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Glyn Ford
For Glyn Ford's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 26, 2011
EU breaks the lock on hungry North Koreans
The European Union announced July 4 it would provide €10 million of emergency food aid to North Korea through the World Food Program (WFP) until the end of September — before this year's harvest.
COMMENTARY
Dec 15, 2009
Business challenge for Europe after Lisbon
CINDERFORD, England — The much-delayed final ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, and the appointment of former Belgium Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy as president of the European Union and Britain's Cathy Ashton as de facto foreign minister, means that the EU will increasingly take center stage on matters of global trade, foreign policy and security as the world looks to Brussels rather than the national capitals of EU members for key decisions.
COMMENTARY
Sep 23, 2009
Time to boost Japan-EU ties
CINDERFORD, England — Yukio Hatoyama and the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) have finally taken up the reins of power after their stunning election victory Aug. 30. The promise of their manifesto is change. With politicians on top and bureaucrats on tap, Japan is to develop a proactive autonomous foreign policy that establishes a more balanced Japan-U.S. alliance, strengthens Japan's trade relations and promotes measures to prevent global warming. Interestingly, this agenda is echoed in Brussels.
COMMENTARY
Jun 26, 2009
EU cyclone belts the left
BRUSSELS — The only results to cheer in the recent European Parliament elections came from Greece, where PASOK (Panhellenic Socialist Movement) went up to nine seats, and Ireland, where the financial crisis and public re-evaluation of regulation saw the Irish Labour party win two to three seats. Meanwhile, the sugar daddy of the transnational Libertas Party, Declan Ganley, failed to win a seat.
COMMENTARY
Jul 31, 2008
Money can't buy Tibetan love
By all measures Tibet's economy is booming. In the past 30 years its growth rate has outstripped the rest of China's, 10.4 percent to 9.8 percent year on year. The result is that the vast majority of Tibetans have been pulled out of deep poverty.
COMMENTARY
Jul 28, 2008
EU, Japan should try to make up for lost time
BRUSSELS — After the Cold War, in which Europe and Japan played subordinate political — and military — roles to Washington, the European Union and Japan found themselves in the position of being "economic giants" but "political dwarves."
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 27, 2008
LDP's future as dicey as Humpty Dumpty's
BRUSSELS — Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda has been in office less than 12 months, yet polls show popular support for his administration running around 20 percent. Fukuda and his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) face a bleak future.
COMMENTARY / World
May 1, 2008
Food crisis endangering millions
BRUSSELS — The World Trade Organization (WTO) is in the last throes of its Doha Development Round negotiations, the European Union is currently undertaking a "health check" on its Common Agricultural Policy and the whole world is opening biofuel plants as a technological fix to curb CO2 emissions and cope with escalating oil prices. All three predicated on the experience of half a century of food mountains, wine lakes and the West dumping its surplus food on the rest to the detriment of subsistence farmers around the globe. Escalating food prices are increasingly leading to rioting on the streets and the world needs a fresh approach if last week's cry for help from Africa is to be heeded.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 4, 2008
Cambodia's revenge fiasco
BRUSSELS — Cambodia is currently witnessing the commencement of what is likely to become a grotesque farce. In July, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia will try four Khmer Rouge leaders, as well as the commandant of the infamous S21 Tuol Sleng prison, for crimes committed more than 30 years ago. The trials are expected to cost more than 150 million euro, a sixth of the country's annual GDP.
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 21, 2008
Insurrections push Philippines to the brink
MANILA —The current president of the Philippines, Gloria Arroyo, whose election in 2004 was deeply flawed, but probably not fraudulent, is currently beset by a sea of troubles that threaten to overwhelm her regime.
COMMENTARY / World
Dec 16, 2007
Fascist currents in the EU mainstream
LONDON — On a cold wet November evening the dreamy spires of Oxford University became the unlikely setting for a new front line between the organization Unite Against Fascism and the far-right British National Party (BNP).
