Xinhua | 2012-8-23
By Agencies
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will visit Cambodia in November to
attend the 21st ASEAN Summit and East Asia Summit, a senior UN official
said here Thursday.
Noeleen Heyzer, UN Under Secretary-General
and Executive Secretary of the Economic and Social Commission for Asia
and the Pacific (ESCAP), said that the UN-ESCAP will not only continue
to help ASEAN in intra-ASEAN Connectivity, but also help connect the
bloc with the whole Asia-Pacific.
Cambodian Deputy Prime
Minister and Foreign Minister Hor Namhong said he would also invite Ban
to attend the Global-ASEAN Dialogue Forum, which will be focused on
global issues such as the troubled financial system, food safety,
energy security, and climate change.
Ban visited Cambodia for the first time in October, 2010.
Ouch
Borith, secretary of state at Cambodia's foreign ministry, said that
the upcoming visit of Ban will help further enhance relationship and
cooperation between the UN and ASEAN.
Heyzer was here from Tuesday to Friday to further enhance ties between the UN and Cambodia.
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Five Asean members to set up rice trader federation : Yanyong
August 23, 2012
The Nation
Thailand will join with four neighbouring countries in setting up a federation of rice traders with the objective of pushing up regional rice prices, Permanent Secretary for Commerce Yanyong Puangrach said.
Prior to the Asean Summit in October, commerce ministers of five Indochina countries Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar will discuss the establishment of a world rice federation to look at rice trading in the global market. The five ricegrowing countries currently sell 20 million tonnes of rice overall two-thirds of the total global trading volume of 30 million tonnes.Yanyong said he strongly believed that the rice federation would raise the standard and value of rice in the Asean region.
He was also confident that free trading in Asean in the future would increase the sales volume and value of rice in the five countries.
Thailand remains the largest rice exporter in the Asean community, followed by Vietnam.
In early August, the Thai government projected 2012 rice exports at 8.59 million tonnes while Vietnam set an export target at 67 million tonnes annually until 2015. Vietnam's annual export projection was close to its recorded export of 7.2 million tonnes in 2011.
With huge export volumes from Thailand, India and Vietnam, rice prices in Asia may decline compared to the highest value of US$1,000 per tonne in 2008 when a food crisis affected many countries.
The permanent secretary of commerce said the government's bidding of about 700,000 tonnes of rice in the near future is aimed at helping exporters while rice in the government's stock will be sold on a governmenttogovernment basis at cheaper prices.
China, Indonesia, Iraq and Iran are keen to buy rice from Thailand, he added.
Iran stupidly restricts women students
By Dale McFeatters
Rarely does a country make a conscious decision to dumb itself down. But it happens. Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. China during Mao's Great Leap Forward. Japan under the 2 1/2 centuries of the Edo period.
Now Iran has decided its young women have become too smart for their own good and the comfort of its male chauvinist clerics, who have seen long-held and cherished stereotypes about women threatened.
So the theocratic government has banned women from 77 undergraduate courses in the coming year, including, according to The Telegraph of Great Britain, computer science, electrical engineering, industrial engineering, nuclear physics, business management, hotel management, English literature and English translation. These last two were no doubt responsible for the introduction of heretical ideas.
The specialty Oil Industry University campuses have banned women altogether.
According to The Telegraph, "Senior clerics in Iran's theocratic regime have become concerned about the social side-effects of rising educational standards among women, including declining birth and marriage rates."
It seems to be a tenet of the clerics that women are the inferior sex, but once given the chance at higher education women have excelled. The Telegraph says women outnumbered men by three to two in passing this year's university entrance exams. And United Nations figures show Iran has the highest ratio of female to male undergraduates in the world.
Human rights activist and Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, now in exile in Britain, has demanded a U.N. investigation. She told the U.N. secretary general and the high commissioner for human rights that the study restrictions were part of a concerted campaign to reduce the number of women in universities and weaken the Iranian feminist movement that has been in the forefront of protests against the regime.
Experience has shown that one of the surest paths to prosperity and progress in a nation is educating women and improving their access to professions. Having clamped down on higher education for women, the clerics may be more secure in their masculinity but they will end up presiding over a dumber nation.
