The service is has more than 200,000 users globally
It is the only backed and regulator-approved EWA in Asia
Paywatch partnered with Bank KB Bukopin to launch Asia’s first bank-backed EWA service in Indonesia. Paywatch is an Earned Wage Access (EWA) provider. The launch of this service follows the signing of an MoU…Continue Reading
Chia is currently the CFO of MyAirline
She was previously with Air Asia for 11 years
Catcha Digital Berhad announced today that it appointed Shireen Chia Yin Ting (PIC) as its new Independent Non-Executive Director (INED), effective 31 May 2023.
Chia is currently the Chief Financial Officer of MYAirline, a new startup airline in…Continue Reading
Small breweries and local distilleries are hopeful of a bright future if the Move Forward Party forms a coalition government and pushes changes to liberalise the alcohol industry as promised.
Despite clear economic opportunities from diversifying craft beers and in the speciality spirits market, small businesses have been struggling to survive, let alone thrive, in Thailand’s heavily monopolised alcohol industry, due to harsh laws and regulations controlling production and retailing.
The party’s MP in Bangkok’s Constituency 22, and its leading liquor liberalisation campaigner, Taopiphop Limjittrakorn, told the Bangkok Post that amending these laws to promote fairer competition for small enterprises and break the liquor industry monopoly will be one of the first things the party will push in parliament.
“Our first step will be to amend the ministerial regulations on liquor production, which can be done within the first week of the first parliamentary session to unlock the remaining barriers preventing small-scale distilleries from entering the business,” Mr Taopiphop said.
“We’re now opening dialogue to discuss other issues such as excise rate changes and loosening alcohol control rules to reach a consensus on solutions to these issues since they require the amendment of other related acts, which needs more preparation and takes more time.”
Sore points
As the co-founder of Sandport Brewery, a small craft brewery in Chatuchak district, Supapong Pruenglampoo is one entrepreneur directly affected by the restrictive rules, which he claims were written heavily in favour of the giant conglomerates and designed to put off small firms from entering the industry.
“The first obstacle every newcomer in the brewing business had to face was meeting the demanding criteria for registering a business licence,” Mr Supapong said.
The system required applicants to have at least 10 million baht of registered capital and a minimum production capacity of 100,000 litres per year to get a licence for brewpubs, while a minimum production capacity of at least 10 million litres per year was needed to qualify for a bottled beer manufacturing licence.
Despite these rules for craft brewery registration having been lifted in 2022, the criteria for distilled spirits remain the same, as they require a minimum production capacity of 30,000 litres per day to gain a licence for distilled spirit production.
“This is the first high barrier that keeps small entrepreneurs with limited resources out,” he said.
Also, he said microbreweries are taxed at the same high rate as the big beer companies at 22% of the retail price, despite the production costs of microbreweries being incomparably higher.
This forces small craft beer brewers to sell their products at a much higher price than mass-produced beers.
“Microbrewers are also regulated by strict rules under the Alcoholic Beverage Control Act that prohibit us from advertising and selling our products online, and we are subjected to similar fines as the big brands of up to 500,000 baht if found violating the rules,” he said.
“So, we are happy to hear that Move Forward plans to push the liquor liberalisation policy since we want competition under fair rules.”
Thanakorn Tuamsa-ngiam, founder of Prachachon Beer (Beer People), a social network group advocating for liquor liberalisation, said the enforcement of laws is also a major problem.
“When enforcing alcohol control rules, officials often overlook the misdeeds of big companies and instead focus on prosecuting small business owners. They can interpret the law in a way to penalise small businesses and ordinary people deliberately,” he said.
“I myself am a victim of such actions, as I was prosecuted for violating the Alcoholic Beverage Control Act by advertising alcoholic beverages online, even though I only posted educational articles about craft beer on the Prachachon Beer Facebook Fanpage.”
Opportunities ahead
Despite the law discouraging small liquor enterprises, Mr Thanakorn said more people are interested in homebrewing and setting up their own businesses, which aligns with global trends in an alcohol industry which is diversifying.
“Thailand has diverse agricultural products that can be bases for developing craft beers and speciality spirits. With support from authorities, we can be a global hub for craft beer tourism, which can lift the economy and boost tourism,” he said.
