Mixed sentiments pull SET down at the start of the week
The Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET) Index fell by 2.23 points, or 0.14 per cent, to 1,648.10 on Monday morning, witnessing a high of 1,655.04 and a low of 1,648.10 in opening trade.
The SET Index closed at 1,650.33 on Friday, up 2.58 points or 0.16 per cent. Transactions totalled THB78.70 billion with an index high of 1,657.79 and a low of 1,644.12.
Krungsri Securities forecast the index on Monday would fluctuate between 1,640 and 1,660 points amid positive and negative sentiments.
It said the index gained positive sentiment from the government easing lockdown, as domestic Covid-19 infections continued to decline. Also, the censure debate on government ministers had gone smoothly.
However, it advised investors to beware of mass sell-offs of shares in response to lower-than-expected US non-farm payrolls and signs of overbought stocks.
The baht opened at 32.46 to the US dollar on Monday, strengthening from last week’s closing rate of 32.62.
The Thai currency is likely to move between 32.35 and 32.55 during the day and between 32.25 and 32.75 this week, Krungthai Bank market strategist Poon Panichpibool said.
Poon predicted that the baht would drift sideways in the short term. Foreign investors are keeping an eye on the Covid-19 situation in the country after the easing of lockdown measures, before adjusting their possession of Thai assets.
The dollar could be supported by the US Federal Reserve’s move to reduce quantitative easing (QE). The dollar weakened after US employment data was worse than expected.
If the European Central Bank signals to decrease QE, the euro will strengthen and weaken the dollar.
Your food prices are at risk as the world runs short of workers
Across the world, a dearth of workers is shaking up food supply chains.
In Vietnam, the army is assisting with the rice harvest. In the U.K., farmers are dumping milk because there are no truckers to collect it. Brazil’s robusta coffee beans took 120 days to reap this year, rather than the usual 90. And American meatpackers are trying to lure new employees with Apple Watches while fast-food chains raise the prices of burgers and burritos.
Whether it’s fruit pickers, slaughterhouse workers, truckers, warehouse operators, chefs or waiters, the global food ecosystem is buckling due to a shortage of staff. Supplies are getting hit and some employers are forced to raise wages at a double-digit pace. That’s threatening to push food prices – already heated by soaring commodities and freight costs – even higher. Prices in August were up 33% from the same month last year, according to an index compiled by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization.
The coronavirus pandemic has helped spark a labor shortfall for many parts of the economy. But the impact is particularly stark in food and agriculture, which are among the world’s least-automated industries. Food security is a sensitive issue in many parts of the world and thin margins mean rising costs generally pass through to buyers, according to Boston Consulting Group.
“Almost certainly there is disruption,” said Decker Walker, BCG’s agribusiness expert in Chicago. Effects vary among locations and products, he said, but “the general theme seems to be: The roles with the least desirable working conditions are actually the ones that we have the most pain with.”
Your food prices are at risk as the world runs short of workers
There are signs the labor shortfall is curbing supplies. In the U.S., wholesale distributors like Sysco Corp. and United Natural Foods Inc. are reporting production delays and slowdowns for items ranging from bacon and cheese to coconut water and spices. In the U.K., some stores are running low on staples like bread and chicken, while McDonald’s Corp. ran out of milkshakes in August.
“We have family-wage, great jobs that have been open, that we’ve been recruiting really hard for and have had trouble filling,” said Patrick Criteser, chief executive officer of Tillamook County Creamery Association. The Oregon-based dairy co-operative recently ran so short of workers that a board member had to skip an operational meeting to help out in the fields. “With the inflation we’re seeing in the business and the inflation that we’re seeing at the farm level, it’s going to translate to the shelf.”
Shortages are hitting farms, processors and restaurants alike. Malaysia, the world’s No.2 palm oil producer, has lost about 30% of potential output of the edible oil used in everything from chocolate to margarine. Shrimp production in southern Vietnam – one of the world’s top exporters – has dropped by 60% to 70% from before the pandemic. And a fifth of tomato production in the south of Italy has been lost this year, due to the scorching heat and transport paralysis, according to the farmers’ association CIA.