Dale McFeatters is an editorial writer for Scripps Howard News Service.
Rarely does a country make a conscious decision to dumb itself down. But it happens. Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. China during Mao's Great Leap Forward. Japan under the 2 1/2 centuries of the Edo period.
Now Iran has decided its young women have become too smart for their own good and the comfort of its male chauvinist clerics, who have seen long-held and cherished stereotypes about women threatened.
So the theocratic government has banned women from 77 undergraduate courses in the coming year, including, according to The Telegraph of Great Britain, computer science, electrical engineering, industrial engineering, nuclear physics, business management, hotel management, English literature and English translation. These last two were no doubt responsible for the introduction of heretical ideas.
The specialty Oil Industry University campuses have banned women altogether.
According to The Telegraph, "Senior clerics in Iran's theocratic regime have become concerned about the social side-effects of rising educational standards among women, including declining birth and marriage rates."
It seems to be a tenet of the clerics that women are the inferior sex, but once given the chance at higher education women have excelled. The Telegraph says women outnumbered men by three to two in passing this year's university entrance exams. And United Nations figures show Iran has the highest ratio of female to male undergraduates in the world.
Human rights activist and Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, now in exile in Britain, has demanded a U.N. investigation. She told the U.N. secretary general and the high commissioner for human rights that the study restrictions were part of a concerted campaign to reduce the number of women in universities and weaken the Iranian feminist movement that has been in the forefront of protests against the regime.
Experience has shown that one of the surest paths to prosperity and progress in a nation is educating women and improving their access to professions. Having clamped down on higher education for women, the clerics may be more secure in their masculinity but they will end up presiding over a dumber nation.
Dale McFeatters is an editorial writer for Scripps Howard News Service.
Monday, August 20, 2012
Storm Kills 9 in Northern Vietnam, Floods Fields, Damages Homes
By Bloomberg News
At least nine people were killed and at least 14 were injured by a storm that brought heavy rains to northern Vietnam over the weekend, according to the country’s central committee for flood and storm control.
Typhoon Kai-tak also passed through southern China, causing floods and the evacuation of more than 500,000 people.
Three people died in Vietnam’s Vinh Phuc province, west of the capital city of Hanoi, where one person was killed as a result of the storm, the committee said in a report posted on its website. Other fatalities took place in Bac Giang, Lao Cai, Son La and Yen Bai provinces, according to the report.
More than 20,000 hectares of rice fields were flooded in the region, and some provincial roads were damaged, the committee said. More than 11,000 houses were damaged.
At least nine people were killed and at least 14 were injured by a storm that brought heavy rains to northern Vietnam over the weekend, according to the country’s central committee for flood and storm control.
Typhoon Kai-tak also passed through southern China, causing floods and the evacuation of more than 500,000 people.
Three people died in Vietnam’s Vinh Phuc province, west of the capital city of Hanoi, where one person was killed as a result of the storm, the committee said in a report posted on its website. Other fatalities took place in Bac Giang, Lao Cai, Son La and Yen Bai provinces, according to the report.
More than 20,000 hectares of rice fields were flooded in the region, and some provincial roads were damaged, the committee said. More than 11,000 houses were damaged.
PRESS DIGEST - Vietnam newspapers - Aug 20
Aug 20 (Reuters) - These are some of the leading
stories in the official Vietnamese press on Monday. Reuters has
not verified these stories and does not vouch for their
accuracy.
FINANCIAL NEWS:
LAO DONG
- The central bank has approved partly private VPBank to increase credit growth to 30 percent this year after the bank reported first-half loans rose 11.6 percent from the end of 2011.
- Masan Group is allowed to list an additional 172 million new shares on Aug. 21, raising its total number of shares to 687 million, the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange said.
- As of Aug. 16, dong loans with rates above 15 percent in the banking system fell to 24.6 percent of outstanding loans, down as much as 65 percent compared with the ratio prior to July 15, central bank data showed.
THOI BAO KINH TE VIETNAM
- One of the reasons for the low credit growth of Vietnam's banking system so far this year is that businesses, which have overcome difficulties and reduced inventory, are still reluctant to expand business on fear of further economic fluctuations, a bank executive said.
