In the arid Gobi Desert spanning the two Asian nations of China and Mongolia is a bold attempt to make wine and reduce poverty. The environment is harsh, with temperatures swinging from sub-zero winter cold to sweltering summer heat. The desert is also home to high winds and notorious dust storms that plague China’s capital Beijing every year.
China’s wine industry is booming as people have embraced the drink’s perceived health-giving qualities and are using it to celebrate new-found wealth as the economy has flourished. Current wine consumption in China is half a litre per person per year, low compared to the French average of 55 litres a year. But this is growing quickly.
One innovative winery is using this wine boom to tackle poverty and increase local wealth.
Chateau Hansen (hansenwine.com) in Inner Mongolia has been operating since the 1980s, but recent expansion and modernization have significantly increased its earning power and the number of people it employs. Located in an area with high levels of poverty, it has developed a successful wine business in the desert by tapping the plentiful water supplies from the Yellow River. The area is now considered one of the best for growing wine grapes in China.
Located near Wuhai city (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhai), 670 kilometres west of Beijing, Chateau Hansen has 250 hectares of Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Gernischt grapevines.
The vines are buried under the sand to protect them from the harsh weather in the winter.
“The lowest temperature gets down to is below -20 degrees C (Celsius), but in summer, it can reach 38 or 40 degrees C (102 or 104 F),” Li Aixin, Chateau Hansen’s head of viticulture, told MSNBC. “Here the four seasons are good for the growth of the grapes, but in the winter we need to bury them in the earth” to keep them from freezing. Hansen has been ambitious in its approach. It has a European-style chateau, hotel and even a French wine expert, Bruno Paumard, on site to help with the wine making. The chateau’s cellar now stores 1,000 barrels of wine.
Paumard arrived in China in 2005. He has thrown himself into Chinese culture and tasted and tested the country’s wines. Hansen has produced 400,000 bottles of wine, mostly sold in China, where red wine drinking has become a big part of the culture of celebration.
Hansen sells the majority of its wine to government organizations and regional enterprises. It has seen its profits double to 100 million yuan (US $18 million) in 2011 and hopes sales will double again in 2012.
“Eighty per cent of the market in China is really the local governments who encourage the enterprises in their cities to consume red wine, of a certain brand, at their banquets in the place of Chinese ‘baijiu’ for their incessant and never-ending toasts,” said Paumard, referring to China’s home-grown rice wine. “So it’s actually a market that’s totally unique.”
Hansen’s Cotes du Fleuve Jaune du Desert de Gobi has become one of the biggest award-winning wines in China. It received a bronze medal from the International Wine Challenge of Blaye, near Bordeaux, France.
China now stands as the world’s fifth-largest consumer of wine (International Wine and Spirit Research study) (http://www.iwsr.co.uk/). The market in China is forecast to grow by 54 per cent from 2011 to 2015, adding up to a billion bottles.
In this busy marketplace, Hansen prides itself on being organic. It also has the goal of turning the arid desert into green vineyards using irrigation from the Yellow River and groundwater. It wants to create employment and raise living standards in the region and is fitting into a national strategy to raise living standards for poor regions.
There is a training programme for the around 400 workers employed by the winery. No pesticides are used and only sheep dung is used as a fertilizer provided by 3,000 sheep on site. Trees also play a role in providing humus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humus) for the vines. There is also accommodation in a nearby village for the employees.
There are 250 hectares of vineyards and the grapes are harvested by hand. Expansion began in 2001 when the chateau and winery were built. It is strategically located just 500 metres from an airport and the chateau has a luxury hotel. Around 20,000 people visit a year, according to Hansen’s website, bringing in further income for the winery. The winery also uses Mongolian culture and cuisine as a selling point to attract tourists.
The chief executive of Hansen is Han Jianping, who made his first fortune in real estate development.
Han believes that “the momentum of growth in the wine industry is huge.”
“With a great foundation of more than 1 billion people as we have in China, and (the industry) growing at 20 or 30 per cent a year, there is a huge potential for more growth,” he said.
Republished in 2021 in cnwinenews.com.