“We also need technical and innovative support on brewing craft beers and distilling speciality spirits since, despite our rich biodiversity resources, we still rely on imported materials. So, we also hope to collaborate more with researchers and academics.”
Meanwhile, one booze tycoon, Piti Bhirombhakdi, a director of Boon Rawd Brewery Ltd and a fourth-generation scion of the Singha Beer corporate empire, says he also supports MFP’s bid to liberalise the liquor industry.
Although the policy is aimed at countering the dominance of the big beer companies and promoting small businesses, Mr Piti said he does not have any problem with new competitors in the market. Instead, he says this is a great opportunity for Singha Beer to evolve, diversify and adapt to the changing market landscape.
“Sure, there will be more intense competition for market share, but this is a normal thing in the free market. I also believe liquor liberalisation will bring much greater benefits to our company and the industry,” Mr Piti said.
Despite the Move Forward Party’s policy receiving support from stakeholders in the alcohol industry, some medical experts are concerned over the possible social impacts that easier access and possibly higher alcohol consumption could bring if controls are loosened.
“I agree liquor liberalisation can help boost the economy and support small local businesses, but the strict laws controlling the advertising and sale of alcohol are also important to prevent adverse impacts on public health and society from irresponsible drinking,” Dr Udomsak Saengow, director of the Research Institute for Health Sciences at Walailak University, said.
Lorry operators called on the Move Forward Party (MFP) to stamp out bribery in the transport sector on Thursday, saying the practice has been around for about two decades.
Land Transport Federation of Thailand (LTFT) chairman, Apichart Prairungruang, on Thursday led 30 representatives from logistics companies in submitting a petition to MFP MP-elect Wiroj Lakkhanaadisorn, calling on the party to act swiftly to end the racket.
According to Mr Apichart, kickbacks to highway police add to their operating costs. He said LTFT members have tried to raise the issue in the past, but they were met with intimidation instead.
Out of the 1.5 million lorry operators registered with the Department of Land Transport (DLT), the LTFT estimated around 200,000 regularly pay bribes so their trucks can carry loads beyond the legal limit, he continued, though he insisted none of the LTFT’s 400,000 members engage in such a practice.
He said the bribes range from 3,000-15,000 baht, depending on the load amount an operator wishes to put on a truck. He added those who have paid for a “premium” package can carry anything without a weight limit.
“In the past, there were four to five stickers. Now there are 40-50 stickers,” he said.
Mr Apichart said the MFP’s campaign against the bribes had given the federation hope that the issue would be dealt with seriously.
Shortly after the MFP raised the issue, the Royal Thai Police transferred Pol Maj Gen Ekkaraj Limsangkat, commander of the Highway Police Division, to an inactive post at the Operations Centre of the Central Investigation Bureau (CIB).
However, Mr Apichart said it would take more than that to stamp out the practice, as it is a deep-rooted problem.
Mr Wiroj said the public’s attention is currently on the highway police, but local traffic police are also involved in the racket.
He said the party would gather more information and submit the findings to the Office of the Inspector-General of the Royal Thai Police (RTP) and the police’s anti-corruption division.
Earlier, Mr Wiroj claimed that overloaded trucks with special stickers on their windscreens are not required to stop at weighing stations. The stickers indicate a bribe has been paid.
Police have found that two grocers in Bangkok acted as directors of 48 shell companies linked to a Chinese couple facing charges of running a 10-billion-baht international fraud scheme.
The two grocers, who had shops in Thon Buri, were paid 4,000 baht a month for each company they represented, said Pol Maj Gen Amnat Traipote, deputy commissioner of the Cyber Crime Investigation Bureau (CCIB).
The companies were legally registered with the Department of Business Development to engage in tour guide services, brokerage, wholesale, holding and property trade.
Thai shareholders held 51% of each company, and Chinese nationals the rest. The businesses each had 5 million baht in registered capital and were all headquartered at houses in the same luxury housing estate in Prawet district where the Chinese couple were arrested on Wednesday.
Police are now checking the tax records of the companies, Pol Maj Gen Amnat said on Thursday.
Shaoxian Su, 31, and his girlfriend Keyi Ye, 25, were arrested at their 67-million-baht house in The Palazzo Srinakarin estate in Prawet on charges of public fraud and money laundering.
Police say the couple lured people in many countries into fake investments in digital currencies and other assets, with damages estimated at 10 billion baht.