COMMENTARY
Aug 18, 2007
China's tough leap forward
BRUSSELS — Ever since Deng Xiaoping's aphorism "Black cat, white cat, who cares as long as it can catch mice" was burned into Chinese souls by the successive horrors of the Great Leap Forward, its resulting famine and the Cultural Revolution's shambolic savagery, China has seen 10 percent-plus growth rates for three decades.
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 14, 2007
Aceh peace pays off for election victor
BRUSSELS -- After the second anniversary of Aceh's tragic tsunami, peace seems to have finally come to the troubled province. Official results of the Dec. 11 provincial elections came with the new year. They confirmed a landslide victory for one faction of the former rebels.
COMMENTARY / World
Dec 2, 2006
Talks doomed without EU
BRUSSELS -- After a 15-month hiatus, North Korea will return to Beijing in December for resumption of the China-brokered six-party talks with the two Koreas, the United States, Japan and Rus- sia in attendance. Yet unless U.S. President George W. Bush makes a sharp turn of direction, prospects for a solution are bleak. The North is set to return to talks it abandoned in late 2005 following the so-called breakthrough with the Sept. 19 Joint Statement. In fact, the statement papered over an enormous division between the two main protagonists.
COMMENTARY / World
Oct 19, 2006
European politics swing right
BRUSSELS -- Europe is in danger of seeing its extreme-right parties move into the mainstream. The message has changed. Anti-Semitism has metamorphosed into "Islamophobia" since 9/11, finding a popular resonance with those bearing the consequences of the war on terror. Islamophobia has become the prejudice of the day, but the threat from the extreme right is real and it is found across the European Union.
CULTURE / Books
Aug 27, 2006
Picturing North Korean propaganda
Japan's comic craze was first documented for the West with the publication of Frederick Schodt's "Manga Manga, The World of Japanese Comics" (1983). Since then, the production and consumption of manga and anime -- its moving picture equivalent -- have spread to China and the Republic of Korea. More recently, on the production side, North Korea has emerged as a destination for "outsourcing" the heavy manual labor element of both manga and anime, as illustrated by French-Canadian cartoonist Guy Delisle's introspective graphic novel "Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea" (2005). Almost nothing, however, has been written on the indigenous manga industry in North Korea.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 24, 2006
Tories need to do more than pick on EU
BRUSSELS -- All the focus groups in Britain demonstrate that people do not care about Europe. Or at least they certainly don't treat it as a priority. The economy, health and education, as well as quality of life and security issues, con- sistently rate higher. Yet David Cameron's Tories are still falling into the trap of talking about Europe long before expanding on their other policies.
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 24, 2006
Ending a barbarity against black bears
BRUSSELS -- Last month the cruel practice of farming Asiatic black bears for their bile was put firmly on the global agenda as 377 members of the European Parliament -- more than half the EP membership -- signed a written declaration calling on China to ban this barbarity. With bear bile already illegal in the European Union, the EP declaration should prompt further action from the European Commission and individual member states in the battle against bear-bile farms.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Jan 15, 2006
Two writers, two very different North Koreas
NORTH KOREA: The Struggle Against American Power, by Tim Beal. Pluto, 2005, 352 pp., £18.99 (paper). NORTH KOREA: The Paranoid Peninsula, by Paul French. Zed Books Ltd., 2005, 352 pp.,£17.95 (paper). The subtitles of these books reveal the sharply differing points of departure on North Korea for writers Tim Beal and Paul French. For Beal, North Korea is a product as much of American ill will as it is of its own internal ideology. Beal takes on the despairingly bad press it gets by challenging Western-accepted wisdom across the board. North Korea may spend the highest level of gross domestic product in the world on its military, but that's still less than 0.4 percent of the spending by the U.S.-Japan-South Korea axis combined.
COMMENTARY / World
Dec 20, 2005
Making a difference in Aceh
BRUSSELS -- The European Union's successive waves of industrial, social, economic and monetary integration have come and, mostly, gone. The cutting edge of political debate within the EU now centers on an emerging Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP).

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