Resources
1) China Wine Online: An information service that also produces the China Wine Business magazine and runs the China Wine Study Tour. Website: http://www.winechina.com/en/index.asp
Crime in the South’s fast-growing cities has a negative affect on economic development and social and community harmony. In Africa, with one fifth of the world’s population, for example, data is very poor on crime and its victims. The absence of good data means prevention and detection of crime is poor, and resources to fight it can’t be allocated effectively.
Over 900 million people – almost a sixth of the world’s population – now live in urban slums (UN) – high-tension places that offer a fertile environment for crime to flourish. In developing countries 43 per cent of urban dwellers live in slums – and in the least-developed countries the figure is 78 per cent. Keeping these areas safe is a serious challenge, especially when trust in police and local authorities is low. People are often afraid of how police will react to reporting of crime. Many rightly believe they will be asked for a bribe, or that reporting a crime somehow singles them out as a troublemaker.
Harnessing the power of people organizing together offers one way of fighting back against crime, and combating the paralysis of feeling there is nothing that can be done. An initiative in Brazil is turning to the powerful collaborative potential of Web 2.0 to track crime and help to solve it. And for the first time in history, Brazilians can now see in more or less real time what crime there is and where it is happening in their country.
Wikicrimes, the brainchild of Professor Vasco Furtado of the University of Fortaleza’s Knowledge Engineering Research Group, is inspired by the very popular user-contributed encyclopaedia Wikipedia, and germinated in his mind while on an academic sabbatical at Stanford University in California in 2006.
Victims of crime can simply map and report crimes using the website, which uses brightly coloured drawing pins to indicate where a cluster of crimes has taken place. Site users answer a series of questions on suspects and witnesses. Anyone planning a journey can then easily zoom in on the places where they will go, and see the crime profile of that area – and perhaps be more cautious and aware to avoid becoming victims themselves.
Brazil’s crime problem is huge: Films like City of God – where gangs fight deadly battles in the slums or favelas – shows how vicious it is.
Wikicrimes, whose motto is “Share crime information, Keep safe!”, began development in April 2006, and went ‘live’ with a launch at the end of 2007. Starting with just two employees, it has now grown to a team of 10.
Furtado was frustrated with police hoarding crime statistics in Brazil, and not letting people know where crimes were taking place: he also believes the police, as in many other countries, manipulate statistics for various political purposes. “The traditional mechanism of data-gathering for which police are responsible ends up giving them a monopoly over the handling of information on criminal occurrences,” Furtado said. And that “is not always in keeping with the precept of transparency and public availability of information required by a democratic system.”
Furtado believes transparent crime statistics are vital to a well-functioning democracy.
“We are still facing very big challenges,” he said. “Cultural change is one of them. We don’t have in Brazil the culture of sharing information for benefiting others. People need to realize that when they register a crime they are helping others, and that should be the reason others will act in the same fashion.”
He tried to get the police involved in the project, by contributing data, but with no luck. Brazil’s police argue their monopoly over crime statistics exists for some very serious reasons. “We are very worried about revealing police data which may restrict the work of the police,” Antenor Martins of Rio’s Civil Police Department told the BBC. “Also we don’t want a feeling of insecurity for the people – they don’t deserve that here or anywhere else in the world.”
Many also worry about a crime profile of an area dragging that area down, scaring people away. The police also worry about inaccurate information. “When people walk into a police station, you sign an incident report. If you give information which isn’t true, you have to respond to charges of giving false evidence,” said Martins.
But Furtado believes trust between citizens and the police is so low, it is hurting the fight against crime.
“The police suffer a lack of credibility among the populace which, in turn, contributes toward the low rate of reporting such occurrences: the so-called underreporting effect,” he said. “Research conducted with victims of crime in several Brazilian states has shown that underreporting may, in densely-populated areas, reach up to 50 per cent for certain types of crimes.”
Furtado believes a better picture of crime will lead to better public policies and policing: “The result of this can be disastrous in terms of formulation of public policies and especially in the planning of police actions, in view of the fact that the official criminal mapping may reflect a trend that is quite unlike what is actually occurring in real life.