Police suspect companies in their network purchased 19 luxury houses in the same estate in Prawet and leased them out to other Chinese people.
On Wednesday, police impounded hundreds of millions of baht worth of assets from the couple.
Doomsaying is an old occupation. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a complex subject. It’s easy to fear what you don’t understand. These three truths go some way towards explaining the oversimplification and dramatisation plaguing discussions about AI.
Yesterday outlets around the world were plastered with news of yet another open letter claiming AI poses an existential threat to humankind. This letter, published through the nonprofit Center for AI Safety, has been signed by industry figureheads including Geoffrey Hinton and the chief executives of Google DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic.
However, I’d argue a healthy dose of scepticism is warranted when considering the AI doomsayer narrative. Upon close inspection, we see there are commercial incentives to manufacture fear in the AI space.
And as a researcher of artificial general intelligence (AGI), it seems to me the framing of AI as an existential threat has more in common with 17th-century philosophy than computer science.
When ChatGPT was released late last year, people were delighted, entertained and horrified.
But ChatGPT isn’t a research breakthrough as much as it is a product. The technology it’s based on is several years old. An early version of its underlying model, GPT-3, was released in 2020 with many of the same capabilities. It just wasn’t easily accessible online for everyone to play with.
Back in 2020 and 2021, I and many others wrote papers discussing the capabilities and shortcomings of GPT-3 and similar models – and the world carried on as always. Forward to today, and ChatGPT has had an incredible impact on society. What changed?
In March, Microsoft researchers published a paper claiming GPT-4 showed “sparks of artificial general intelligence.” AGI is the subject of a variety of competing definitions, but for the sake of simplicity can be understood as AI with human-level intelligence.
Some immediately interpreted the Microsoft research as saying GPT-4 is an AGI. By the definitions of AGI I’m familiar with, this is certainly not true. Nonetheless, it added to the hype and furore, and it was hard not to get caught up in the panic. Scientists are no more immune to group think than anyone else.
The same day that paper was submitted, The Future of Life Institute published an open letter calling for a six-month pause on training AI models more powerful than GPT-4, to allow everyone to take stock and plan ahead. Some of the AI luminaries who signed it expressed concern that AGI poses an existential threat to humans, and that ChatGPT is too close to AGI for comfort.
Soon after, prominent AI safety researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky – who has been commenting on the dangers of superintelligent AI since well before 2020 – took things a step further. He claimed we were on a path to building a “superhumanly smart AI”, in which case “the obvious thing that would happen” is “literally everyone on Earth will die.”
He even suggested countries need to be willing to risk nuclear war to enforce compliance with AI regulation across borders.
One aspect of AI safety research is to address potential dangers AGI might present. It’s a difficult topic to study because there is little agreement on what intelligence is and how it functions, let alone what a superintelligence might entail. As such, researchers must rely as much on speculation and philosophical argument as evidence and mathematical proof.
There are two reasons I’m not concerned by ChatGPT and its byproducts.
First, it isn’t even close to the sort of artificial superintelligence that might conceivably pose a threat to humankind. The models underpinning it are slow learners that require immense volumes of data to construct anything akin to the versatile concepts humans can concoct from only a few examples. In this sense, it’s not “intelligent.”
Second, many of the more catastrophic AGI scenarios depend on premises I find implausible. For instance, there seems to be a prevailing (but unspoken) assumption that sufficient intelligence amounts to limitless real-world power. If this was true, more scientists would be billionaires.
Cognition, as we understand it in humans, takes place as part of a physical environment (which includes our bodies) – and this environment imposes limitations. The concept of AI as a “software mind” unconstrained by hardware has more in common with 17th-century dualism (the idea that the mind and body are separable) than with contemporary theories of the mind existing as part of the physical world.
Still, doomsaying is old hat, and the events of the last few years probably haven’t helped. But there may be more to this story than meets the eye.
Among the prominent figures calling for AI regulation, many work for or have ties to incumbent AI companies. This technology is useful, and there is money and power at stake – so fearmongering presents an opportunity.
Almost everything involved in building ChatGPT has been published in research anyone can access. OpenAI’s competitors can (and have) replicated the process, and it won’t be long before free and open-source alternatives flood the market.
This point was made clearly in a memo purportedly leaked from Google entitled “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI.” A moat is jargon for a way to secure your business against competitors.
