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Here I will post news on the Chinese economy/development - currently the world's second largest economy. PLEASE DO NOT FLAME. Do not comment if you have nothing substantial to add.
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Following two articles from FT.
Taiwan caters to Chinas giant fish appetite
By Robin Kwong in Fangliao
Published: September 17 2010 23:29 | Last updated: September 17 2010 23:29
Choosing your own dinner from a large fish tank is a central attraction of Hong Kongs famous seafood restaurants.
As the rest of China grows increasingly enamoured with Cantonese cuisine, a Taiwanese company is hoping to cash in, with a boost from a trade deal between Taiwan and China.
The most valuable fish from Long Diann Marine Bio Technologys aquaculture farms in the Taiwanese seaside town of Fangliao is unlikely to be found in any restaurant tank. The giant grouper, whose steamed flesh is the most prized among Hong Kong gastronomes, can reach 2.5 metres long and weigh 600 kilos.
Tai Kun-tsai, the owner of Long Diann, was the first in the world to reliably breed the huge fish for farming. Mr Tai, who keeps two 150kg pet grouper in a tank in his living room, has since emerged as Taiwan's biggest grouper farmer.
Partly because of Mr Tais technology, Taiwan has emerged as the worlds only significant exporter of farmed giant grouper. Other countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand ship wild giant grouper caught from the sea.
Almost all of Mr Tais T$200m ($6.3m) sales last year were to Hong Kong, the worlds biggest market for grouper. Over the past year, however, Mr Tai has seen demand surge from mainland Chinese cities such as Shanghai and Beijing. Prices for farmed giant grouper have almost doubled from T$280 a kilo a year ago to T$480 ($15).
The surge in demand and the rise in prices for grouper over the past year was the biggest I have seen since I began this business more than 20 years ago, Mr Tai says.
Chinas growing appetite stands to make Mr Tai and Fangliaos other grouper farmers significant beneficiaries of the Economic Co-operation Framework Agreement, the first formal trade deal between Taiwan and China. China considers Taiwan part of its territory even though the island has been ruled as a de facto independent state since 1949.
Besides eliminating the current 13 per cent Chinese tariff on live fish, the deal, which came into effect this month, will see Beijing remove tariffs on more than 500 products from Taiwan to the benefit of the islands bicycle, petrochemicals and machinery industries.
Taiwan grouper production has already risen from T$2bn in 2007 to T$3bn last year, according to Mr Tai, and huge capacity expansions are now being planned to tap growing Chinese demand. Over the next three years, Mr Tai plans to invest T$300m to T$500m to triple the size of his fish farm, betting he can quintuple annual revenue to T$1bn.
The growth of the mainland Chinese market has really just begun, Mr Tai said. We expect the greater China market to grow by 20 per cent every year.
Mr Tais efforts are backed by the government, which is promoting grouper as a new national export.
James Sha, director-general of Taiwans Fisheries Agency, says grouper avoid direct competition with China, whose coastal areas become too cold for the species during the winter.
There are very few grouper farmers in China, he said. They mostly focus on freshwater fish.
Mr Sha says the trade deal opens the door for grouper farmers, typically small family businesses, to develop into bigger companies by entering new markets such as supplying frozen fish to inland Chinese provinces.
We want to help make sure the farmers have alternative markets in case prices crash, Mr Sha says.
****************************************
The fate of the last giant pandas of China
By Henry Nicholls
Published: September 17 2010 22:20 | Last updated: September 17 2010 22:20
A panda cub in the Wolong Valley, China
In Chinas rural west, embedded in the crumpled mountain range that rises up to the Tibetan plateau, is a small town called Baoxing. Here, daily life is dominated by the mining industry. Rusty trucks bring in vast hunks of raw marble, freshly hewn from the surrounding mountains. Factories along the roadside cut them into *perfect worktop slabs destined for distant designer kitchens. A thick film of white dust coats everything, including the huge Baoxing River, which carries the dust off through a seemingly infinite series of hydro- electric dams towards the Yangtze.
This much is typical of the frenetic pace of industry across China, a country whose economy has been growing at a staggering pace for decades. But Baoxing deserves special attention, for the steep, bamboo-clad slopes above the town are part of the best-preserved panda habitat on earth. Roadside artisans reflect this, fashioning miniature pandas from small chunks of marble, stone models of the live animals that dwell in the hills. In Baoxing, two sides of China are on show: one determined to extract prosperity from the natural world and another intent on conservation even at the expense of development.