“WikiCrimes intends to change the traditional logic of handling information on crimes that have already occurred, and considers that such a change is up to the citizens themselves. It is based on the principle that with adequate support, citizens will be capable of deciding how and when historical information on criminal occurrences can be publicized as well as for what purpose.”
Sao-Paulo-based NGO Sou de Paz works to reduce violence in Brazil, and is a big supporter of Wikicrimes. “If we develop Wikicrimes, we can look at things like domestic violence or information on drug trafficking – things that affect communities but that people don’t report either because of shame or fear,” the group’s Denis Mizne told the BBC. “If you can get access to this information or publicise it together with Wikicrimes, it could help in areas that suffer most from violent crime.”
Wisely, Wikicrimes is acting to address police concerns over accurate reporting of crimes.
“Technically the big challenge is to define mechanisms to identify false registering,” Furtado said. “We are creating fields in WikiCrimes for the user to provide further information that brings more reliability to the crime information registered — links to newspapers, for instance. We are also defining algorithms to compute the reputation of the informants.”
And Wikicrimes is not just for Brazil: they want people from around the world to add to the site and help build up the crime profile of all countries.
Furtado said responses from the general public have largely been positive. “The best I could ever hope,” he said. “The project is for the citizen and I feel that they realize this. Every day, I receive messages from people offering support and giving congratulations.”
“I had no idea of similar projects before doing Wikicrimes, but, recently, I have received some messages of similar initiatives even though with a local scope in Brazil, Argentina and USA,” he added.
“In terms of crime it would be nice if this would show that it’s necessary to publish the crime data that we have in law authorities and institutions,” he said. “If this is a success, I am sure that all the crime data will be available for people, because they will realize there is no way that the authorities can keep it all to themselves.”
Furtado keeps a rolling report on progress with Wikicrimes on his blog.
Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP’s South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South’s innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.
More than 1.7 billion people around the world have no domestic electricity supply, of whom more than 500 million live in sub-Saharan Africa (World Bank). Without electricity, many development goals remain dreams that will never be achieved.
But in a first for India, a village is now entirely powered by solar energy, kick-starting its development and reversing the decline common to many villages.
Rampura village in the state of Uttar Pradesh (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uttar_Pradesh) had previously been without electricity. But its move to solar power has boosted school performance, brought new economic opportunities for women, and even made the buffalo produce more milk! By getting up early, the buffalo can be fed more before day breaks.
Being able to see at night unleashes a vast range of possibilities, but for the very poor, lighting is often the most expensive household expense, soaking up 10 to 15 percent of income.
There’s a direct link between lighting and economic development. Each 1 per cent increase in available power will increase GDP by an estimated 2 to 3 per cent.
In India, 600,000 villages still lack electricity. Despite the country’s impressive economic gains – growth of over 9 percent per year for the last three years, although that rate is now slowing – the levels of poverty in the country’s villages have driven millions to flee to the sprawling slum zones of India’s cities.
Rampura was set up with solar power by a project of Development Alternatives (http://www.devalt.org/), a New Delhi-based NGO working on promoting “sustainable national development”. Using US $1,406,000 from Norwegian solar power company Scatec Solar (http://www.scatecsolar.no/), it installed 60 solar panels to power 24 batteries. The village’s 69 houses are directly connected to the solar plant.
Manoj Mahata, the project’s programme director, said half of India’s 600,000 villages without electricity can now have the option of solar power.
A steady electricity supply means children are extending their study time past daylight hours. Nine-year-old Aja told the Sunday Times: “I like watching television and the light at night means I can read.”
For women, the light brought by electricity means they can take on new business opportunities to boost income. “I want to start a sewing business with other women to make tablecloths and blouses,” said mother of three Gita Dave.
“Even the buffalo are producing more milk because people can feed before dawn,” said Ghanshyam Singh Yadav, president of Rampura’s energy committee.
“This is not rocket science. This is simple,” says Katja Nordgaard, director for off-grid projects at Scatec.
“The model is relatively cheap, and it is easy to operate and maintain. It can be built in three to four weeks, and can easily be scaled up if the demand for electricity increases.