Yann LeCun, who leads AI research at Meta, says these models should be open since they will become public infrastructure. He and many others are unconvinced by the AGI doom narrative.
Notably, Meta wasn’t invited when US President Joe Biden recently met with the leadership of Google DeepMind and OpenAI. That’s despite the fact that Meta is almost certainly a leader in AI research; it produced PyTorch, the machine-learning framework OpenAI used to make GPT-3.
At the White House meetings, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman suggested the US government should issue licences to those who are trusted to responsibly train AI models. Licences, as Stability AI chief executive Emad Mostaque puts it, “are a kinda moat.”
Companies such as Google, OpenAI and Microsoft have everything to lose by allowing small, independent competitors to flourish. Bringing in licensing and regulation would help cement their position as market leaders, and hamstring competition before it can emerge.
While regulation is appropriate in some circumstances, regulations that are rushed through will favour incumbents and suffocate small, free and open-source competition.
Michael Timothy Bennett is a PhD Student at the School of Computing, Australian National University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
As the global economic intelligentsia debates how to “decouple” or “de-risk” from China, Elon Musk clearly didn’t get the memo.
The Tesla founder was feted like a returning king in Beijing this week. From the moment his private jet arrived on Tuesday, Musk is reportedly being called “Brother Ma,” putting him in rarified league with Alibaba billionaire Jack Ma.
There are many takeaways from Musk’s first China visit in three years. One is that not everyone is decoupling from China, least of all the globe’s most influential electric vehicle (EV) evangelist and owner of Twitter. Another: the future of EV production and innovation is shifting toward Asia’s biggest economy.
Yet the most important one may be how Beijing is putting out a huge welcome mat for foreign chieftains – from Musk to JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon – to signal that China really is open for business again.
The perception that China is becoming hostile toward foreign capital intensified after Ma ran afoul of Xi Jinping’s regulators in late 2020.
In March, China’s leader installed a new premier, Li Qiang, to take the lead in changing that narrative. And what better way than Musk visiting China and reaffirming his commitment to producing more Teslas in mainland factories?
Of course, Li and Ma go way back. It was Li, back in his days as Shanghai party boss, who lobbied Musk to open a Tesla “gigafactory” in the city. The facility, which opened in April 2022, was Tesla’s first outside the US.
Now, here is Musk, controversial as he is, hinting at an even bigger production presence in China. In 2022, Tesla contributed roughly one-quarter of Shanghai’s overall total automotive production.
The next objective for local governments around China: angling for closer ties with Tesla to win some of those jobs as Musk looks to expand his autonomous driving fleet and sales to Chinese consumers.
It’s just what Li’s image makers might have hoped for as Tesla looks to “aggressively focus on building out its China footprint,” says analyst Daniel Ives at investment firm Wedbush.
Even though China has its own promising EV companies, including BYD Co, Musk understands that Xi’s nation has become “the golden goose EV market,” Ives says. As such, Tesla’s mainland plant is now the “heart and lungs” of Musk’s global production.
Musk is also giving Xi and Li a big public relations win in another way. At his meeting Tuesday with Foreign Minister Qin Gang, Musk gave the thumbs down to Washington’s decoupling from China strategy. Musk said, effectively, that the relationship between the two biggest economies is too symbiotic to fail.
This is music to Li’s ears as China welcomes a who’s-who of multinational company chieftains. In recent days, top officials from Starbucks Corp, Jardine Matheson, Franklin Templeton and UK chip software giant Arm Ltd dropped by. Later this month, Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang is reportedly coming to town.
The frenetic pace of these meetings comes as China’s foreign direct investment experiences an ill-timed U-turn. In the first three months of the year, roughly US$30 billion zoomed away from China. Stock investors are pivoting elsewhere, too. Since its 2021 high, the MSCI China Index has lost more than half of its value.
On the debt side, China “suffered outflows” in April to the tune of $3.8 billion “as the positive effect of the Covid reopening fades away,” says economist Jonathan Fortun at the Institute of International Finance.
Hence the urgency to dispel the gathering notion that China’s leadership is in an anti-foreigner sentiment phase. Xi chose Li to lead the China-is-open-for-business repair effort.
First, there’s a matter of improving the odds of reaching a 5% economic growth rate this year. Analyst Kelvin Wong at OANDA notes that the latest reading from China’s Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) data “further reinforced an increasing slowdown in external demand and lackluster internal domestic demand ex-post re-opening from Covid-19 stringent lockdowns.”