As an exclusively Chinese animal and one that has, since the 1950s, emerged as the countrys national treasure, the giant panda tells us much about the progress of modern China. It was through this valley, in June 1935, that the Communist Party of Chinas Red Army passed on its Long March to escape the Chinese Nationalist party. One of the few to survive the year-long, 6,000-mile ordeal was Mao Zedong, who carried the CPC to power in 1949. Within a decade, the giant panda was well on its way to becoming a national ambassador. It was perfect for the job: rare, beautiful and, importantly for Mao, it carried no imperial baggage whatsoever.
Painting the panda was not only acceptable during the Cultural Revolution, it was positively encouraged, and by the 1960s its alluring black-and-white form had become synonymous with China. Better still, the west had become increasingly obsessed with the species, thanks largely to animals collected in the vicinity of Baoxing. In 1869, Père Armand David, a French missionary, found specimens there that became the basis for the formal scientific description of this species. In 1936, Ruth Harkness, an American fashion designer, brought the first live panda, Su-Lin, out of China, a 3lb cub who captured western hearts.
Edwin Heath visits one of the pandas given to the UK by China in 1974
Mao, quite sensibly, exploited this interest with gusto. Between 1957 and 1983, he gave away more than 20 animals most of them sourced from the mountains around Baoxing to foster ties with a string of carefully chosen countries. Most famously, he gave a pair to Richard Nixon, Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, after his historic visit to China in 1972. The UK also benefited from panda diplomacy when, following prime minister Edward Heaths visit to China in 1974, London Zoo received Chia-Chia and Ching-Ching.
Mindful of Chinas increasingly open stance towards the west, the World Wildlife Fund requested permission to study the creature which inspired its logo. But during rounds of intense negotiations in late 1979, it transpired that the privilege would cost the charity $1m, money that China put towards the construction of a state-of-the-art breeding facility near the Wolong Nature Reserve, several hours drive north of Baoxing. It was a price worth paying, as the research collaboration between China and the WWF, which began the following year, greatly increased our knowledge of the life of the panda in the wild.
At the same time, in keeping with Chinas increasingly tough economic stance, the CPC stopped giving away pandas and moved instead to an explicitly commercial model, renting out pandas to foreign zoos on lucrative short-term loans. In 1998 the policy changed and pairs of pandas started to leave China on long-term loans, which improved the chances of reproduction in captivity. Today, China is so self-sufficient that it could happily run the panda show alone, but these loans still make sound financial sense. Most US zoos with pandas, for example, currently pay $500,000 a pair annually to show off these rarities. However confident the Chinese might feel about their own economy, its hard to see why they would turn down this revenue.
. . .
As Chinas prosperity has grown, so the environment with the giant panda as its public face has been moving up the political agenda. There has been a lot of work to do. Between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, vast swathes of Chinese forest were felled, including about half of the giant pandas natural habitat. This deforestation is thought to have played a big role in the devastating floods that spread across the Yangzte River basin in 1998, killing thousands and costing tens of billions of dollars to repair. Without trees to sponge up rainwater, Sichuans bare mountainsides funnelled it directly into the river system.
China responded to this crisis with some of the worlds boldest environmental initiatives. The Natural Forest Protection Programme, a nationwide logging ban launched in 1998, put in place tough new measures for the protection of forests and halted most commercial logging in the upper reaches of the Yangtze, the heart of panda country. In addition, Chinas Grain for Green programme has converted crops on steep slopes to grass and forest. Since 1999, when pilot projects began in Sichuan, Gansu and Shaanxi (the three provinces that still have wild pandas), China has spent $40bn on the programme.
A marble statue of pandas in the centre of Baoxing addresses the towns twin concerns of mining and conservation
Its hard to know how successful these measures will be in preventing more flooding, but they have certainly improved the plight of the panda. Before the nationwide logging ban, loggers were reluctant to acknowledge that the forests they worked in were home to pandas, as to do so would have endangered their livelihoods. With the ban in place, however, pandas *suddenly became an asset, as the same workers looked for other sources of income. This helps to explain why the number of protected areas dedicated to giant pandas leapt from about 20 before the ban to more than 60 today, with several more being added every year. It also made it possible for China to propose the mountains around Baoxing as a Unesco World Heritage Site, one that occupies one million hectares embracing seven nature reserves, nine parks and almost 30 per cent of the worlds wild panda population. With more than 5,000 plant species about the same number as there are in France the Sichuan Giant Panda Sanctuaries World Heritage Site has richer botanical treasures than those found anywhere else outside the tropics.