- The spread between dollar and dong deposit rates now stands at 2 percentage points, and banks cut dong rates, depositors would switch to dollar, which will pressure on the dong, said financial expert Le Xuan Nghia, former deputy head of the National Financial Supervisory Commission.
DAU TU
- The central bank said 23 banks have sought permission to raise their annual credit growth quota, but it has only granted approval to raise the target to 27-30 percent for those lenders which received initial targets of 8-10 percent.
ECONOMIC AND GENERAL NEWS:
VIETNAM NEWS (vietnamnews.vnagency.com.vn)
- A total 27 people were killed after Typhoon Kai Tak hit northern Vietnam last Friday, damaging more than 6,000 houses, the National Committee for Search and Rescue said.
QUAN DOI NHAN DAN
- The Phu Cat airport in the central province of Binh Dinh has been taken out of the list of dioxin-affected hotspots in Vietnam, after more than 7,000 cubic metres of contaminated soil had been buried, the Natural Resources and Environment Ministry said.
HANOI MOI
- Vietnam aims to meet 60 percent of domestic demand for medicine by 2015, while export of the products should rise 10-15 percent annually, the Health Ministry said in a project to boost domestic consumption and production of pharmaceutical products.
DAU TU
- Acquisition activities are booming as leading companies take advantage of other firms' divestment and sales of projects, businessmen said. (Reporting by Hanoi Newsroom; Editing by Gopakumar Warrier)
FINANCIAL NEWS:
LAO DONG
- The central bank has approved partly private VPBank to increase credit growth to 30 percent this year after the bank reported first-half loans rose 11.6 percent from the end of 2011.
- Masan Group is allowed to list an additional 172 million new shares on Aug. 21, raising its total number of shares to 687 million, the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange said.
- As of Aug. 16, dong loans with rates above 15 percent in the banking system fell to 24.6 percent of outstanding loans, down as much as 65 percent compared with the ratio prior to July 15, central bank data showed.
THOI BAO KINH TE VIETNAM
- One of the reasons for the low credit growth of Vietnam's banking system so far this year is that businesses, which have overcome difficulties and reduced inventory, are still reluctant to expand business on fear of further economic fluctuations, a bank executive said.
- The spread between dollar and dong deposit rates now stands at 2 percentage points, and banks cut dong rates, depositors would switch to dollar, which will pressure on the dong, said financial expert Le Xuan Nghia, former deputy head of the National Financial Supervisory Commission.
DAU TU
- The central bank said 23 banks have sought permission to raise their annual credit growth quota, but it has only granted approval to raise the target to 27-30 percent for those lenders which received initial targets of 8-10 percent.
ECONOMIC AND GENERAL NEWS:
VIETNAM NEWS (vietnamnews.vnagency.com.vn)
- A total 27 people were killed after Typhoon Kai Tak hit northern Vietnam last Friday, damaging more than 6,000 houses, the National Committee for Search and Rescue said.
QUAN DOI NHAN DAN
- The Phu Cat airport in the central province of Binh Dinh has been taken out of the list of dioxin-affected hotspots in Vietnam, after more than 7,000 cubic metres of contaminated soil had been buried, the Natural Resources and Environment Ministry said.
HANOI MOI
- Vietnam aims to meet 60 percent of domestic demand for medicine by 2015, while export of the products should rise 10-15 percent annually, the Health Ministry said in a project to boost domestic consumption and production of pharmaceutical products.
DAU TU
- Acquisition activities are booming as leading companies take advantage of other firms' divestment and sales of projects, businessmen said. (Reporting by Hanoi Newsroom; Editing by Gopakumar Warrier)
Web snares Vietnam as bloggers spread protests over land
(Reuters) -
Farmer Le Dung and his fellow villagers stockpiled rocks and petrol
bombs to battle police trying to take over their land for a luxury
property development near Vietnam's capital city.
But their most powerful weapon turned out to be the equipment they had set up with the help of Internet activists to record and broadcast the confrontation, which was ignored by state-controlled media.
Within hours of the fight on a clear April morning, video of several thousand police firing tear gas and beating farmers in the Van Giang district just east of Hanoi had gone viral.
