For reasons unknown to me and unexplainable, this French warship “Clemenceau” keeps fascinating me and I really want to keep following the happenings! The saga of the Clemenceau and its on-again, off-again journey to India… My friends have been cursing me for converting this blog space into a breaking news site ( but I still feel the need… need to keep writing on the carrier!
Reacting to the widespread criticism drawn by France over this, the French government offered to take back the Clemenceau’s toxic asbestos waste on Jan 27, 2006. "Our ambassador has indicated to the Indian committee of experts that if the Indian authorities demand it, the asbestos waste will be repatriated to France," said the Defense Ministry spokesman Jean-Francois Bureau!
This may not be a big sense of achievement, but the battle has helped raise awareness, in France, Egypt and India. We obviously don't want a division of labor where India treats the French navy's waste. India and France have signed the Basel convention. It's possible to decontaminate the ship in France, but asbestos removal would cost 30 million euros.
This is a real sad state of affairs globally! Is this what we call globalization?! Add to this the recent case of France, Spain, and Luxemburg, Belgium teaming up to block the Mittal - Arcelor merger. Donald Rumsfield termed these bunch of countries as “Old Europe”, may be he was right!
Guy Dollé, chief executive of Arcelor, the world's second-largest steel group, which is the target of a $23 billion takeover bid, his company is like a perfume, whereas the predator, Mittal, the world's biggest steel group, is like a cheap eau de cologne!
All of this has sounded more of an emotional outburst from Arcelor, and other heads of states; even though the markets have been behaving rationally. The merger does make sense considering that the two groups’ plants do not overlap much, with the markets being separate. Why should such a hue & cry be raised over this episode? The crux of this bitterness may well be that, Laxmi Mittal, of Mittal Steel is not one of the Europeans and a traveling immigrant in Europe.
Globalization is defined as “Development of extensive worldwide patterns of economic relationships between nations.”, but this seems to be a perfect example of anti-globalization. Maybe, this is the time for the Asian countries put their foot down on these irrational policies and start to unwelcome/block globalization efforts of European companies like Lafarge, Vodafone, Nokia!
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