“I have been in this business since the ’80s, but I have never seen a situation like this,” said Michele Ferrandino, a farmer in Foggia. “Tomatoes are very perishable goods. There were not enough trucks to transport the crop to the processing plants, in those crucial days” of the harvest, he said.
Your food prices are at risk as the world runs short of workers
Canceled or delayed deliveries have also forced British dairy farmers like Mike King in South Gloucestershire, England to dump milk while stores run short. King estimates he has lost some 20,000 liters (5,283 gallons), and says some farmers have resorted to milking their cattle less frequently due to staffing shortfalls.
Even as restaurants and other businesses re-open in the U.S. and parts of Europe – boosting demand for goods such as meat and bottled drinks – the delta variant is spreading in places like Southeast Asia, curbing primary production. Other, longer-established pandemic effects are still causing problems too: Covid outbreaks continue to crop up in meat- and fish-processing plants, forcing temporary closures, and border restrictions in countries from the U.K. to Thailand are limiting the supply of migrant workers.
In some places, the scramble for staff is compounded by local issues, such as difficult and dangerous farmwork conditions caused by a record U.S. heatwave, or the disruption of Brexit.
As a result, employers face another hurdle: Workers have plenty of options.
The current economy is creating “choice where choices may not have existed in the past,” said BCG’s Walker. When “the entire world is short-staffed,” filling less desirable jobs gets more difficult, he said.
Employment in the food supply chain can certainly be tough. Whether it’s backbreaking strawberry picking, insecure slaughterhouse work or the fast-paced, high-pressure environment of a restaurant kitchen, many jobs are physically taxing, short-term, poorly paid – or a combination of all three.
With more jobs available, Australian workers who might previously have settled for positions at meat processing plants in sparsely populated areas can opt for work in busier towns instead. Many of the European Union citizens who might typically travel to the U.K. to work on farms, in haulage or serving coffees are choosing to stay in their home countries or on the continent. American laborers who have struggled with sweltering heat in the fields may choose the cool interiors of a store instead.
Jon DeVaney, president of the Washington State Tree Fruit Association, acknowledges that work such as fruit picking is demanding.
“It is a physical job,” he said. “You are picking fruit and carrying it up and down ladders, so if your alternative is pushing buttons on a cash register, that might be more appealing.”
Higher salaries and perks can sweeten the deal. Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. recently raised U.S. menu prices by as much as 4% after increasing average pay to $15 an hour; in Canada the company is offering a referral bonus to help with recruitment. Pork-processing workers at Smithfield Foods in South Dakota get freebies like Apple Watches or iPads once they complete their first 60 days, a company official said. Pizza chain Rossopomodoro, which is headquartered in Europe, has been forced to boost its base pay by 50% in London, CEO Daniele di Martino said.
But often money is not enough. Workers are increasingly demanding greater protection from the coronavirus as well as higher wages, according to Sunny Verghese, CEO of agricultural trading giant Olam International Ltd.
While meatpackers have made significant safety progress since last year, they are up against the delta variant now. That has slowed the amount of cattle moving through slaughterhouses at meat giant Tyson Foods.
“We were on a good trajectory and then the delta variant showed up, and we’ve taken a step back as result of that,” CEO Donnie King said on a call with investors last month. “Essentially it takes six days to get five days’ worth of work.”
Worker shortfalls aren’t happening everywhere, and the effects aren’t evenly distributed. Much of mainland Europe has not felt the same crippling shortages as the U.K., where Brexit constrained the flow of EU workers. China has been largely unaffected and in India, while inflation is still a worry, labor is plentiful and agriculture has been mostly untouched by virus restrictions.
Elsewhere, labor is just one of several headaches for the world’s food ecosystem. Extreme weather from Brazil to France has affected harvests. Surging crop prices have pushed up the price of feeding livestock – and therefore the price of meat. Transport costs have skyrocketed due to soaring demand, container shortages and overwhelmed ports, not helped by the temporary partial closure of China’s Ningbo-Zhoushan, the world’s third-busiest cargo port.
