a big part in the “energy dominance” strategy, Energy Secretary Rick Perry told reporters, but so will exports of coal and U.S. technology that helps reduce emissions from coal-fired plants, he said.

Perry said he discussed the potential for U.S. coal exports to Ukraine with President Petro Poroshenko during his visit to Washington last week.

The Trump administration believes in an “all-of-the-above” approach to energy, Perry said – borrowing the energy catch-phrase of the Obama administration.

U.S. domestic energy prices have plunged in recent years because of the natural gas boom, crowding out competing sources of power, including coal and nuclear. Dozens of nuclear power reactors are in danger of shutting down over the next several years as a result.

The Trump administration wants to make sure the United States remains “technologically and economically engaged” in the nuclear industry, Perry said. “If we do not, then China and Russia will fill that void,” he said.

But he said the administration would not be “wildly supportive” of subsidizing any sectors of the energy industry.

Perry said energy supports in the tax code would be examined as the administration and Congress look at tax reform later this year.

“I think we’ll have a good healthy conversation about the energy sector and tax incentives, subsidies – all of that needs to be on the table and we need to have a conversation about it,” Perry said.
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New York City real estate companies’ attempts to rename a Harlem neighborhood “SoHa” have enraged longtime residents of the historically black enclave, who say the move erases the community’s rich cultural history.

The neighborhood served as home and inspiration to generations of leading African-Americans, including activists W.E.B. Du Bois and Malcolm X, who dubbed it “Seventh Heaven.” Artists such as poet Langston Hughes and singers Harry Belafonte and Ella Fitzgerald also lived there.

The “SoHa” name, echoing the high-priced, largely white Manhattan neighborhood of SoHo in lower Manhattan, has begun appearing in real estate listings for apartments located between 110th Street and 125th Street, and Realtor Keller Williams boasts a “SoHa Team” of agents on its website.

Keller Williams did not respond to a request for comment.

Harlem’s U.S. Congressman Adriano Espaillat vowed to introduce a House resolution to protect Harlem from being renamed.

“#WeRHarlem! And we refuse to be called by any other name! #NY13 #HarlemStrong,” @RepEspaillat wrote on Twitter on Monday.

The tweet accompanied a photograph of the famed Apollo Theater, where Fitzgerald made her singing debut at age 17 on Amateur Night in 1934.

Espaillat said the congressional resolution he plans to introduce this week “supports imposing limitations on the ability to change the name of a neighborhood based on economic gain.”

“I along with leaders and constituents of this community stand united to vigorously oppose the renaming Harlem in yet another sanctioned gentrification,” he said in an email. “This is an incredibly insulting attempt to disown Harlem’s longtime residents, legacy, and culture.”

Jamie McShane, a spokesman for the Real Estate Board of New York, an industry association, said the group supports existing state regulations, which prohibit real estate brokers from using “a name to describe an area that would be misleading to the public.”

Harlem is not the only historically black U.S. neighborhood to have its image challenged by eager real estate agents.

Further north, parts of the South Bronx have been christened the “Piano District,” a reference to its former instrument manufacturing base.

In Washington, D.C., real estate firms have recast the Shaw neighborhood around historically black Howard University as North End of Shaw.

Both sparked outrage among longtime residents, particularly after developers who pushed the Piano District name change threw a “Bronx is Burning” themed Halloween party in 2015 that focused on the neighborhood’s 1970’s decay, complete with a bullet-riddled car sculpture.
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Making agriculture profitable and “cool” for young people in Africa is key to lifting millions out of poverty and stemming migration to Europe, said the president of the African Development Bank (AfDB).

Akinwumi Adesina was named the winner of this year’s World Food Prize on Monday for his decades-long work to boost food production in his native Nigeria, increase access to credit for small farmers across Africa and transform the continent’s agriculture.

Kenneth Quinn, president of the Des Moines, Iowa-based World Food Prize Foundation, said the $250,000 award reflected Adesina’s “breakthrough achievements” as Nigeria’s minister of agriculture and his critical role in the development of the nonprofit Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.

Adesina, 57, told Reuters he was humbled by the award but felt his work to ensure Africa could feed itself was “uncompleted business.”

Almost 30 percent of the 795 million people in the world who do not have enough to eat are in Africa, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

“When I look at Africa today, I see that many rural areas unfortunately have become zones of economic misery,” Adesina said in a phone interview ahead of the award’s announcement.

No sector has greater potential to revive those areas than agriculture, but investments are needed to make it attractive for young people, many of whom risk their lives migrating in search of better opportunities in Europe, Adesina said.

“We must make agriculture cool for young people,” he said. “The key is to make agriculture a business. Agriculture is not a way of life, is not a development activity, it’s a business.”

Africa has 65 percent of the world’s uncultivated arable land but imports food for $35 billion every year, a bill that is expected to swell to $110 billion by 2025, he said.

“It makes no sense. That is food Africa should be producing, processing, selling and exporting,” he said. “Africa in the future should not only feed itself, but it must contribute to feeding the world.”

Toward this end, agriculture must become more industrialized, with farmers gaining better access to seeds, fertilizer, credit, power and infrastructure, he said.

Farmers should be supported to transform from producers of raw materials, such as cocoa and cotton, to manufacturers of finished goods such as chocolate and garments, which have less volatile prices, Adesina said.

To accelerate growth, the AfDB aimed to invest $12 billion in the energy sector, hoping to leverage another $50 billion from the private sector, he said.

Last year, AfDB had invested $800 million to support young agro-entrepreneurs in eight countries and planned to extend the scheme to 30 nations, he added.

Adesina called on governments and institutional investors, such as pension and insurance funds, to “see the gold” in African agriculture and invest in it to unlock its potential. He said he was convinced the future billionaires of Africa would come from agriculture.

“I don’t believe that the future of African youth lies at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea,” he said. “The future of African young people lies in a more prosperous and inclusive Africa, and there is no other sector that has greater power to create growth than the agricultural sector.”

Adesina was named winner of the World Food Prize, regarded as the equivalent of a Nobel Prize for agriculture, in a ceremony on Monday at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington.
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Jury selection began Monday in the trial of a Chinese billionaire accused of bribing United Nations diplomats to gain their approval of a U.N. conference center he wanted to build.

Ng Lap Seng has pleaded not guilty. He has posted $50 million bail, but is restricted to a luxury New York City apartment that he owns, where he is under guard around the clock. He is allowed to leave his apartment only to visit his doctors or his lawyers.

Ng, who is 69, is accused of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes for the center he planned to build in Macau.

Prosecutors say some of the money reached former General Assembly president John Ashe and a former diplomat from the Dominican Republic, Francis Lorenzo.

Ashe died last year in a freak accident while lifting weights at his home.

Lorenzo pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with U.S. prosecutors in the case against Ng.

Ng’s lawyers contend the charges are politically motivated, aimed at trying to curb China’s influence over developing countries that might have used the Macau conference center.

If prosecutors and defense lawyers can agree on selection of a jury without delay, the judge in the case estimated the trial would last a month or perhaps longer.
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