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Japan

Earthquake And Tsunami Spell Disaster For Japanese Car Industry

Global dealerships are beginning to fret that new Japanese automobiles won't make it to the market.

Toyota IQ
Toyota IQ
Nathalie Brafman

The Japanese car industry is at a standstill. Some five days after the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan, all the factories of the country's biggest car manufacturers Toyota, Nissan and Honda were still closed, including those which were not directly affected. Toyota, the world's top automobile manufacturer, estimates a production decline of 40 000 vehicles. Honda has announced that it does not plan to restart production before Sunday, and puts its production loss at some 16,000 vehicles.

According to a study by investment bank Goldman Sachs, cited by Bloomberg, financial losses could top two billion yen ($24.6 million) for every day of lost production at Nissan and Honda. For Toyota, the bill could be three times higher.

The factories could start-up again in the coming days, but probably not for long. Even if some of the factories have not been damaged, their supply has been disrupted. Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn said earlier this week that even if operations resumed soon, "it would not be for very long because the supplier network "is really devastated".

The problem has been exacerbated by the unique Japanese system of Kanban (literally meaning "label") employed by the nation's car industry. A supply concept invented by Toyota at the end of the 1950s, the system uses the rate of demand to control the rate of production. The method allows manufacturers to limit their stock volumes and thus reduce costs. "Japanese automakers are faced with a three-fold challenge", says Yann Lacroix, an industry expert for top French insurance company Euler Hermès. "They have to resume production is spite of rolling power blackouts; obtain the necessary components from their suppliers in spite of devastated roads; and somehow export their cars abroad at time when the ports on the eastern coast are closed."

These problems will soon have repercussions abroad. Japan is the world's second-largest car exporter (after Germany). More than one in every ten cars produced in the world comes from Japan. In 2010, the export market (including cars and parts) was worth 130 billion dollars.. More than eight million vehicles were built on the archipelago, half of which were sent to the United States.

"Toyota produces 47 percent of its cars in Japan, about four million units, and out of that we export close to half of them (1.8 million)", says Philippe Boursereau, Toyota spokesperson in Europe. Supply of Toyota's hybrid Prius, of its four-wheeled Rav 4 or the small IQ – all made exclusively in Japan - is likely to be seriously affected by the disruption in the company's parts supply chain.

"We haven't been able to contact all our suppliers yet, so we do not know what shape they are in", Boursereau says. According to the carmaker, 60 percent of the cars sold in Europe are manufactured in Japan, but "it takes about six weeks for Toyota vehicles to travel from Japan to Europe." This means that over the next five weeks, European dealers will still be receiving cars (or car parts) manufactured before the earthquake and the tsunami. Any disruptions in European or American plants would only begin to occur by the middle of April.

Read original article in French

Photo - kosabe

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Society

Italy's Right-Wing Government Turns Up The Heat On 'Gastronationalism'

Rome has been strongly opposed to synthetic foods, insect-based flours and health warnings on alcohol, and aggressive lobbying by Giorgia Meloni's right-wing government against nutritional labeling has prompted accusations in Brussels of "gastronationalism."

Dough is run through a press to make pasta

Creation of home made pasta

Karl De Meyer et Olivier Tosseri

ROME — On March 23, the Italian Minister of Agriculture and Food Sovereignty, Francesco Lollobrigida, announced that Rome would ask UNESCO to recognize Italian cuisine as a piece of intangible cultural heritage.

On March 28, Lollobrigida, who is also Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's brother-in-law, promised that Italy would ban the production, import and marketing of food made in labs, especially artificial meat — despite the fact that there is still no official request to market it in Europe.

Days later, Italian Eurodeputy Alessandra Mussolini, granddaughter of fascist leader Benito Mussolini and member of the Forza Italia party, which is part of the governing coalition in Rome, caused a sensation in the European Parliament. On the sidelines of the plenary session, Sophia Loren's niece organized a wine tasting, under the slogan "In Vino Veritas," to show her strong opposition (and that of her government) to an Irish proposal to put health warnings on alcohol bottles. At the end of the press conference, around 11am, she showed her determination by drinking from the neck of a bottle of wine, to great applause.

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