But Chinas ambitions for its underdeveloped west do not sit comfortably with these impressive green achievements. In 2000, the Western China Development Plan got under way, a huge initiative to pull the western half of the country up to the standards of the relatively developed east. China makes bold claims for its environmental protection as it goes about this massive project, but there are real tensions at play, and the devastating Sichuan earthquake of 2008, which left some 90,000 people dead and at least five million homeless, has made it all the harder to pursue development and conservation simultaneously. China must now rebuild the infrastructure of this fragile region ruptured dams, fractured roads, entire towns. What impact will this have on pandas?
China is fortunate in being able to avoid the destruction of flora and fauna that characterised the industrial revolutions in Britain and other western countries. There are signs that it is determined not to make the same mistakes. It is in places such as Baoxing, where Chinas raw industrial spirit meets its precious, fragile ecology, that we will find out if they succeed. Pandas have been living here for thousands of years. At the last official census a decade ago, there were just a few hundred left in the region. The chances of seeing one are virtually nil, so why bother to try to save them? The answer, surely, is the powerful symbolism of the giant panda, which rests on its continued survival outside captivity. Lose the panda in the wild and modern China will have lost its own identity.
Henry Nicholls is author of The Way of the Panda: The Curious History of Chinas Political Animal (Profile).
******************************************
From SCMP
Dell set to invest US$100b on mainland
New manufacturing and service complex in Chengdu will eventually employ 3,000
Bien Perez
Sep 18, 2010
Computer maker Dell plans to spend more than US$100 billion on the mainland over the next decade to accelerate expansion in its second-biggest market after the United States.
That commitment includes Dell's total investment in facilities, employment, research and development, and purchases from mainland suppliers.
Dell, the world's second-largest supplier of personal computers, will open its second flagship manufacturing and customer support complex in Chengdu next year. The company also plans to open an additional office at its first computer manufacturing centre in Xiamen and hire up to 500 new staff later this year to support its growth in North Asia.
"These investments are indicative of how Dell sees the importance of China, which will soon become the world's biggest personal computer market," Bryan Ma, associate vice-president of Asia-Pacific devices and peripherals research at International Data Corp (IDC), said yesterday.
IDC forecasts mainland personal computer volumes to surpass those of the United States by 2012, "if not sooner", Ma said.
It has estimated total personal computer shipments on the mainland will reach 97 million units in 2012, up from 81 million units next year and 67 million units this year. Shipments in the US, by comparison, are predicted to hit 93 million units in 2012, from 86 million units next year and 78 million units this year.
Demand for computer systems in western China is expected to grow an average of 21 per cent annually through 2014.
"We're planning for the future, and we're excited about our strategic investments in China that will help us better serve the region's increasing need for technology solutions and services," Dell chairman and chief executive Michael Dell said.
The Texas-based computer maker is developing its new manufacturing and customer support facility inside the West Chengdu High-Tech Park. Its new complex is expected have a staff of up to 3,000 over time after starting operations next year.
Amit Midha, the president of Dell China, said: "The strong Chengdu workforce and our new operations there will better position Dell for additional growth opportunities in western China."
Dell estimated its revenue on the mainland had "increased 11 times" from financial years 2000 to 2010. In the firm's latest financial quarter, it reported mainland sales grew 52 per cent year on year.
According to IDC, Dell has moved ahead of Hewlett-Packard, the world's leading personal computer supplier, to become the mainland's No2 brand. It estimated Dell took a 9 per cent domestic share in the second quarter to edge HP, which had an 8.2 per cent share. Lenovo Group (SEHK: 0992, announcements, news) led the market with a 28.7 per cent share.
Stephen Felice, the president of Dell's global consumer and small and medium business operations, has said the firm's annual mainland sales are approaching US$5 billion.