“People in India are already paying when they need to charge cell phones, and for the kerosene they use in their lamps. The willingness to pay for energy is relatively high here, especially when that energy is reliable.”
In Bangladesh, more than 230,000 households are now using solar power systems thanks to the government’s Infrastructure Development Company Ltd. (IDCOL), giving rise to opportunities for a whole new generation of entrepreneurs to make use of this new power supply for the poor. IDCOL is run by the Ministry of Finance, and is on course to install 1 million Solar Household Systems (SHS) using solar panels by 2012. The Bangladeshi government is hoping to bring electricity to all its citizens by 2020 – meaning this is now a prime time for entrepreneurs specializing in providing energy efficient products to the poor.
Another initiative to boost development in India’s rural villages is the concept of the Model Village India (www.modelvillageindia.org.in), previously profiled by Development Challenges (November 2008).
Resources
Lighting Africa: this website run by the World Bank is a virtual business community and has forums, market intelligence, access to grants, network and partnership opportunities. Website:http://lightingafrica.org/index.cfm?Page=Home
D.light Design is dedicated to bringing modern lighting and power to more than 1.6 billion people globally currently living without electricity. They aim to be the number one player in off-grid lighting and power solutions worldwide. Website:http://www.dlightdesign.com/
Solar Power Answers is a one-stop-shop for everything to do with solar power. It has a design manual and guides to the complex world of solar power equipment. Website:http://www.solar-power-answers.co.uk/index.php
Watch Magazine (Toronto, Canada), October 12, 1994
Preparing to invade Lee’s Palace October 19, supersonically hyped English pop fivesome Oasis have a lot to live up to. The Manchester-based band have experienced a tsunami of media hype reminiscent of The Sex Pistols or The Beatles.
A triple slam of three hit singles in three months – Supersonic, Shakermaker, Live Forevever – and four sold out UK tours preceded their first album, Definitely Maybe. But this clever English pop formula faces its biggest challenge: North America.
The band has developed in less than a year, a reputation for being a ferry-disturbing, hotel-trashing, media-slagging, earth-shattering, shit-disturbing, ego-boosting, self-absorbed, tune-churning, attention-grabbing machine.
And what does an Oasis album sound like?
After you’ve heard all the hype and b.s., approaching 11-track Definitely Maybe should be a disappointing experience. It’s not. The album is craftily tight, with every song great. These guys left the crap at home – a lesson for other bands.
Singer Liam Gallagher’s voice isn’t polished, posh or slick. He drags words out, lets his voice crack, he whines. But this is the charm. Brother Noel Gallagher’s lyrics are cheeky, deliberately oblique at times, pragmatic and just simply entertaining. Gone are the 12-point manifestos of other bands, into the trash goes the primary-school poetry.
Noel writes songs that deliberately pay homage to their influences: The Stone Roses, The Jam, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Sex Pistols. But listen closely. Each one is manipulative – you can’t help feeling the rhythm flow. There’s straight chord-bashing, multi-layered jangle guitar, and a lager-laden freight train ripping through the entire album.
Though it is worth mentioning there are five in Oasis – 22-year-old Liam, 27-year-old songwriter and guitarist Noel, guitarist Paul Arthurs, bassist Paul McGuigan, drummer Tony McCarroll – the band has deliberately served up brothers Liam and Noel as willing fodder for the press.
Hailing from the much-maligned north of England – Burnage, South Manchester to be exact – has meant the band has taken buckets of regional bigotry over their Mancunian accents. It seems the London style gestapo will still let good old fashioned English class and regional prejudices get in the way of a solid analysis of Oasis.
Calling up from Austin, Texas, lead singer Liam’s thick Mancunian accent rips through the telephone line in a firestorm of profanity – it’s refreshing.
The band is on a mission to devour all the “crap bands.” And through a little of Liam and Noel’s own version of the power of positive thinking, or to some, bold-faced arrogance, Oasis are going to give the music business an enema like they’ve never seen before.