On closer inspection, Wong notes, the data “indicated a risk of a deflationary spiral at play.” The input cost – main raw material purchase prices – sub-component of the manufacturing PMI declined at the fastest pace in May since July 2022 – 40.8 versus 46.4 – while the output cost sub-component fell for the third consecutive month and recorded its steepest decline for ten months in May to 41.6 from 44.9.
The bottom line, Wong says, is Beijing needs to halt the narrative about “the risk of the deflationary spiral in China.”
Economist Lu Ting at Nomura International added that “the sharper contraction in the manufacturing PMI suggests that the risk of a downward spiral, especially in the manufacturing sector, is becoming more real.”
Others are more sanguine. Some economists argue that China Beige Book data shows that manufacturing activity may be perking up.
Goldman Sachs China economist Hui Shan says recent trends in China’s emerging industries PMI seem a “tentative sign that manufacturing activity may begin to stabilize.”
At the same time, a “loss of economic momentum amid weakening demand both at home and abroad” is getting harder for Premier Li’s team to ignore, says economist Carlos Casanova at Union Bancaire Privée.
Li, Casanova notes, has “vowed more targeted measures to expand domestic demand and stabilize external demand earlier in May, in an effort to promote a sustained economic rebound, but it remains to be seen whether these will be effective.”
Yet Li is also focused on structural reforms needed to restore investor confidence. Here, Musk’s timing could not be better.
In recent weeks, Beijing basked in the glow of global headlines over China surpassing Japan as the world’s biggest exporter of autos for the first time. Some of that dynamic reflects China’s embrace of EVs, while Toyota Motor and many Japan Inc peers stick with hybrid vehicles.
The narrative shift followed an earlier Li era victory: a move to break up Alibaba Group into six units – and founder Ma’s return to China after a long absence. Alibaba’s structural shakeup was a win for reformers and a vital gesture to reassure global investors that the regulatory crackdown on Big Tech is finished.
Since then, analysts like Kelvin Ho at Fitch Ratings have noted how “this could boost Alibaba’s credit strength if capital is freed up from businesses that generate little cash and deployed in stronger cash-generating businesses or used to pay down debt.”
The hope, too, is that Alibaba’s example could become a model for other internet giants in harm’s way, including Baidu, ByteDance, Didi, Tencent and others. If so, it would unlock value in China’s biggest service sector companies, enticing global investors.
Both Xi and Li surely appreciate Musk’s firm rejection of the idea that the US and China can thrive economically separately.
As economists at Allianz argue in a note to clients: “The economic implications of a further decoupling between the West and China could be far-reaching,” noting that the fallout for China’s economy could be “far from negligible.”
“China,” they argue, “could retaliate by curtailing the supply of critical raw materials in which it has a dominant position, which could severely disrupt global supply chains. But this is unlikely as it already applies some forms of outbound investment restrictions and is still looking towards economic pragmatism.”
At the margin, though, Musk’s doubling down on China and offering an alternative to the loud decoupling debate have given Beijing one of the best weeks of global headlines it’s had in some time.
Follow William Pesek on Twitter @WilliamPesek
In an unassuming butcher’s shop on Singapore’s Ann Siang Hill, juicy steaks hang from hooks in the windows. Local favourites – chicken satay skewers and beef rendang – sit in cool glass booths.
But the meatiness is an illusion, the satays are soy-based and the steaks pumped up with shiitake mushroom. But, Love Handle, Asia’s first plant-based butcher, is not targeting Singapore’s vegans, or the vegetarian diets of the country’s Buddhist and Hindu communities. About 70% of its customers are meat eaters and its mission is to reach the mainstream.
“Our target audience is specifically not vegans,” said Ken Kuguru, Love Handle’s CEO and founder. “It’s a bit of a paradox. [But in everything] we are a little bit paradoxical.”
As a city-state that imports more than 90% of its food and has little room for actual livestock, Singapore has a vested supply chain interest in shifting from traditional meats.
Last year, a three-month chicken export ban from Malaysia, which provides the Lion City with about 34% of its poultry, halted the normal inflow of approximately 1.8 million broiler chickens a month. The ban caused a hike in poultry prices and concern over the country’s food security.