The unlikely alliance between farmers and urban Internet activists illustrates a rapidly evolving challenge to the Communist government's authority as Vietnamese grow bolder in their protests over issues ranging from land rights to corruption and China's expanding regional influence.
Vietnam has responded with a crackdown on bloggers that has earned it the title of "Enemy of the Internet" from media freedom group Reporters Without Borders, which says only China and Iran jail more journalists.
Censors in the one-party state routinely block Facebook and other social networking sites, although a nimble Web activist community often finds ways around them, illustrating the enormous challenge facing the government in a country where a third of the 88 million population is online.
"At first we didn't understand how it could help us but now we see the value. Our struggle was published to the world," said Le Dung, who fought in Vietnam's 1979 war against China, as he sat under a framed picture of late Communist leader Ho Chi Minh.
"If we hadn't used the Internet the authorities may have killed us; now they know they have to be careful."
The Van Giang incident and other land disputes covered by bloggers have triggered an unusually heated national debate over how the government should reform Vietnam's land laws before the expiry of farmers' 20-year public land leases in 2013.
Rapid economic growth has put pressure on farmers as industrial estates, houses, and roads have expanded, leading to a rash of violent land conflicts. Farmers complain the compensation offers for their land are far too low from companies that often have ties to influential politicians.
Fish farmer Doan Van Vuon was catapulted to hero status early this year after he organized armed resistance to local authorities trying to take over his land near Hai Phong city, a case that was covered by official media as well as bloggers.
CHINA RESENTMENT SPURS BLOGGERS
Bloggers are linking land with other causes they say have a common theme -- a government that is beholden to powerful economic interests and unresponsive to popular demands.
"The blogging movement is growing stronger," said Nguyen Van Dai, a lawyer and rights activist who was jailed for four years for using the Internet to call for democracy and who remains under a loose form of house arrest in Hanoi.
"The government can't keep secrets like it could before."
One influential activist, who goes by the pseudonym Boris and works at a state-owned firm, helped educate the farmers at Van Giang about their rights and taught them how to send pictures and videos through cellphones. Although about 1,000 families there have so far failed to stop the 500-hectare Ecopark project, Boris said wide publicity from the incident had prevented other land developers going ahead with similar plans.
Boris, who boasts he could bring 1,000 people onto Hanoi's streets at a day's notice, said he had also played a key role in organizing regular protests against China's territorial goals in the South China Sea -- a claim backed by other bloggers. The government allowed anti-China protests to go ahead last year, but soon clamped down on them after it became clear they could be a lightning rod for broader discontent.
Some activists exhibit a boldness that is startling, considering the stiff jail terms that have been handed down to others for "anti-government propaganda".
Alfonso Le, a 42-year-old blogger who writes the "Homeland Arise" blog, spoke to Reuters at a tiny Hanoi cafe within earshot of a green-uniformed police officer across the room.
"Now that social networks are more popular, it's not so easy for the police to arrest people," said Le, using his Facebook nickname. "If the police make trouble, I just send a status message on Facebook and a lot of people will come."
His activism has come at a price. He said he has been arrested three times and divorced his wife after she gave information to the police.
Another blogger, who asked not to be identified, also occupies the world of tolerated blogging. She believes she is safe as long as her writing stays within certain "red lines". In her blog, a protest march might be described as a "parade" or a "walk".
Still, she is sometimes followed by police and was arrested at an anti-China protest this month and kept for a day at a rehabilitation camp for "drug users and prostitutes".
"They (the authorities) are scared to death after what has happened in Burma and the Arab Spring," she said.
Former military officer Le Thanh Tung became the latest online activist to be punished this month, receiving a five-year sentence after a trial that lasted an hour, according to Reporters Without Borders. That came less than a week after blogger Dinh Dang Dinh was handed a six-year sentence.
The trial of three other high-profile bloggers was postponed this month after the mother of one of them committed suicide by setting herself on fire.
FUTILE CRACKDOWN?
Washington has voiced concern to Vietnam over a proposed new decree that would require Internet users to register with their real names, enabling the government to track its online critics more easily.
But Carl Thayer, a Vietnam expert at the Australian Defence Force Academy, said the government's attempts to control the Internet were probably futile given the web's deep penetration and bloggers' talent for sidestepping technological barriers.