“Crap bands. That motivates us to be big,” says Liam confidently. “We were pissed off listening to all the daft bands – blagging the kids that this is what it is all about when it’s not. We are there to prove them all wrong. No bullshit, no strings attached – just simple rock n’ roll.”
Are they the vanguard of a new English invasion, or just another crew of hyped-up, trainer traipsing tossers? North America represents a walled fortress that has buffeted repeated attempts to resurrect the Brit-pack musical and cultural invasion of the 60s. The times have changed in the land where hip-hop, country music and heavy metal rule.
The classic British art-school pop formula of acquiring a very cool one-word name, a pile of trendy clothes, some mega-cool posters – and these days a video – falls flat amongst a population more comfortable in sweatpants and a baseball cap.
But Liam disagrees, and points to their appearance at the New Music Conference in New York.
“Packed-out – the crowd was havin’ it. The gigs have been like at home. Because we’re from England they don’t know much about us – they just come and listen to the music, go home and have a good night.
“We are fucking slick, a big machine! But we’ve not been trained. We know our songs are fucking good. We know we’ve got the best songs on the fucking planet. It ain’t just England – we know our kid (Noel) write the best songs in a long, long time. Since the days of Lennon and McCartney. And he’s doing it on his own.”
Liam’s antics, much to the disappointment of Noel, have gotten some major print in England’s tabloid music press, and has lead to a sleazy prose slug-fest between rivals the New Musicial Express and Melody Maker.
There was the ferry fracas, with Liam san Noel being tossed off for fighting and public drunkenness. Or how about being arrested for some serious hotel trashing with Primal Scream and the Verve while on tour in Sweden.
With the media hyping the scrapper reputation, an ugly element has been attracted to their concerts. During an August 9 concert, a fan punched Noel in the eye during Bring it Down, resulting in a mob of 300 stoning the tour bus.
But the band has never been sedate. They got their first record contract by storming a concert and demanding to be allowed to play or they will tear the place down.
“We’re not hype – I laugh at the English press. They’re stupid. They don’t even understand our music. They like it, that’s about it. Then they’ve got to write about me and our kid fighting, bits about trashing the hotel.”
Talking to Oasis, forget about the nice-boys-next-door routine. In fact, forget about every false face pop musicians had to put on in the puritanical 80s, and the politically correct 90s. Oasis not only admit to using drugs, shock of shock, they like it.
“Our mums know about it. I was doing drugs since I was 13. Sniffing gas, sniffing glue, drinking cider, getting off my face.”
They don’t labour themselves with the soul-consuming indie band angst of worry that if they get big they have somehow sold out.
Depending on the day of the week and who you talk to, the brothers either enjoy a healthy creative conflict, or bloody well hate each other. Certainly, the evidence points to the latter, while Liam says otherwise.
There was the time at a South England gig where Noel punched Liam in the face and chased him off stage. But there is the Noel who returned from being a roadie for the Inspiral Carpets and approached the band in 1992 telling them their songs are “shite” and they should let him write the songs and take over.
“Our kid, he’s a bit of a singer, but he knows he can’t sing. He says I can’t write a song. We are both kind of jealous of each other. That’s how I see it anyway. I don’t know. He thinks he’s the only one who really loves music, and his own brother don’t understand it. And I ant to prove to him I mean it a little more than he does – and it freaks him out. He sings totally different – then I get a grip of it and I bite the head off of it.”
It has been Noel’s discipline and raw talent, Liam admits, that pulled Oasis together.
They believe in total commitment to the cause of being the best band in the world.
“There’s a day when you turn around and say, right “Do you want this to be every Tuesday, Thursday night, like a fucking scout club meeting, or do you want it to be real?” If you want it to be real, you’ve got to be here every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday – you can’t go out drinkingwith your mates or doing this with your bird. You can’t have a bird if you want to be the biggest band in the world – this is what it’s about. If you don’t like it, piss off, tell us now.”
They gotten a reputation for being a juicy interview for jaded journalists tired of earnest musicians telling of their next charity album, or wanking on about how their music is deep.
The British press have gorged themselves on a love-hate feast of large portions of Oasis.