Still, the shortage of workers threatens to further add to costs, whether through wage increases or supply shortfalls. And the issue won’t disappear when the pandemic ends: The share of workers employed in agriculture has been falling for decades amid a shift to cities and services sectors, and hiring for some jobs was tough long before Covid. These more permanent changes to the labor market call for technological solutions, and investment in automation and robotics has accelerated during the pandemic.
In the U.S., automated tractors, robotic milkers and machines such as carrot planters are replacing human labor. Meanwhile, U.K. farmers are trialling robots to pick strawberries, lettuce or broccoli. Harvesting tools have helped Brazil’s robusta-coffee farmers cut dependence on manual workers to one-fifth of the number needed just a few years ago, according to Edimilson Calegari, general manager at Espirito Santo-based cooperative Cooabriel. While the country’s labor shortfall extended the length of the harvest, he said, technology has lessened its impact.
Still, it will take years before farmers really take to robots, according to Cindy van Rijswick, a senior analyst at Rabobank in Utrecht who specializes in horticulture.
“In the end, prices for food have to go up to compensate workers in a better way and to find solutions,” van Rijswick said. “They just cost money and we need to be willing to pay that.”
Investors are placing big bets on a growing space economy – but can they reach orbit?
Space is hot.
The billionaire “space barons” – Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson – have given the industry a cachet not seen since the Apollo era of the 1960s and ’70s, with Branson and Bezos flying to the edge of space on their own spacecraft and Musk’s SpaceX becoming the dominant supplier of people and cargo to the International Space Station.
Investors are fearful of missing out. That’s turned out to be great news for the space companies hoping to get a piece of the satellite-launch business. But it’s also caused analysts to warn that space is still a nascent and risky business, one rocket explosion away from disaster.
Hundreds of millions of dollars are now flowing to an industry long viewed as too risky for serious investment. New start-ups are blossoming in an explosion reminiscent of the early days of tech, when money poured into Silicon Valley start-ups at the beginning of the Internet age. Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, the chief of space operations for the U.S. Space Force, even predicted during a recent speech that investment in the commercial space sector would drive “a second Golden Age of space.”
Over the past decade, investors pumped $200 billion into 1,500 space companies around the world, according to an analysis done by Space Capital, a space investment firm. Investment in start-up space companies reached $7.6 billion last year, a 16 percent increase from 2019, according to Bryce Space and Technology, a consulting firm.
“This level of investment is consistent with the 6-year trend beginning in 2015 of unprecedented levels of venture capital driven investment flowing into the space industry,” the company said.
That has helped drive a $447 billion global space economy that grew 4.4 percent last year, according to the Space Foundation, an advocacy group. Over the past 10 years, the space economy has grown 55 percent, according to the Foundation, which said the commercial space products and services market is valued at $219 billion.
In addition to those investments, several space ventures have gone public over the past year through special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs.
Branson’s Virgin Galactic space tourism company was one of the first high-profile space ventures to go public through a SPAC when it merged with a New York hedge fund in 2019. Since then, SPACs have “exploded in popularity,” according to a report by analysts at Avascent and Jefferies, a financial advisory firm specializing in aerospace, which found that the mergers across all industries raised $83 billion in 2020 compared to $14 billion the year before.
But the stocks can be volatile. In the last couple of weeks, for example, the stocks of two space companies took hits when they suffered problems. Shares of Virgin Galactic dipped after the Federal Aviation Administration said it was investigating the company after its flight, with Branson on board, went off course. The probe was first reported by the New Yorker.
Astra, a start-up rocket company based outside of San Francisco, saw its stock drop after a launch attempt failed to reach orbit last month.