Vietnam has among the world's fastest-growing rates of Internet use, according to market-research firm Cimigo.
Internet penetration in Hanoi and the southern commercial capital Ho Chi Minh City has risen above 50 percent.
"It is a battle I don't think the Vietnamese government is going to win," Thayer said.
The thorny problem of land rights, which goes to the heart of the Communist Party's legitimacy in its traditional power base of more than 10 million farmers, is where the bloggers have had the biggest impact.
In the wake of the Van Giang and Hai Phong violence, some lawmakers and academics have called for private land ownership to help protect farmers -- an unthinkable proposal until recently in a country where the state's ownership of all land is enshrined in the constitution.
Nguyen Duc Kien, the vice chairman of the National Assembly's economic committee, told Reuters the country's Land Law would be revised and that farmers would be allowed to remain on their land after 2013. Literally interpreted, the current law allows the state to take back farms without any compensation at the end of the lease period.
"Land is an issue that is a potential cause of tension in society," he said.
Nguyen's and other comments from officials have convinced blogger activists that the leases will be extended, although that in itself will not resolve the problem of land grabs by private developers backed by the state.
"The bloggers were a big part of that," said the blogger Le. "We told a different side of the story. We showed that the ruling party's words don't match its actions."
(Editing by Jason Szep and Paul Tait)
But their most powerful weapon turned out to be the equipment they had set up with the help of Internet activists to record and broadcast the confrontation, which was ignored by state-controlled media.
Within hours of the fight on a clear April morning, video of several thousand police firing tear gas and beating farmers in the Van Giang district just east of Hanoi had gone viral.
The unlikely alliance between farmers and urban Internet activists illustrates a rapidly evolving challenge to the Communist government's authority as Vietnamese grow bolder in their protests over issues ranging from land rights to corruption and China's expanding regional influence.
Vietnam has responded with a crackdown on bloggers that has earned it the title of "Enemy of the Internet" from media freedom group Reporters Without Borders, which says only China and Iran jail more journalists.
Censors in the one-party state routinely block Facebook and other social networking sites, although a nimble Web activist community often finds ways around them, illustrating the enormous challenge facing the government in a country where a third of the 88 million population is online.
"At first we didn't understand how it could help us but now we see the value. Our struggle was published to the world," said Le Dung, who fought in Vietnam's 1979 war against China, as he sat under a framed picture of late Communist leader Ho Chi Minh.
"If we hadn't used the Internet the authorities may have killed us; now they know they have to be careful."
The Van Giang incident and other land disputes covered by bloggers have triggered an unusually heated national debate over how the government should reform Vietnam's land laws before the expiry of farmers' 20-year public land leases in 2013.
Rapid economic growth has put pressure on farmers as industrial estates, houses, and roads have expanded, leading to a rash of violent land conflicts. Farmers complain the compensation offers for their land are far too low from companies that often have ties to influential politicians.
Fish farmer Doan Van Vuon was catapulted to hero status early this year after he organized armed resistance to local authorities trying to take over his land near Hai Phong city, a case that was covered by official media as well as bloggers.
CHINA RESENTMENT SPURS BLOGGERS
Bloggers are linking land with other causes they say have a common theme -- a government that is beholden to powerful economic interests and unresponsive to popular demands.
"The blogging movement is growing stronger," said Nguyen Van Dai, a lawyer and rights activist who was jailed for four years for using the Internet to call for democracy and who remains under a loose form of house arrest in Hanoi.
"The government can't keep secrets like it could before."
One influential activist, who goes by the pseudonym Boris and works at a state-owned firm, helped educate the farmers at Van Giang about their rights and taught them how to send pictures and videos through cellphones. Although about 1,000 families there have so far failed to stop the 500-hectare Ecopark project, Boris said wide publicity from the incident had prevented other land developers going ahead with similar plans.
Boris, who boasts he could bring 1,000 people onto Hanoi's streets at a day's notice, said he had also played a key role in organizing regular protests against China's territorial goals in the South China Sea -- a claim backed by other bloggers. The government allowed anti-China protests to go ahead last year, but soon clamped down on them after it became clear they could be a lightning rod for broader discontent.
