An American warship sailed through the Taiwan Strait, the US Navy and Taiwanese authorities said Thursday, triggering concern in Beijing.
The transit came as China, which views Taiwan as a renegade province, unveiled a defence white paper Wednesday stressing its willingness to use force to thwart any move towards the self-ruled island's independence, and accusing the United States of undermining global stability.

It also followed an unprecedented joint Chinese-Russian air force exercise this week that triggered furious protests of airspace violations by key US regional allies South Korea and Japan.
According to the US Navy's Seventh Fleet, the USS Antietam, a guided-missile cruiser, conducted a routine transit through the narrow waterway separating the Chinese mainland and Taiwan during July 24-25.
The transit "demonstrates the US commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific", the Fleet said in a statement.

"The US Navy will continue to fly, sail and operate anywhere international law allows."

American warships periodically conduct navigation exercises in the waterway, sparking angry responses from China.

But Beijing's reaction to the latest sail-by was relatively restrained, with foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying saying China had "expressed its concerns to the American side".

"The Taiwan issue is the most important and sensitive issue in Sino-American relations," Hua said.

She said China urges the United States to respect the "One China" principle, and "treat Taiwanese issues with care and diligence so as not to undermine Sino-American relations and peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait".

Beijing lodged a protest with Washington in May after a US destroyer and a supply ship sailed through the strait.
China views any ships passing through the strait as essentially a breach of its sovereignty -- while the US and many other nations view the route as international waters open to all.
Last month, a Canadian frigate and a support vessel passed through Taiwan Strait in a recent string of such transits, as they came from a visit to Vietnam's Cam Ranh Bay heading to Northeast Asia.

The ships were going to join "a multinational effort to counter North Korea's evasion of UN Security Council sanctions by maritime smuggling".
In April, Beijing said its navy had warned off a French warship that had entered the Taiwan Strait earlier that month and lodged an official complaint with Paris.

The reelected BJP government faces the dual challenges of agriculture stress and weak employment. The author believes that India's world standing in food and agriculture gives it a platform to address the issue of genetically modified seeds, and that performance risk insurance should be used to support financing for Small and Medium Enterprises.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, recently reelected with another absolute majority in the Lok Sabha, faces two strategic issues that offer much opportunity: increasing weak income in the farm sector and improving the level of employment. Although the Modi government has made progress in infrastructure development, electricity, and sanitation during the past five years, these two structural issues are a critical drag on the country’s economy.

India’s GDP growth has ranged from 9.3% in 2016 to 5.6% year-on-year in January of 2019. The record high was a running rate of over 11% achieved in early 2010. The projection of the World Bank for fiscal 2020 is 7.5%. As the fastest growing major economy in the world, these aggregate figures are impressive. However, they mask a weak and inefficient agricultural sector whose growth rate has ranged from 0.6% to 2.9% since 2016.

Various reasons may be cited for this phenomenon: depletion of aquifers, industrialisation, lack of technological innovation, fragmented land holdings and limited incentives to take risk – and emphasis of other sectors of the economy, most notably IT, telecommunications, consumerism and business services. The Indian agricultural sector was once the beneficiary of the Green Revolution, modernised by tubewell irrigation, boosting yields of food grains per hectare in areas that were once dry-farmed. Now yields are

maxed out, and there is an enormous structural inefficiency: 17.1% of India’s GDP is derived from agriculture, but this sector employs almost half the country’s workforce.

A national debate has started on the use of genetically modified (GM) seeds; their impact on human health and the environment is not yet clearly understood. While farmers are adopting these seeds that are resistant to plant diseases and droughts, their use has been mired in a patent dispute (until a Supreme Court ruling in January); controversy over payment of royalties; and central government regulations prohibiting their use.

Most recently, a civil disobedience movement has arisen in Maharashtra, with farmers defying regulations and risking fines and imprisonment to be able to use GM seeds. The fact that distressed farmers are willing to break the law to plant these drought-/disease-resistant seeds and are willing to incur financial and legal exposure, attests to the increasing desperation in the agricultural sector.

The West has made strides in the use of GM crops, but not without controversy. Perceptions are divided between it being a human and environmental threat and a beneficial technology to increase world food production.

Prime Minister Modi is known to be supportive of it, dating to his tenure as chief minister of the state of Gujarat, where genetically modified cotton was introduced successfully. However, the legal proceedings in India of Monsanto, the American agrochemical multinational now owned by Bayer, have, in part, influenced opposition in India to the future of genetic modification in agriculture as have environmental groups in Latin America.

India’s world standing in food and agriculture gives it a strategic platform from which to exert leadership in identifying solutions – by using innovative technology or through genetically modified seeds or risk incentives. A major national undertaking, with sponsorship by the highest levels of the government of India in partnership with the private sector, can conclusively assess the benefits and risks of genetically modified seeds – and uplift the agriculture sector.

The second strategic challenge is unemployment at over 6%, a 45-year high. However, there is debate on whether the focus should be on job creation or the level of wages. Focusing on job creation, the World Bank advises that the Indian working age population increases by 1.3 million per month. However, other expert sources opine that unemployment figures are not relevant because of low wages that offer no
incentive, as well as underemployment, where the poor are engaged in “marginal self-employment”.

Thus far, Make in India has yielded some high-visibility joint ventures with U.S. companies: Tata/Boeing production of fuselages for the AH 64 Apache and a Mahindra/Boeing venture to manufacture the F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter are examples. However, foreign joint ventures do not have the scale to address
India’s employment challenge.

Further, there is not much data about the incremental effect of Make in India, launched in 2014. Even though the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation, controlled by the Ministry of Labour and Employment, estimates job creation at almost 500,000 per month, it is significantly less than the envisioned 1 crore per year.

