"International donors have pledged a record aid of more than $8 billion to Vietnam for the next year, a rise of more than $3 billion compared to last year. Within the package, $1.4 billion will be in the form of grants while the rest, $6.6 billion, will be in concessional loans.

The World Bank is the biggest multilateral donor this year, doubling last year's commitment of $2.5 billion. It is followed by the Asian Development Bank with nearly $1.5 billion. Among bilateral donors, Japan stands out with the biggest pledge of $1.64 billion."

"More than a billion people in Asia depend on Himalayan glaciers for water, but experts say they are melting at an alarming rate, threatening to bring drought to large swathes of the continent. Glaciers in the Himalayas, a 2,400-kilometer range that sweeps through Pakistan, India, China, Nepal and Bhutan, provide headwaters for Asia's nine largest rivers, lifelines for the 1.3 billion people who live downstream.

But temperatures in the region have increased by between 0.15 and 0.6 degrees Celsius each decade for the last 30 years, dramatically accelerating the rate at which glaciers are shrinking. As world leaders gather in Copenhagen this month for a crucial climate change summit, campaigners warn that some Himalayan glaciers could disappear altogether within a few decades."

"The World Bank and New Delhi are in talks about financing the international expansion of Indian Railways, one of the largest and most profitable networks in the world, to bring transport infrastructure to African countries and other developing nations. An ambitious partnership with Indian Railways is at the heart of a World Bank strategy to persuade India and China, two of the fastest-growing large economies, to participate more directly in the development of the world's poorest nations.

Indian Railways, which has revenues of about $18 billion, carries 20 million passengers a day on about 18,000 trains and employs 1.4 million people. It is one of the few mixed traffic systems, carrying both passengers and freight, that generates a cash surplus. Indian Railways has a growing business in Africa."

"World hunger and food insecurity is a recurring problem in most parts of the developing world. Among the many potential biotechnologies that are available, genetic modification (GM) of crops demands particular attention. Biotechnology offers a very promising alternative to synthetic foods and an improvement on conventional plant-breeding technologies.

Economists argue that resolving hunger requires political solutions and not just agro-technical solutions. According to them, instead of looking at biotechnology as a yet unproven and non-existent breakthrough, decision makers should look at the full body of research that shows that solutions to eliminate hunger are not technological in nature, but rooted in basic socio-economic realities. This is not to say that technology, including biotechnology, does not play a role in reducing, say, malnutrition, but there is no technology that can override the immediate political and social forces that keep people poor and hungry."

"The IMF has approved a 92.5-million-dollar bailout package to help the Maldives weather the global financial crisis. The Indian Ocean nation's economy has been hard hit by a fall in tourism, lower fish exports and a drop in capital inflows. The country's foreign reserves fell to over just two months of imports this year.

The 36-month economic program aims to reduce the country's fiscal deficit and ensure that social programs are not reduced. The Maldives has agreed to reduce the size of its government, cut civil servants' salaries, introduce corporate taxes and privatise loss-making enterprises while protecting the poor through targeted subsidies."

"Infant mortality rate in Bangladesh halved in 18 years since 1990, according to a recent Unicef report. The mortality rate of children below five also decreased from 149 to 54 per 1,000 within the period. However, despite some important steps taken by Bangladesh such as enacting the Labour Law in 2006 which prohibits hazardous labor for children, Bangladesh still needs to harmonize its national legislation with the principles and provisions of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Earlier on November 25, Unicef unveiled a study on child poverty and disparities in Bangladesh that stated over half of Bangladesh's children are living in poverty with deprivation of food, sanitation and shelter. The study also mentioned that 64 percent children are deprived of sanitation, 57 percent of nutrition, 52 percent of information, 41 percent of shelter, 16 percent of healthcare and 8 percent of education."

"The Indonesian government intends to renegotiate the implementation of the Free Trade Area in the Asean region and between Asean and China which would start on January 1, 2010. The coordinating minister for the economy, Hatta Radjasa, said that it was still being studied if there were possibilities to postpone the implementation of the agreement.

Several industrial sectors in Indonesia have complained about the planned implementation of the free trade agreement because they thought Indonesia was not yet ready for competing with goods from China. Several associations have asked the government to conduct renegotiations so that the planned imposition of free tariff agreement on several commodities could be postponed."

"The Asian Development Bank and the UK Department for International Development have entered into a new five-year strategic partnership to fight poverty in India. The British government would provide a grant of 14 million pounds for the partnership.

The partnership would directly benefit the poor by building roads, improving irrigation and developing cities in the poorest Indian states. Every $1 million contribution from DFID supports infrastructure investments of $300 million that directly benefits the poor. The new partnership offers opportunity to maximise the impact of ADB lending operations."

"China's State Council has approved a plan to develop the Yellow River Delta in East China's Shandong Province into an efficient and environmentally-friendly economic zone. The development of the country's last underdeveloped river delta will be raised to a nationally strategic level.

The development plan aims for regional growth of 15 percent annually during the five-year plan period. At the same time, it aims to lower the aggregate per-GDP energy consumption by 24 percent. Some experts doubt the practicability of such a plan and stated the ecological development of such an area could be just a political campaign."

"The Indian economy's 7.9 percent growth in the second quarter of this fiscal has taken everyone by surprise, but rising food inflation, which has seen the daily grocery bill shoot up sharply, has dampened some of the euphoria. The full impact of the poor summer monsoon may be felt in the third quarter.

The fears that the poor performance in the agricultural sector would impact the rest of the economy have not come true. In fact, manufacturing growth has been robust at 9.2 percent while mining and services have also risen by an equally healthy 9.5 and 9.3 percent, respectively."

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