For Oasis watchers, the landmark article was the April 23 issue this year of NME. Titled The Bruise Brothers, this was the true beginning of the hype machine. The article immediately focuses in on the duelling brothers, barely touching the fact they are a band.
The stage was set for a punch and judy comedy involving the nasty yet lovable Gallagher brothers. Shakespeare couldn’t have written a better play for the press gang to report.
While Liam denies it, there has been talk of a full-blown conspiracy involving Oasis record label Creation and their buddies within the press – an Oasis hype mafia some have called it.
“If someone likes you and your on their label, they are going to talk about you. We’ve done all the shit gigs man. The reason why we are bigis because we are fucking crafty. We’ve done four sell-out tours within the space of four months. What other band does that? – none. We’ve had a single out every month. People are just tripping. There’s no big mafia working us up. If there is, I don’t fucking know it. No one’s told me.
“They just want to build us up as hype and then see if they can knock us down. But they won’t be able to – ’cause we are writing the best songs – we can rip their papers up and wipe our bums with it and throw it in the fucking bin, they can’t do it with us. They can do it with Suede, ’cause Suede let em. If someone stitches me in the paper and I meet them in London or wherever, they get it, I tell them.
“A couple weeks ago we were on the front cover of the NME, Melody Maker – we didn’t even do an interview with the NME. They just sneaked over and got a picture, the picture that was on the cover of the NME was going to be for VOX.
“They got (freelance photographer) Keving Cummings to sell the VOX picture to the NME. Now Kevin Cummings don’t come near us, if he does I’ll slap him, and I’ve told him. He says this is for VOX, and the next fucking day it’s on the front cover of the NME without even an interview with us.
“They can try and have a backlash – we will release Whatever at xmas with proper Beatles styling, which will sell thousands and thousands of fucking copies and put us in the charts.”
When former Jam powerhouse and English pop icon Paul Weller dropped by an Oasis gig, the meeting was blown into the clash of titan egos by the press.
“He comes to the gig because he likes the music. We chilled out with him. You know how the press works, they just build it up. They made out as if Paul Weller walked in our dressing room and our kid fucking snaps at him. He loves Paul Weller. This is bullshit, I’m not having the NME or the Melody Maker deciding what we are. No way, I’m not having it.”
In fact Liam sees Weller on holy ground. “The other two guys in the band were dicks, I don’t care for them at all. Paul Weller was a diamond. He wrote some mega songs. They are bloody selling groceries, trying to get it together.
“Everyone is going they should form the Jam again – no way man. They look like 50-year-old men, them two now. Paul Weller looks like a young lad now. He’s kept it together, why should he go back, go jamming with them again. He’s still young.”
It took just one tour with Primal Scream for Oasis to determine who is the greatest rock n’ roll band alive. Lead singer Bobby Gillespie’s degenerate 70s roadshow follies didn’t impress Liam.
“They ain’t the rock n’ roll band everybody makes them out to be. There’s only three in Primal Scream – the rest are all hiding. A rock n’ roll band to me is about five people who know each other very well, they are all friends. They ain’t the last rock n’ roll band, we are! Fucking idiots, we are! Well we aren’t the last, but we are the rock n’ roll band to date if there is one about – not Primal Scream.
“Plus he (Gillespie) smells and they don’t wash their clothes. They are too rock n’ roll cliche, you know what I mean. I know for a fact lot of these rock n’ roll types look at us and say we aren’t rock n’ roll because we have trainers. So fucking what! It’s not all about winkle pickers, skin-tight pants and long greasy hair. That’s Guns n’ Roses material!”
Note:This was the first article about Oasis in North America. In October, 2007 Liam Gallagher was named one of the ten wittiest Englishmen in history.
A sample of Watch magazine covers from 1994 (Toronto, Canada).
Sloan’s 1994 release, Twice Removed, was called by Chart magazine one of the “Top 50 Canadian Albums of All Time”.
In 1999 I published the first book on Mongolia’s contemporary music scene. Freshly opened up to the wider world, Mongolia’s musicians were leading the way for this youthful, new Asian democracy. By 2020, Mongolian musicians had become a global Internet sensation.
David South Consulting 
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