Dell said the expansion in Chengdu supports the government's western China development strategy, which aims to boost the development of trade and other commercial initiatives in the country's inland western region.
**************************
Following two articles from FT.
Taiwan caters to Chinas giant fish appetite
By Robin Kwong in Fangliao
Published: September 17 2010 23:29 | Last updated: September 17 2010 23:29
Choosing your own dinner from a large fish tank is a central attraction of Hong Kongs famous seafood restaurants.
As the rest of China grows increasingly enamoured with Cantonese cuisine, a Taiwanese company is hoping to cash in, with a boost from a trade deal between Taiwan and China.
The most valuable fish from Long Diann Marine Bio Technologys aquaculture farms in the Taiwanese seaside town of Fangliao is unlikely to be found in any restaurant tank. The giant grouper, whose steamed flesh is the most prized among Hong Kong gastronomes, can reach 2.5 metres long and weigh 600 kilos.
Tai Kun-tsai, the owner of Long Diann, was the first in the world to reliably breed the huge fish for farming. Mr Tai, who keeps two 150kg pet grouper in a tank in his living room, has since emerged as Taiwan's biggest grouper farmer.
Partly because of Mr Tais technology, Taiwan has emerged as the worlds only significant exporter of farmed giant grouper. Other countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand ship wild giant grouper caught from the sea.
Almost all of Mr Tais T$200m ($6.3m) sales last year were to Hong Kong, the worlds biggest market for grouper. Over the past year, however, Mr Tai has seen demand surge from mainland Chinese cities such as Shanghai and Beijing. Prices for farmed giant grouper have almost doubled from T$280 a kilo a year ago to T$480 ($15).
The surge in demand and the rise in prices for grouper over the past year was the biggest I have seen since I began this business more than 20 years ago, Mr Tai says.
Chinas growing appetite stands to make Mr Tai and Fangliaos other grouper farmers significant beneficiaries of the Economic Co-operation Framework Agreement, the first formal trade deal between Taiwan and China. China considers Taiwan part of its territory even though the island has been ruled as a de facto independent state since 1949.
Besides eliminating the current 13 per cent Chinese tariff on live fish, the deal, which came into effect this month, will see Beijing remove tariffs on more than 500 products from Taiwan to the benefit of the islands bicycle, petrochemicals and machinery industries.
Taiwan grouper production has already risen from T$2bn in 2007 to T$3bn last year, according to Mr Tai, and huge capacity expansions are now being planned to tap growing Chinese demand. Over the next three years, Mr Tai plans to invest T$300m to T$500m to triple the size of his fish farm, betting he can quintuple annual revenue to T$1bn.
The growth of the mainland Chinese market has really just begun, Mr Tai said. We expect the greater China market to grow by 20 per cent every year.
Mr Tais efforts are backed by the government, which is promoting grouper as a new national export.
James Sha, director-general of Taiwans Fisheries Agency, says grouper avoid direct competition with China, whose coastal areas become too cold for the species during the winter.
There are very few grouper farmers in China, he said. They mostly focus on freshwater fish.
Mr Sha says the trade deal opens the door for grouper farmers, typically small family businesses, to develop into bigger companies by entering new markets such as supplying frozen fish to inland Chinese provinces.
We want to help make sure the farmers have alternative markets in case prices crash, Mr Sha says.
****************************************
The fate of the last giant pandas of China
By Henry Nicholls
Published: September 17 2010 22:20 | Last updated: September 17 2010 22:20
A panda cub in the Wolong Valley, China
In Chinas rural west, embedded in the crumpled mountain range that rises up to the Tibetan plateau, is a small town called Baoxing. Here, daily life is dominated by the mining industry. Rusty trucks bring in vast hunks of raw marble, freshly hewn from the surrounding mountains. Factories along the roadside cut them into *perfect worktop slabs destined for distant designer kitchens. A thick film of white dust coats everything, including the huge Baoxing River, which carries the dust off through a seemingly infinite series of hydro- electric dams towards the Yangtze.
This much is typical of the frenetic pace of industry across China, a country whose economy has been growing at a staggering pace for decades. But Baoxing deserves special attention, for the steep, bamboo-clad slopes above the town are part of the best-preserved panda habitat on earth. Roadside artisans reflect this, fashioning miniature pandas from small chunks of marble, stone models of the live animals that dwell in the hills. In Baoxing, two sides of China are on show: one determined to extract prosperity from the natural world and another intent on conservation even at the expense of development.