Still, more than a dozen companies have gone public, or announced they would in recent months. They include Planet, which has built a constellation of satellites to take images of the Earth, and Astra. Rocket Lab, which has launched dozens of small satellites on its Electron rocket, started trading on the Nasdaq last month. And Virgin Orbit, which “air launches” a rocket designed to fly satellites by dropping it from the wing of a 747 airplane, announced that it would go public through a SPAC and that it had raised $100 million in another funding round backed by Boeing and AE Industrial Partners.
International companies also are driving growth, analysts said. “Going forward, I would expect to see it becoming increasingly international,” said Nickolas Boensch, a program manager at Bryce. “China, Japan, the U.K. have been huge players here, and there is something attractive to having a domestic capability.”
But part of the market may be overhyped and overheated, and analysts warn that there could be a reset similar to the tech bubble in the early 2000s.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt we’re in a bubble,” said Greg Autry, a professor of space leadership policy and business at Arizona State University. “But that’s OK. A lot of people freaked out during the e-commerce bubble. But if I had the opportunity to buy Amazon or Google at the height of that bubble, I would.”
But as the Avascent analysts looked at the projected revenue for 10 companies that recently went public, the analysts warned that “not all SPACs are created equal.” They noted that “there is no free lunch in capital markets. Given that SPACs offer high return opportunities, they consequently carry notable risks.”
Chad Anderson, the managing partner of Space Capital, agreed, saying “for the most part these should be looked at with a very skeptical eye.”
A lot of the companies have yet to produce any revenue, he said, and “they have these projections where they go from $15 million to magically $2 billion in revenue in two years. And you have to wonder how they’re going to do that.”
Investors had long shied away from investing in space – the quickest way to become a millionaire in space, one axiom went, is to start out as a billionaire.
“There was a very limited market with a handful of defense contractors on one side, and the government on the other,” Anderson said.
SpaceX changed everything, he said. Musk’s company showed that it could win the trust of NASA and the Pentagon, score lucrative government contracts and capture a large portion of the commercial launch market as well. Last year, for example, SpaceX captured a Pentagon contract for $316 million for launches between 2022 and 2027. The United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, was awarded $337 million for launches during that period.
SpaceX has been a notable recipient of private investment. In 2015, Google and Fidelity invested $1 billion in the company, helping it fund the satellite constellation, called Starlink, it’s building to provide Internet to consumers from space.
Replicating SpaceX’s success may be difficult. Astra’s attempt to reach orbit went awry last month in an awkward, I-think-I-can attempt that saw the rocket fire its engines from its launchpad in Alaska, then lurch sideways as if it were exiting the stage, and finally climb into the skies. It flew straight up for 2 1/2 minutes before spinning out wildly. Controllers on the ground terminated the flight, causing it to crash into the ocean.
But Astra CEO Chris Kemp thinks his company, which uses a mobile launchpad, allowing the company to fly from any place it can get a license, will be successful in a market that is seeing a huge proliferation in the number of satellites flooding Earth’s orbit.
Over the next 10 years, more than 50,000 satellites could be launched into orbit, up from the few thousand currently in operation today, according to Analytical Graphics Inc., a company based outside Philadelphia that builds software to track spacecraft and debris in space.
To keep up with demand, Astra is planning to launch on an almost daily basis by 2025, Kemp said, an ambitious goal that he said is actually “conservative.”
“That’s what’s great about being a public company,” he said. “You have to put some things out there, and then your shareholders will judge you based on how you perform.”
After the Astra launch went awry, Kemp said that an engine shut down right after launch. But he wrote on Twitter that he was “incredibly proud of our team. Space may be hard, but like this rocket, we are not giving up.”
Peter Beck, the founder and CEO of Rocket Lab, thinks his company is well positioned, too. It’s had nearly two dozen launches over the past three years from its site in New Zealand, putting more than 100 satellites in orbit for a range of customers, including NASA and the Pentagon. And it has more than $100 million in launches booked for an array of commercial and government customers. All of which gives Rocket Lab an edge over some of the other space companies looking to raise cash, Beck said.
