News stories by Christopher Pala, page 3

Kazakhstan, intent on diversifying its economy away from oil and mining, has extended its cereal acreage by a third in the past ten years, doubled the value of its grain harvest. It has eradicated rural poverty in the north, the country's breadbasket.

Global warming will melt far less of the glaciers of Central Asia than of those in other mountain ranges, shielding the people who depend on them for water from the effects of climate change for several decades at least, scientists say.

Rarely have so many donor countries spent so much for so long to achieve so little. In fact, the scores of Western countries ranging from the Netherlands to the United States that have tried for 20 years to coax the Central Asian nations to use their water cooperatively and create a win-win situation for all have found that the Central Asians are cooperating less and less, not more and more.

Just six years after the completion of a dike that raised the level of the northern part of the Aral Sea by two metres and slashed its salt content by two-thirds, this remote Central Asian lake once synonymous with ecological catastrophe has become a model of environmental recovery.

For the past quarter century, the United States' relations with Pacific island nations were framed by the South Pacific Tuna Treaty, which combines foreign aid, subsidies to the U.S. fleet of purse-seine fishing vessels and their largely unfettered access to the islands' waters, which contain the world's last major stocks of tuna.

Eight Pacific island nations that are leveraging their contracts with foreign fishing fleets to save the world's last great stocks of tuna are getting little sympathy from the countries representing those fleets.