As an exclusively Chinese animal and one that has, since the 1950s, emerged as the countrys national treasure, the giant panda tells us much about the progress of modern China. It was through this valley, in June 1935, that the Communist Party of Chinas Red Army passed on its Long March to escape the Chinese Nationalist party. One of the few to survive the year-long, 6,000-mile ordeal was Mao Zedong, who carried the CPC to power in 1949. Within a decade, the giant panda was well on its way to becoming a national ambassador. It was perfect for the job: rare, beautiful and, importantly for Mao, it carried no imperial baggage whatsoever.
Painting the panda was not only acceptable during the Cultural Revolution, it was positively encouraged, and by the 1960s its alluring black-and-white form had become synonymous with China. Better still, the west had become increasingly obsessed with the species, thanks largely to animals collected in the vicinity of Baoxing. In 1869, Père Armand David, a French missionary, found specimens there that became the basis for the formal scientific description of this species. In 1936, Ruth Harkness, an American fashion designer, brought the first live panda, Su-Lin, out of China, a 3lb cub who captured western hearts.
Edwin Heath visits one of the pandas given to the UK by China in 1974
Mao, quite sensibly, exploited this interest with gusto. Between 1957 and 1983, he gave away more than 20 animals most of them sourced from the mountains around Baoxing to foster ties with a string of carefully chosen countries. Most famously, he gave a pair to Richard Nixon, Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, after his historic visit to China in 1972. The UK also benefited from panda diplomacy when, following prime minister Edward Heaths visit to China in 1974, London Zoo received Chia-Chia and Ching-Ching.
Mindful of Chinas increasingly open stance towards the west, the World Wildlife Fund requested permission to study the creature which inspired its logo. But during rounds of intense negotiations in late 1979, it transpired that the privilege would cost the charity $1m, money that China put towards the construction of a state-of-the-art breeding facility near the Wolong Nature Reserve, several hours drive north of Baoxing. It was a price worth paying, as the research collaboration between China and the WWF, which began the following year, greatly increased our knowledge of the life of the panda in the wild.
At the same time, in keeping with Chinas increasingly tough economic stance, the CPC stopped giving away pandas and moved instead to an explicitly commercial model, renting out pandas to foreign zoos on lucrative short-term loans. In 1998 the policy changed and pairs of pandas started to leave China on long-term loans, which improved the chances of reproduction in captivity. Today, China is so self-sufficient that it could happily run the panda show alone, but these loans still make sound financial sense. Most US zoos with pandas, for example, currently pay $500,000 a pair annually to show off these rarities. However confident the Chinese might feel about their own economy, its hard to see why they would turn down this revenue.
. . .
As Chinas prosperity has grown, so the environment with the giant panda as its public face has been moving up the political agenda. There has been a lot of work to do. Between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, vast swathes of Chinese forest were felled, including about half of the giant pandas natural habitat. This deforestation is thought to have played a big role in the devastating floods that spread across the Yangzte River basin in 1998, killing thousands and costing tens of billions of dollars to repair. Without trees to sponge up rainwater, Sichuans bare mountainsides funnelled it directly into the river system.
China responded to this crisis with some of the worlds boldest environmental initiatives. The Natural Forest Protection Programme, a nationwide logging ban launched in 1998, put in place tough new measures for the protection of forests and halted most commercial logging in the upper reaches of the Yangtze, the heart of panda country. In addition, Chinas Grain for Green programme has converted crops on steep slopes to grass and forest. Since 1999, when pilot projects began in Sichuan, Gansu and Shaanxi (the three provinces that still have wild pandas), China has spent $40bn on the programme.
A marble statue of pandas in the centre of Baoxing addresses the towns twin concerns of mining and conservation
Its hard to know how successful these measures will be in preventing more flooding, but they have certainly improved the plight of the panda. Before the nationwide logging ban, loggers were reluctant to acknowledge that the forests they worked in were home to pandas, as to do so would have endangered their livelihoods. With the ban in place, however, pandas *suddenly became an asset, as the same workers looked for other sources of income. This helps to explain why the number of protected areas dedicated to giant pandas leapt from about 20 before the ban to more than 60 today, with several more being added every year. It also made it possible for China to propose the mountains around Baoxing as a Unesco World Heritage Site, one that occupies one million hectares embracing seven nature reserves, nine parks and almost 30 per cent of the worlds wild panda population. With more than 5,000 plant species about the same number as there are in France the Sichuan Giant Panda Sanctuaries World Heritage Site has richer botanical treasures than those found anywhere else outside the tropics.