“We’ve been the leader in this space for three years,” he said. “As investors look to differentiate companies, it’s pretty stark. There’s a column full of zeros – zero launches, zero revenue, zero everything. And then there’s a column on the Rocket Lab side that has significant numbers. So, it should be pretty obvious.”
When Tim Ellis looked to raise money for his young start-up rocket company in 2016, he pitched 90 investors over a grueling six-week period. “Eighty-nine said no,” he recalled. “One said yes” to lead the $10 million round.
Last year was a different story. The investors came to Ellis and his company, Relativity Space, and he raised $500 million, a massive amount for a rocket company that’s never launched a rocket. Then in June, it raked in another $650 million, a haul that it says will allow it to build a new manufacturing facility and pursue a larger rocket designed to compete with SpaceX.
Relativity Space has already sold a number of flights on its Terran 1 rocket, which the company plans to launch early next year. The rocket is “definitely the most presold rocket in history before launch both by the number of launches and total value,” Ellis said.
What separates Relativity from its competitors is the way it manufactures its hardware. The rockets are made entirely by a massive 3-D printer, which could open up other avenues of business for the company as well. But for now, it’s focused on building rockets and disrupting the industry that has manufactured space vehicles the same way for years, he said.
“We always knew that really we were building this software-driven manufacturing technology that scales without fixed tooling,” Ellis said. “And I’m quite convinced that is going to be the dominate force, not just in the launch industry, but in aerospace overall, which hasn’t changed for 60 years. We’re still building products one at a time by hand with hundreds of thousands to millions of individual parts, a very complicated supply chain, a ton of manual labor and really inefficient cost structures.”
At first, it was a hard sell. Now, it’s backed by some of the biggest names in the investor community, from Mark Cuban to Y Combinator, Fidelity, BlackRock and Tiger Global.
Now all the company has to do is prove it’s worth all that cash.
To be fair, modern media is white men’s invention. Even though the Chinese invented paper and printing, Gutenberg’s type-set printing of the Bible and papal indulgences launched media into the religious, commercial and cultural space which, in turn, kicked off the Industrial Revolution and imperialism. Western science, driven by religious fervour for capitalism, paved the way for the information revolution that became global.
Nothing succeeds like success. White Man’s Media became successful through both new technology and its business model. The medieval Catholic Church grew rich by issuing indulgences (forgiving “sins” of divorce, abortion and crime) and granting letters patent, franchises and charters to go out and conquer colonies. As the commercial class rose in power, so did its demand for information. Venetian merchants created political and war news sheets in 1566. By 1609, Germany was printing the first newspapers. The new printed media spread information and knowledge beyond the hands of the royalty, clergy and elites to the masses. This paved the way for the first French and American revolutions with populist cries for equality, freedom and democracy. American media invented advertising, pushing the right of everyone to consume, enter into debt and freely erode our natural resources.
But the power of media cuts both ways. Just as markets need true, fair and timely information to perform effectively, society needs a courageous media to speak truth to power. Sound political decisions cannot be made with bad or corrupted information. Thus, as early as 1695, Britain abolished the licensing of the press, and by 1791, the newly independent United States of America institutionalised the freedoms of speech, press and assembly into the First Amendment to the Constitution.
Armed with these freedoms, the White Men’s media played a crucial role in the advancement of science, technology, and colonisation. Media, power and technology formed a formidable toolbox that gave the West the decisive edge of knowledge to dominate the rest of the world. As the 20th-century Arab Orientalist scholar Edward Said lamented, mental colonisation through religion and ideology was more powerful than physical colonisation and this was achieved largely through education in Western languages, taught through Christian schools.
Ergo, media is power that can be used to dominate others, inseparable from war and beliefs. As Kenyan independence fighter Jomo Kenyatta quipped: “When the missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land, and the missionaries had the Bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.”
Nazi propaganda chief Goebbels understood the power of media in politics when he realised that a lie repeated enough becomes the truth. This prompted Winston Churchill to proclaim that “in wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies”.
