FDC earmarks P16 billion from follow-on offering for expansion.
Byline: Ana Marie Macuja Gotianun-led Filinvest Development Corp. (FDC) will be allotting P16 billion of the net proceeds of its proposed follow-on offering next year for the expansion of several key subsidiaries. In an amended registration statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC),...

Matanzas: Cuba's tourism, citrus and hydrocarbon leader.
When it comes to natural resources, Matanzas is one of Cuba's best-endowed provinces. Only 90 km (56 miles) east of Havana, Matanzas has excellent agricultural lands, abundant fresh water, an ample and deep bay, good transportation routes, numerous oil deposits and Cuba's best-known tourist resort, Varadero. ...

Sugar-mill towns, oil and Varadero--Matanzas has it all. (Geography).
Barely 90 kilometers east of Havana, Matanzas has excellent agricultural lands, abundant fresh water, an ample and deep bay, good transportation routes, numerous oil deposits and Cuba's best-known tourist resort, Varadero. One of the island's most important ecological reserves, the Cienaga de Zapata, covers over half of...

Shrinking wetlands.
Large South American wetlands are under threat from farming and house building. "When you talk about environmental problems in Brazil, you think about the Amazon. But people underestimate the importance of the Pantanal [wetlands]," said Paulo Teixeira, head of the Pantanal Regional Environmental Programme. Soybean and sugar cane farming,...

Tales from Tagalog: the odds may be against them, but the people of a village in the Philippines are determined to reclaim their land from sugar. Devlin Kuyek and Andrew Skinner report.
THE ride home through the sugar hacienda can be disheartening for the residents of Buntog, a small village within the Canlubang Sugar Estate in the Filipino province of Southern Tagalog. The jeepneys (the distinctive national mode of transportation) that travel across the Estate pass through lands where neighbouring villages...

SEC okays spin-off, increase in capital of sugar milling firm.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has approved the spin-off of sugar milling operator Central Azucarera de la Carlota (CAC) from the holding firm Roxas Holdings Inc. and its eventual increase in authorized capital stock. AC disclosed it will increase its authorized capital stock from R1 million...

U.S. Sugar to Explore Building 100 Million Gallon Coskata Ethanol Facility.
CLEWISTON, Fla., Nov. 17 /PRNewswire/ -- U.S. Sugar Corp. today announced that it has entered into an agreement with Coskata, Inc of Warrenville, IL to explore building a 100 million gallon per year cellulosic ethanol facility in Clewiston, Florida. The facility would be the world's largest second generation ethanol...

Pick of the crop: welcome to the Queensland citrus farm where the wildlife is returning, the profits are rolling in and the employees can't bear to retire.
AN OCCASIONAL VOICE can be heard from the block of lemon trees where a score of pickers are systematically harvesting fruit which, within days, will be in capital city shops or on their way overseas. A family of wallabies contentedly grazes on the nearby grassy bank, hopping slowly away...

campaign TRIALS.
Raffle to Save the Reef In a recent letter to the World Heritage Bureau, Australia's leading marine scientists have called for an urgent review of the Great Barrier Reef's World Heritage protection, as increasing human impacts exact their toll. Having played a major role in the World...

The Fiji Organic Project.
It's a big deal when you get the Minister of Finance, the person holding the purse strings for the entire country, to open a meeting. It's an even bigger deal to have him announce that the country's sugar industry, the backbone of the national economy, will thrive if it...