Some activists exhibit a boldness that is startling, considering the stiff jail terms that have been handed down to others for "anti-government propaganda".
Alfonso Le, a 42-year-old blogger who writes the "Homeland Arise" blog, spoke to Reuters at a tiny Hanoi cafe within earshot of a green-uniformed police officer across the room.
"Now that social networks are more popular, it's not so easy for the police to arrest people," said Le, using his Facebook nickname. "If the police make trouble, I just send a status message on Facebook and a lot of people will come."
His activism has come at a price. He said he has been arrested three times and divorced his wife after she gave information to the police.
Another blogger, who asked not to be identified, also occupies the world of tolerated blogging. She believes she is safe as long as her writing stays within certain "red lines". In her blog, a protest march might be described as a "parade" or a "walk".
Still, she is sometimes followed by police and was arrested at an anti-China protest this month and kept for a day at a rehabilitation camp for "drug users and prostitutes".
"They (the authorities) are scared to death after what has happened in Burma and the Arab Spring," she said.
Former military officer Le Thanh Tung became the latest online activist to be punished this month, receiving a five-year sentence after a trial that lasted an hour, according to Reporters Without Borders. That came less than a week after blogger Dinh Dang Dinh was handed a six-year sentence.
The trial of three other high-profile bloggers was postponed this month after the mother of one of them committed suicide by setting herself on fire.
FUTILE CRACKDOWN?
Washington has voiced concern to Vietnam over a proposed new decree that would require Internet users to register with their real names, enabling the government to track its online critics more easily.
But Carl Thayer, a Vietnam expert at the Australian Defence Force Academy, said the government's attempts to control the Internet were probably futile given the web's deep penetration and bloggers' talent for sidestepping technological barriers.
Vietnam has among the world's fastest-growing rates of Internet use, according to market-research firm Cimigo.
Internet penetration in Hanoi and the southern commercial capital Ho Chi Minh City has risen above 50 percent.
"It is a battle I don't think the Vietnamese government is going to win," Thayer said.
The thorny problem of land rights, which goes to the heart of the Communist Party's legitimacy in its traditional power base of more than 10 million farmers, is where the bloggers have had the biggest impact.
In the wake of the Van Giang and Hai Phong violence, some lawmakers and academics have called for private land ownership to help protect farmers -- an unthinkable proposal until recently in a country where the state's ownership of all land is enshrined in the constitution.
Nguyen Duc Kien, the vice chairman of the National Assembly's economic committee, told Reuters the country's Land Law would be revised and that farmers would be allowed to remain on their land after 2013. Literally interpreted, the current law allows the state to take back farms without any compensation at the end of the lease period.
"Land is an issue that is a potential cause of tension in society," he said.
Nguyen's and other comments from officials have convinced blogger activists that the leases will be extended, although that in itself will not resolve the problem of land grabs by private developers backed by the state.
"The bloggers were a big part of that," said the blogger Le. "We told a different side of the story. We showed that the ruling party's words don't match its actions."
(Editing by Jason Szep and Paul Tait)
Cosmetic surgery a multimillion-dollar business in Thailand
Pongphon Sarnsamak
The Nation
Publication Date : 20-08-2012
The Nation
Publication Date : 20-08-2012
|
|
A
drastic change in the public’s perception of cosmetic surgery over the
past 10 years has created a huge demand among Thai consumers, who
contribute most of the 20 billion baht (US$634 million) in income that
surgery clinics enjoy each year.