Some experts believe that to increase employment, more development of the Small and Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) sector is necessary. According to Evoma,[9] a Bangalore-based business services firm that assists small companies, there are an estimated 42.5 million SMEs in the country, constituting 95% of

industrial units, 45% of total manufacturing and representing the second largest employment sector after agriculture.

However, it is acknowledged that the availability of bank credit is a strategic impediment for SMEs, many of which are not bankable at all or cannot support credit for long-term growth.

In the budget announced on July 5, the government of India announced a Rs 70,000-crore ($10.3 billion) capital infusion for public sector banks in order to increase the supply of credit. This is a positive development for the banking sector, but it does not address credit quality of the corporate sector, particularly SMEs.

To assure more credit for SMEs, structured finance, particularly with the use of insurance to underwrite performance risk, should be reviewed as a national priority. While SMEs may not support credit as standalone entities, they can assign their sales revenue to a lender as a credit enhancement, such that a stronger third party makes loan amortisation payments. The bank will look to that assignment for liquidity, and to the insurer for the underwriting of performance risk, i.e. ensuring that the SME delivers the product to its customer.

Due to exclusions of liability and a slow process for payment, performance risk insurance is generally considered weaker coverage than a bank standby letter of credit as these are often payable on demand. However, such performance risk insurance is a valid means of credit enhancement. And insurance companies typically charge several times the sum that a bank requires to underwrite that which is fundamentally the same risk.

As a major national initiative, and to achieve scale, a syndicate of insurance players, and possibly, the government in some role, will be needed. To offer institutional investors an opportunity to participate, as well as diversification, a bank loan fund, appropriately insured, can also be structured. India needs support for a proactive insurance industry developing a performance risk product for selected SMEs – like in the West.

India is a massively complicated democracy and evolving federal system, with many competing constituencies based on language, religion, caste and regionalism. The country is capable of brilliant diagnostics to address these agricultural and employment challenges. It has also demonstrated the type of leadership and national will power required for implementation. Some examples are: the Green Revolution; family planning movement, with the fertility rate falling from over six in 1947 to 2.4 currently; the national biometric identification programme; the Jan Dhan Yojana for financial inclusivity; and the massive Swachh Bharat sanitation project. The same level of focus and national commitment are required to achieve a game-changer in agriculture and stimulate the SME sector.

The United Nations’ 2015 Paris Agreement called for the immediate sequestration of atmospheric anthropogenic greenhouse gases to help avert serious environmental degradation. India can take the lead in this because it is the second largest emitter of methane. Of all the natural greenhouse gases, methane is the hardiest. Technological advances are making it possible to crack methane into gaseous hydrogen and solid carbon on a commercial scale. Methane cracking can provide a steady

supply of hydrogen for futuristic transportation and solid carbon materials — graphene, carbon nanotubes, synthetic diamonds — which are integral to the marine, aerospace and space industries. The commercial benefits apart, methane cracking will also go a long way in meeting the Paris
Agreement’s climate change mitigation objectives. This paper offers some concrete recommendations that can help the government of India shape national legislation and global geoeconomic strategies

Background: The United Nations’ (U.N.) 2015 Paris Agreement forecast grave global warming scenarios, a consequence of rising global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. It called for the immediate sequestration of atmospheric anthropogenic GHGs to assist averting serious environmental degradation.

Among the many GHGs being considered for sequestration by countries and companies globally, methane has the qualities to be the most successful in the near future. Methane is the cleanest of the hydrocarbons and strongest of natural GHGs: it absorbs more heat than carbon dioxide, is a stronger GHG than carbon dioxide and has a longer lifetime in the atmosphere.[Annexure 6.1]
Methane cracking will go a long way in meeting the Paris Agreement’s goals. Recent scientific advances in chemical and energy engineering technologies are making it possible to crack methane into gaseous hydrogen and solid carbon on a commercial scale. The costs of sequestering atmospheric anthropogenic GHGs, including methane, are also falling steadily. Therefore, it is now possible to overcome the deficit of the in-demand hydrogen gas and solid carbon materials by cracking methane, sequestered from the atmosphere and natural gas.

India is the second largest emitter of methane in the world. It is also poised to become the third largest economy of the world by 2047, the 100th year of the nation’s independence. Unlike the approach of other major economies, it aims to grow, complying with the global call for climate change mitigation. India, which presently is on a mega infrastructure drive, has the potential to build a clean and efficient hydrogen-powered transportation sector from methane-cracked hydrogen.
Similarly, India’s objective of becoming a high-technology manufacturing powerhouse can be met by a steady supply of methane-derived solid carbon materials — graphene, carbon nanotubes, fullerenes, carbides, synthetic diamonds — which are central to futuristic electronics, transportation and the marine, aerospace and space industries.

Several Indian ministries and companies are already working on this technology. The Indian Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas (Oil Industry Development Board), the Department of Space and the Ministry of Science and Technology have made incongruous attempts to develop indigenous capacities in carbon capture, hydrogen fuel production and fuel cell technologies. The need, therefore, is to streamline such efforts, draw up
India’s climate action goals and realise the economic potential of methane sequestration.

Many global industrial corporations, particularly in the automotive, chemical, petroleum and electronics sectors, have formed interest groups, such as the Hydrogen Council and Carbon Capture Coalition. The corporations, along with their respective governments, will use these coalitions to collectively gain first-mover advantage in hydrogen-fuel technologies and carbon materials manufacturing and thereby shape national legislations and global geoeconomic strategies.

India’s industrial corporations should step up, forming national coalitions on methane-derived carbon sequestration and hydrogen fuel technologies, participate actively in the global groupings, and at home, invest in end-to-end inventions and innovations. India Inc. and the government must together prepare to shape national and global policies, increase their heft in the world market and strengthen India’s resource and energy security.