Fast forward to today, the drums of war are again being beaten by White Man’s Media, again attended by a bodyguard of lies. Internet guru Yochai Benkler, in his 2018 book “Network Propaganda” summed up the dangers: “First, having a segment of society that is systematically disengaged from objective journalism and the ability to tell truth from partisan fiction is dangerous to any country. It creates fertile ground for propaganda. Second, it makes actual governance difficult … Third, the divorce of a party base from the institutions and norms that provide a reality check on our leaders is a political disaster waiting to happen.”
These disasters are unfolding by the day.
Former CIA media analyst Martin Gurri stated succinctly in “Revolt of the Public” (2016) that, “We live in an age of misinformation – an age of spin, marketing and downright lies. Of course, lying is hardly new, but the deliberate propagation of false or misleading information has exploded in the past century, driven by new technologies for disseminating information – radio, television, the internet – and by the increased sophistication of those who would mislead us.”
In short, White Man’s Media is today being challenged by the rise of new media channels such as Al Jazeera, CGTN, RT and myriad of small social media channels (eg johnmenadue.com) that provide a whole range of information that portray different perspectives and views in different languages from White Man’s Media. And that is what should be the case, because truth comes not from “my way or no way”, but from a myriad different colours of opinions and perceptions. Global media cannot be controlled by a small minority that has only its own interests at heart.
The debacles of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars show that wars fought on the basis of outright lies end up badly for everyone. What role did the White Man’s Media play in such disasters by not speaking truth to power?
The American writer James Baldwin wrote in 1962 about racism in his country: “Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.” Events have shown that White Man’s Media know far less about the rest of the world than they admit, and that they know themselves even less.
We have a situation where the white man is still dominant in global economics, finance, military, technology and media, but may lose that dominance with rapidly changing circumstances. We have a majority that feels insecure because it realises that soon it may be a global minority, in both population and power. No minorities can feel secure when the majority is insecure.
That is not a good foundation for global peace and stability.
Internet minister accused of plagiarising artwork during censure debate
Digital Economy and Society Minister Chaiwut Thanakamanusorn has been accused of plagiarising a foreign artist’s work during the no-confidence debate in Parliament on Friday.
Chaiwut adapted a poster made by Australian artist Joey Klarenbeek, using it to illustrate his mission to protect the three pillars of nation, religion and King. The poster shows ranks of identical youths absorbed in their phone screens as hands reach down to steal their brains.
The minister claimed that the three pillars were being damaged by fake news on social media. He added that youths were being brainwashed and used as political tools to change the country.
On Friday, the Facebook page “Kidyang” accused Chaiwut of failing to credit the artist of the picture he had used. On Saturday, the page added that the artist had not given permission for Chaiwut to use his artwork, which had been plagiarised in this way before.
The Nation Thailand contacted the artist via his Facebook page, “Joey Klarenbeek Illustration”.
Klarenbeek said: “I was never approached to license my artwork and never received payment or artist credit.”
He added that “Unfortunately, this [abuse of copyright] has been occurring repeatedly since I made the artwork for a charity design competition years ago.”
Copyright protects the work of artists and stops others from using it without permission. These days, copyright can be easily checked via an internet search engine.
So far, the Digital Economy and Society Ministry has declined to comment on Chaiwut’s use of the artwork, though it is expected to issue a statement soon.
Positive Posters by Joey KlarenbeekTop 30 Positive Posters exhibition at Thousand Pound Bend cafeSociety 6
Thailand ranks 7th for heritage and 28th overall in this year’s Best Countries rankings compiled by US News.
The rankings are based on global perceptions of countries in terms of characteristics that drive trade, travel and investment – directly affecting national economies.
Canada came top this year with the biggest overall score, while Spain was ranked highest in the heritage category, despite placing 19th in the overall rankings.
US News gave Spain 100 points for cultural accessibility, 96 points for its rich history, 97.3 for great food, 97.5 for its number of cultural attractions and 92.1 points for geographic attractions.
