Links to other sites: News.com.au, Australia, MSNBC

World stocks have been depleted by two years of shortages. World sugar demand significantly outstripped supply in fiscal 2009, which ends in March 2010, pushing up the price of the white crystal and eating into world stocks. The price of white sugar rose 9 February for a second day in London trading on speculation that shortages will continue, reports Bloomberg. The price reached almost $724 for a metric ton (mt).

In 2009, too much rain in Brazil, the world’s largest producer, and poor rains in India, the world’s largest consumer nation, caused supplies to plunge. Brazil is forecast to produce 33.8 million mt in 2010-2011, up 5.4 mt, according to Kingsman. But adverse weather could threaten that forecast.

Background: “Sugar shortage gives India a sweet tooth ache“, 11 September 2009, GenevaLunch

Links to other sites: Bloomberg, Dubai Sugar Conference, Gulf News, Khaleej Times, Kingsman SA

Russian President Dmitri Medvedev called Yanukovich to congratulate him, and the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said: “We hope that relations with the new Ukrainian government will be positive and efficient.”

Links to other sites:BBC, CNN, Ria Novosti

Western nations on the UN Security Council prepared to garner support for even tighter sanctions on Iran. US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the UN should seek new sanctions against Iran in “weeks, not months.”

Iran’s move ends the plan to exchange Iranian low-grade uranium for foreign-sourced higher-grade uranium, which would have eliminated the possibility of developing enrichment facilities in Iran.

Links to other sites: CBC, Ria Novosti, The Times, Voice of America

Links to other sites: Times, UK, Telegraph, UK

Figures published in January 2009 by the Swiss Bankers Association show Switzerland as the global leader in offshore private banking money, with 27 percent of the world market. Other top players, such as the US and the UK, continue to lag well behind.

The news that Swiss banks are still pulling in large amounts of private wealth comes on the heels of several media reports in recent days that suggest Swiss banking has taken a severe battering. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) 31 January wrote of a “renewed assault” on Swiss banks, once it became clear that Germany was likely to buy bank client data stolen from a Swiss bank.

But the US newspaper a week later wrote that the “gloom on Swiss banks looks overdone”, saying that Germany’s threats are legally dubious and most likely designed a “ruse” to frighten clients. This plus the US-bank UBS court case in 2009 “must be seen in perspective.

“While UBS has suffered CHF56 billion of outflows of client money from its Swiss bank and wealth-management divisions since the US scandal broke, this amounts to a manageable 6 percent of assets under management. Julius Baer this week reported a 4 percent rise in inflows in 2009. And Credit Suisse hasn’t had a quarter of outflows since the start of the financial crisis. Most of the funds lost by UBS appear to have stayed in Switzerland.”

Wayne State Law (US) professor Wayne Henning writes in a New York Times blog that “While the edifice of secrecy has shown some cracks lately, it is still an open question whether there will be a serious breach in the wall of silence that the Swiss have built around their banking institutions.”

Newsweek goes so far as to entitle an article “The Death of Switzerland”.

The author of the article is British MP (Member of Parliament) Denis MacShane, who once lived in Switzerland. He writes of Swiss banks that “the Swiss people’s self-satisfied myths are rapidly evaporating. Take banking secrecy. The tradition began in the 1930s, when the Swiss sheltered French capital fleeing left-wing governments and then Jewish money escaping the Nazis. The trick was to make it a crime to reveal any details of a Swiss bank’s dealings—even to the Swiss tax man. The country quickly became famous for its no-questions-asked depositories.”

MacShane’s arguments are weakened, however, by article’s several errors, starting with the invention of the cuckoo clock, which is from the Black Forest and not Switzerland, and including the history of bank secrecy, whose tradition dates back to the 17th century, not the 1930s as he suggests. The 1934 law which enshrined banking secrecy as it is known now was in large part in response to depositers fleeing the collapse of their European currencies for the more stable Swiss franc.

Links to other sites: Euromoney on private bank rankings, New York Times blog, Newsweek, “The Death of Switzerland”, WSJ 31 January 2010, WSJ 7 February 2010

Links to other sites: Business Week, Reuters, Toyota recall notice

Homeless Haitians, post-earthquake, have set up tents on a golf course (photo: ©2010 Marco Dormino/UN)

Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in Geneva Tuesday 9 February made an urgent plea for another kind of aid for Haiti: weather services. The organization points out that “the rainy season with flood risk is due in early April and the hurricane season begins in early June. In order to prevent potential disasters related to natural hazards, which the country is prone to, the capacity of Haiti to produce and disseminate weather information and warnings needs to be developed without delay.”

More than 90 percent of the disasters in Haiti “are linked to frequently occurring meteorological, hydrological and climate-related hazards,” says the WMO.

The country’s meteorological services have operated only partially since the 12 January earthquake, so other WMO member countries have been providing weather information.

The Haiti National Meteorological Center (NMC) is operating from an airport tarmac, since their office building is unsafe to work in, and staff are collecting weather data observations manually at the two airports in Haiti. These are used “to refine the results obtained by the meteorological models available on the Internet and from other Meteorological Services through the WMO coordinated network.”

The United States, Canada and the Dominican Republic are among countries providing reports and forecasts for aviation safety and humanitarian operations, says the WMO, which emphasizes that weather reports are critical “for risk managers, humanitarian assistance entities and other decision-makers and the public in Haiti during the upcoming rainy and hurricane seasons.”

The WMO is working with governments to raise funds for a new office and new weather data stations, computers, and translators to provide information to humanitarian groups.