Ten years ago, both surgeons and customers sneaked into backrooms in hospitals and beauty clinics for the operations. Now, clinics have mushroomed in all parts of the country as consumers welcome the idea of how a tiny appearance change can lead to greater beauty. A recent survey shows that market value of the cosmetic surgery business has increased from 15 billion baht in 2010 to 20 billion baht in 2011. And this year, the value of this industry is expected to increase by another 20 per cent. Meanwhile, the University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce's Centre for Economic and Business Forecasting estimates that cosmetic surgery will be the most popular business among investors this year as more and more teenagers want to undergo the surgery. Records from the Public Health Ministry's Health Service Support Department showed that the number of cosmetic surgery clinics registered with the department has increased from 317 clinics in 2004 to 350 this year. "The world has changed," Dr Supot Sumritvanitcha, a director of Yanhee International Hospital, told The Nation in an exclusive interview. "Every girl wants to be a super-star like Patchrapa Aum Chaichua who is being spotlighted everywhere," he added. In the past, people would feel significantly bad and embarrassed if their friends or relatives had known they'd been to cosmetic surgery clinics. Thai society, at that time, had strong feelings against plastic or cosmetic surgery and stigmatised those people who'd had surgery as being unhappy with their genetic heritage. "Sometimes, people would lie to their friends or relatives about travelling abroad for vacation for two weeks - but in fact, they went to Hong Kong or Japan to undergo cosmetic surgery. When they came home [they were] more beautiful," Supot said. But now, appearance and personality have become more and more important for people to find opportunities and their dream job. Some parents have taken their kids to undergo cosmetic surgery at the age of 15 to pave the way for their success or to enter the entertainment industry. Nose and eyelid surgery is the most popular among teenagers. Supot said 500 teenagers aged over 18 had visited hospital every month to undergo nose surgery and about 450 patients had undergone eyelid surgery. Not only the number of domestic patients had increased during the past few years, the number of foreign patients had increased as well. According to the hospital's records, the number of foreign patients had increased from 25,611 cases in 2008 to 34,440 cases in 2010. They are from many parts of the world such as US, Canada, Mexico, the UK, Germany, France, Netherlands, Italy, Russia, Ukraine, China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, United Arab Emirates, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam, Singapore, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. "For Western customers, many underwent nose and breast reduction surgery, and mid-facial lift," Supot said. Yanhee Polyclinic was opened in 1984 in a 2-block 4-storey building near the Rama 6 Bridge in Bangkok to provide medical services including weight control, general medicine, surgery, obstetrics and gynaecology, paediatrics, intensive care, and dialysis. Following the rise inpatients, Yanhee had opened a 10-storey, 40- bed capacity hospital building on ten rai which became the Yanhee International Hospital in 1997. Now the hospital has opened 36 treatment centres to provide general medicine and a wide range of cosmetic and plastic surgery services such as breast augmentation, facelift, tummy-tuck, liposuction, botox injection, dental whitening, facial treatment, and hair transplant. The hospital recently opened a vaginal repair centre to restore the anatomic arrangement of structures surrounding the vaginal wall. This centre had attracted a lot of attention from customers aged between 18 and 60. At least five patients aged over 40 undergo vaginal repair surgery per day. Supot expects the hospital will earn 3 million baht a month as revenue from this centre. "We want to be an aesthetic institute which provides a one-stop shop for beauty," he said. To prepare for the Asean Economic Community in 2015, Yanhee has invested over 1 billion baht to build two new buildings and purchase new medical devices. The hospital has planned to increase its full-time surgeons from 130 to 150 and increase the part-time surgeons from 120 to 125. It will increase the number of professional nurses from 500 to 700 and import nurses from the Philippines to work as assistants as they can communicate well in English with foreign patients. Apart from Yanhee International Hospital, the Wuttisak Clinic group also plans to join in the competition by increasing its skincare clinics in local and foreign markets. The company now has 109 skincare clinics across the country with more planned. The company will also expand into Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, Malaysia and Indonesia. At least 20 skincare clinics are marked for Vietnam next year, with four clinics located in Cambodia and four more to be set up in Laos, he added. "We know everyone wants to be more beautiful so we'll change the public perception of beauty. We'll help people think [it's] doctors who make them more beautiful and not a cosmetic product," Wuttisak Clinic's chief executive officer Nakorn Kornherun said. Because of the rising demand in skincare treatment, the company has employed 200 general physicians to provide for customers nationwide and send others to work in neighbouring countries. The company has invested in building its brand in the region to win over their local markets. It has spent 600,000 to 700,000 baht a month to rent the most famous building in Vietnam located near the Louis Vuitton shop, and about 80 million baht to renovate the building. "We want to be the number-one player of this business in this region. It would waste our time, if we could not be the number one," he added. US$1 = 31.5 baht |
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