Thailand ranked top in Asean for heritage, but second in Asia behind India which came 6th in the global list.
Thailand got 63.2 points for cultural accessibility, 58.7 points for its rich history, 89.9 for great food, 87.2 points for having many cultural attractions and 84.6 points for geographic attractions.
The world heritage sites in Thailand are:
• Historic Town Sukhothai and Associated Historic Towns
Thailand lures e-bike manufacturers with investment privileges
The Board of Investment (BoI) on Monday approved investment privileges for electric-bicycle manufacturers and also boosted privileges for e-motorcycles, e-tricycles and battery-powered trucks.
The move, aimed to promote Thailand’s growing e-vehicle industry, was approved at Monday’s BoI meeting chaired by Prime Minister Gen Prayut Chan-o-cha and attended by Energy Minister Supattanapong Punmeechaow and Finance Minister Arkhom Termpittayapaisith.
“PM Prayut told the meeting that the BoI must provide aid to SMEs that have been affected by Covid-19 situation as soon as possible to ensure that businesses stay afloat through the crisis and that unemployment is minimised,” said PM’s Office spokesman Thanakorn Wangboonkongchana.
“Industries are also urged to promote the use of manual labour together with machines under the Industry 4.0 framework,” he added.
The meeting also approved measures to help businesses affected by lockdown, including extending the deadline for application of ISO 9002, CMMI and related industrial standards. BoI-promoted companies are also allowed to file for temporary suspension of operations for more than two months.
The BoI reported that in the first six months of this year, 801 projects worth a total Bt386.2 billion were granted investment promotion privileges, up 158 per cent from the same period last year. Of these, 232 projects (29 per cent) are located in Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC) with total investment valued at Bt126.6 billion or 33 per cent of total investment value.
Shared pantries set up to help destitute Bangkokians
Bangkok governor Aswin Kwanmuang launched the “Too Pun Sook” (sharing pantries) project on Monday in a bid to help people suffering to survive the ongoing pandemic.
Aswin called on companies, shops, civil society organisations and wealthy Bangkokians to donate cooked or dried food, toiletries and medicines via pantries set up in the city’s 50 districts.
Bangkokians wishing to donate can call the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration’s Office of Permanent Secretary at (02) 224 8651 or (02) 221 2141-69 extension 1280 or contact their local district office.
Shared pantries set up to help destitute Bangkokians
Bangkokians can get free Covid-19 test at nine sites
The Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) set up nine Covid-testing units in the city as of Sunday. Residents who wish to be tested must bring along two copies of their identity card and a pen to avoid having to share.
Tests will take 30 minutes and will be conducted using the antigen test kit. The testing units have been set up at:
• Sports Ground Pat 2, Rama VI Road, Ratchathewi district (500 tests per day) • Chaeng Watthana Government Complex, Lak Si district (1,000 tests per day) • 72nd Anniversary Stadium, Min Buri district (700 tests per day) • Wat Darn, Bang Phongphang, Yan Nawa district (500 tests per day) • Below Rama VIII Bridge, Bang Phlat district (400 tests per day) • Bang Khae Phirom Market, Bang Khae district (600 tests per day) • Chetupon Commercial College, Rat Burana district (1,000 tests per day) • Enco Terminal, Lak Si district (1,500 tests per day) • Royal Thai Army Club, Phya Thai district (1,200 tests per day)
People who test positive will be tested again using the RT-PCR method before doctors prescribe either Fah Talai Jone or Favipiravir based on symptoms. They will then either be sent home to isolate under the BKK HI/CI care system or shifted to a waiting centre.
Your food prices are at risk as the world runs short of workers
Your food prices are at risk as the world runs short of workers
Positive Posters by Joey Klarenbeek
Top 30 Positive Posters exhibition at Thousand Pound Bend cafe
Society 6
Thailand ranks top in Asean for heritage sites
Shared pantries set up to help destitute Bangkokians
Shared pantries set up to help destitute Bangkokians
Shared pantries set up to help destitute Bangkokians
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