But Chinas ambitions for its underdeveloped west do not sit comfortably with these impressive green achievements. In 2000, the Western China Development Plan got under way, a huge initiative to pull the western half of the country up to the standards of the relatively developed east. China makes bold claims for its environmental protection as it goes about this massive project, but there are real tensions at play, and the devastating Sichuan earthquake of 2008, which left some 90,000 people dead and at least five million homeless, has made it all the harder to pursue development and conservation simultaneously. China must now rebuild the infrastructure of this fragile region ruptured dams, fractured roads, entire towns. What impact will this have on pandas?
China is fortunate in being able to avoid the destruction of flora and fauna that characterised the industrial revolutions in Britain and other western countries. There are signs that it is determined not to make the same mistakes. It is in places such as Baoxing, where Chinas raw industrial spirit meets its precious, fragile ecology, that we will find out if they succeed. Pandas have been living here for thousands of years. At the last official census a decade ago, there were just a few hundred left in the region. The chances of seeing one are virtually nil, so why bother to try to save them? The answer, surely, is the powerful symbolism of the giant panda, which rests on its continued survival outside captivity. Lose the panda in the wild and modern China will have lost its own identity.
Henry Nicholls is author of The Way of the Panda: The Curious History of Chinas Political Animal (Profile).
******************************************
From SCMP
Dell set to invest US$100b on mainland
New manufacturing and service complex in Chengdu will eventually employ 3,000
Bien Perez
Sep 18, 2010
Computer maker Dell plans to spend more than US$100 billion on the mainland over the next decade to accelerate expansion in its second-biggest market after the United States.
That commitment includes Dell's total investment in facilities, employment, research and development, and purchases from mainland suppliers.
Dell, the world's second-largest supplier of personal computers, will open its second flagship manufacturing and customer support complex in Chengdu next year. The company also plans to open an additional office at its first computer manufacturing centre in Xiamen and hire up to 500 new staff later this year to support its growth in North Asia.
"These investments are indicative of how Dell sees the importance of China, which will soon become the world's biggest personal computer market," Bryan Ma, associate vice-president of Asia-Pacific devices and peripherals research at International Data Corp (IDC), said yesterday.
IDC forecasts mainland personal computer volumes to surpass those of the United States by 2012, "if not sooner", Ma said.
It has estimated total personal computer shipments on the mainland will reach 97 million units in 2012, up from 81 million units next year and 67 million units this year. Shipments in the US, by comparison, are predicted to hit 93 million units in 2012, from 86 million units next year and 78 million units this year.
Demand for computer systems in western China is expected to grow an average of 21 per cent annually through 2014.
"We're planning for the future, and we're excited about our strategic investments in China that will help us better serve the region's increasing need for technology solutions and services," Dell chairman and chief executive Michael Dell said.
The Texas-based computer maker is developing its new manufacturing and customer support facility inside the West Chengdu High-Tech Park. Its new complex is expected have a staff of up to 3,000 over time after starting operations next year.
Amit Midha, the president of Dell China, said: "The strong Chengdu workforce and our new operations there will better position Dell for additional growth opportunities in western China."
Dell estimated its revenue on the mainland had "increased 11 times" from financial years 2000 to 2010. In the firm's latest financial quarter, it reported mainland sales grew 52 per cent year on year.
According to IDC, Dell has moved ahead of Hewlett-Packard, the world's leading personal computer supplier, to become the mainland's No2 brand. It estimated Dell took a 9 per cent domestic share in the second quarter to edge HP, which had an 8.2 per cent share. Lenovo Group (SEHK: 0992, announcements, news) led the market with a 28.7 per cent share.
Stephen Felice, the president of Dell's global consumer and small and medium business operations, has said the firm's annual mainland sales are approaching US$5 billion.
Dell said the expansion in Chengdu supports the government's western China development strategy, which aims to boost the development of trade and other commercial initiatives in the country's inland western region.