At the same time, environmental sustainability concerns are pushing many in Singapore and beyond to rethink their diets to reduce consumption of animal products. Restaurants and suppliers are increasingly following a similar path as Love Handle in using plant-based foods to reach customers beyond just vegans and vegetarians. Though challenges remain in making a convincing meat substitute, a rising class of Singaporean food entrepreneurs are betting on new techniques to recreate favourite dishes in a more eco-friendly way.
For some of them, this isn’t just a business decision – it’s a way to possibly prevent the worst outcomes of global climate change while preparing for a new world brought on by environmental crises.
In the Lion City, about 7% of the population are vegan or vegetarian, according to a 2020 poll by research firm YouGov Singapore. Individual reasons for the diet typically include environmental and health concerns, which together accounted for 70% of the reasons to give up meat.But it is unlikely that change will be driven by the small minorities who are willing to fully embrace a plant-based diet.
“There’s a lot of dishes that already cater to this community,” said Kuguru. “It’s established, it’s traditional, it’s there – but it hasn’t grown.”
To penetrate beyond this small and set demographic, he believes it’s important to emulate the “meaty” flavours that might hold people back from moving away from animal proteins.
Love Handle’s products replicate the umami tones of meat by catalysing the natural chemical interactions released from vegetables through the cooking process. Some plant-based companies replicate meat’s bloody qualities through leghemoglobin, a red protein found in soybeans.
These kinds of efforts are already showing promise in the marketplace as consumers around the world gain a taste for the meat-free lifestyle. According to Bloomberg Intelligence data, the global market for plant-based foods could see fivefold growth by 2030.
On the other hand, the quantity of meat produced over the past 50 years has increased threefold and remains on an upward trajectory, according to an October report on sustainable food by accounting giant PwC’s strategy consulting business.
Another report by the Stockholm Environment Institute a month later stated animal-based foods could be responsible for at least 16.5% of total greenhouse gas emissions. The report warned that if current consumption trends continue, it will be impossible to keep global warming below the 1.5° Celsius mark and increasingly challenging to stay below the 2° Celsius upper limit.
Vegan alternatives of popular local food … appeal[s] to the masses, draws them in to give vegan food a try”
LK Ong, Chef, VeganBliss
The high environmental stakes have provided extra motivation to those hunting the elusive secrets of re-creating meatiness.
For VeganBliss restaurant, which opened last year amongst the bright Peranakan shophouses of Joo Chiat Road, the key to selling a wider market on sustainable eating has been emulating not just the meat, but also the meal. The restaurant’s “roast chicken rice” bestseller is made from natural gluten but resembles the sliced fillets found at most of the country’s popular hawker food markets.
“Making vegan alternatives of popular local food … appeal[s] to the masses, draws them in to give vegan food a try, [and shows them] that the switch to veganism doesn’t entail sacrificing your favourite food,” says LK Ong, chef at VeganBliss.
For other restaurants, branching out from familiarity of local favourites has raised a challenge.
“In Asia, we eat based on tradition. You eat what you do because that’s what your mum did and grandmother did,” said Christina Rasumussen, a chef and entrepreneur. “But this doesn’t work for our planet anymore … we have to change.”
After working at Michelin-starred restaurant Noma and a plant-based collective in her native Denmark, Rasmussen moved to Singapore in 2022. When launching Mallow, her first pop-up concept in the city-state, she grappled with the challenge of how to integrate a vegan business into a culinary culture that celebrates local dishes such as poached Hainanese chicken rice and seafood laksa soup noodles and where traditional hawker food markets have gained UNESCO heritage status.
“Overall, vegan concepts are not popular like you may find in other western cities,” she said.
Most of Mallow’s customers were not vegan. As she prepares to launch her first permanent restaurant, Fura, she has consciously moved away from “plant-based” or “plant-forward” labels, to instead focus on “what our diet could look like in the future, due to climate change”. The menu will use ingredients that are in abundant supply, including insect proteins.
“We don’t openly brand ourselves as being vegan on purpose as it turns many away, instead we say plant-focused,” Rasmussen said. “[We’re] slowly changing people’s perceptions of what being conscious can look and taste like.”
As a small island metropolis, making sustainable diets the norm in Singapore will rely on sustainable supply chains.
Last year’s upheaval of chicken imports brought this fact into stark relief.
“We intend to grow more food locally to serve as a buffer in times of supply disruption,” said Grace Fu, minister for sustainability and the environment, in a parliamentary response to the chicken situation.
Fu and others in government used the issue to promote Singapore’s “30 by 30” campaign, an ongoing effort that aims to boost domestic food production to about 30% of everything consumed in the city-state by the end of the decade.
Restaurants including Love Handle and Fura focus on native ingredients such as soybeans, jackfruit and mushrooms. But the market still faces serious challenges in cost accessibility. Currently, Love Handle’s prices parallel those of high-end meat butchers in the city.
“Green Rebel” beef steak, made from mushrooms and seasoned with Cajun spices, costs $5.91 (SGD 8) for a 180 gram portion, while a 100 gram packet of vegetable “sausage” mince is priced at $5.17 (SGD 7).
In comparison, $10.16 (SGD 13.75) can buy 500 grams of Australian grass-fed beef mince and a 250 gram New Zealand striploin beef steak costs $8.49 (SGD 11.50) at local supermarket FairPrice. At local wet markets, prices can be even cheaper.
“In order to bring plant-based meats closer to the [meat-eating] consumer, the company will often add in additives, flavourings, colours, textures – when you add in all these new ingredients, you add to the cost, you add to the energy consumed in the process,” said Willam Chen, a professor in food science and technology at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.
“Subsequent processing of plant-based protein foods to suit consumers’ demand also needs energy. There is no holy grail.”
To address this issue, some innovation hubs are developing alternative proteins grown from animal cells in labs. Last year, Singapore became the first country in the world to grant regulatory approval for the sale of lab-cultured meat.
It’s a sector of innovation that fascinates Kuguru. For Love Handle’s next venture, he is partnering with a research lab to fuse animal and plant cells to create alternative proteins at a larger scale.
While not involving the slaughter of live animals, these new hybrid meats would not be considered vegan. But Kuguru is confident this move will not shut most vegans out.
“Anecdotally, the vast majority of vegans and vegetarians opted to move to a vegan and vegetarian diet because of either environmental reasons or animal cruelty reasons,” he said. “For those groups, moving to hybrid meat products would solve their core issues and allow them to reintroduce sustainable and ethical meat products back into their diets.”
As companies vye to keep up with consumer tastes, the wider industry has a more pressing issue on its plate. For Kuguru, switching to greener alternatives from traditionally farmed, animal meats may quite literally be a way to save the earth.
“Given the data on the beef industry, the carbon emissions, the amount of land that’s available, the math doesn’t work,” he said. “The planet is going to implode.”
Duo were paid B4,000 a month for each of the 48 shell companies they represented, say police
Police have found that two grocers in Bangkok acted as directors of 48 shell companies linked to a Chinese couple facing charges of running a 10-billion-baht international fraud scheme.
The two grocers, who had shops in Thon Buri, were paid 4,000 baht a month for each company they represented, said Pol Maj Gen Amnat Traipote, deputy commissioner of the Cyber Crime Investigation Bureau.
The companies were legally registered with the Department of Business Development to engage in activities including tour guide services, brokerage, wholesale, holding and property trade.
Thai shareholders held 51% in each company and Chinese nationals the rest. The businesses had 5 million baht in registered capital each and were all headquartered at houses in the same luxury housing estate in Prawet district where the Chinese couple were arrested on Wednesday.
Police are now checking the tax records of the companies, Pol Maj Gen Amnat said on Thursday.
Shaoxian Su, 31, and his girlfriend Keyi Ye, 25, were arrested at their 67-million-baht house in The Palazzo Srinakarin estate in Prawet on charges of public fraud and money laundering.
Police say the couple lured people in many countries into fake investments in digital currencies and other assets, with damages estimated at 10 billion baht.
Police suspect companies in their network had bought 19 luxury houses in the same estate in Prawet and leased them out to other Chinese people.
On Wednesday police impounded hundreds of millions of baht worth of assets from the couple, including expensive Bearbrick dolls.
In March this year, Seatrium announced that its wholly-owned Brazilian subsidiary, Estaleiro Jurong Aracruz, was being investigated for “alleged irregularities” over its practices. Seatrium said later that month that the proceedings relate generally to “past conduct investigated by the Brazilian authorities in connection with Operation Car Wash”. However, on AprContinue Reading