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Cargill Inc., the agriculture and trading giant, said Thursday that it would close a division that trades coal, as well as European power and gas, after a strategic review of the businesses. Cargill, one of the world's largest privately owned companies, said in a statement that it is exiting the businesses because of "significant changes in the coal and European power and gas markets." It didn't identify those changes. Separately, Cargill and Copersucar SA, a Brazilian sugar and ethanol trader, agreed to combine their global sugar-trading activities, creating a new joint venture that will source and trade sugar. The Geneva-based energy-trading operation Cargill is closing is part of its energy, transportation and metals division. Cargill estimates it buys nearly $5 billion of energy a year. Reduced coal consumption in some countries, such as the U.S., has lifted global supplies of coal in recent years and depressed prices, intensifying competition for markets that still need the fuel. Coking coal, used for making steel, is trading at its lowest level in eight years, while prices of thermal coal, used in power generation, are the weakest since 2009. Cargill said it would continue to trade in petroleum, petrochemicals, iron ore and steel, ocean freight and North American gas and power markets. Last month, SparkSpread.com, an energy-market publication, reported that Cargill suffered losses of at least $100 million trading in energy markets early this year, mostly in mid-Atlantic power markets. The publication didn't cite a source for its information. Pete Stoddart, a spokesman for Cargill, said Thursday that the company doesn't disclose the results of individual business units, but said the $100 million-loss figure was inaccurate. He said the decision to exit the coal and European power businesses was unrelated to the U.S. power operation. The Cargill-Copersucar sugar venture will be 50%-owned by each company. Other financial terms weren't disclosed. The venture will benefit from a large supply of sugar from Copersucar's partner mills in Brazil, the world's largest sugar producer and exporter, and from both companies' logistics-management experience, the companies said. The venture's trading activities will be based in Geneva, with offices in locations including Hong Kong, São Paulo, Brazil; Miami, Moscow and Dubai. Ivo Sarjanovic, who leads Cargill's sugar business, will be chief executive once the new company is formed, which is expected in the second half of 2014. Copersucar Chairman Luis Roberto Pogetti will become the first chairman of the venture, a post that will rotate. Both companies' ethanol businesses and fixed assets, such as terminals and mills, are excluded from the transaction. Each company will continue to own its own logistics and infrastructure facilities, but these will serve the joint venture, according to a spokesman for Copersucar. The deal will help Copersucar shore up its logistics reach after a massive fire in October damaged six of its Brazilian sugar warehouses, used to store and ship sugar at the port of Santos. Shipments of sugar from the port dropped by about 40% after the fire. Copersucar is repairing its Santos terminal and by February 2015 expects to have the capacity to receive and ship 10 million tons of sugar a year, an average of about 800,000 to a month, up from a current 250,000 a month. The deal comes as other commodity companies have struggled in the sugar business. Bunge Ltd. last month said it hired Morgan Stanley to advise on a strategic review of its money-losing sugar milling operation, which has been hurt by low world sugar prices and caps on the price of ethanol produced from sugar cane in Brazil. Archer Daniels Midland Co., in financial results reported in February, recorded a $50 million impairment of its investment in a Brazilian sugar mill, based on a new assessment of future cash flows from the business. Cargill, founded in 1865, has diverse operations including processing meat, selling steel and making pharmaceutical ingredients, in addition to trading grain, energy and other commodities and transporting goods across a sprawling global logistics network.

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what you guys think about this medical cost in singapore i keep adding new insurance policies to my existing policy because my agent said that my previous policies would NOT be able to cover critical illness i dont think i can afford so many insurance policy i may die from starvation if they keep asking me buy more and more insurance i bought my first insurance when i was doing NS, my LCP "force" me to buy because if I dont buy i know I sure kena wash toilet for the next 3 months everything is privatising even our power stations (which are generally considered sensitive installations) http://www.asiaone.com/Health/News/Story/A...1019-94673.html Medical care is not a commodity By Lee Wei Ling MOST developed countries believe that the free market is the best system for allocating scarce commodities. The right price for such commodities, they believe, is best determined by allowing the forces of supply and demand to operate freely. But a free market can work efficiently only if sellers and buyers have roughly equal knowledge about the commodities changing hands. Such a condition does not always exist. Medical care, especially, cannot be priced like any other commodity because the seller (the doctor) has much more information than the buyer (the patient). The patient is therefore at the mercy of the doctor, not only in terms of what he is charged but also in terms of what he needs to 'buy'. For example, procedures that may be unnecessary, such as blood tests and radiological examinations, may be ordered by a doctor, and the patient would be in no position to refuse. One could argue, of course, that patients can shop around to find doctors who would offer them the cheapest package. But this is impractical: Patients with urgent medical problems do not have time to shop around. Patients from foreign countries would want to get their medical problems attended to quickly so that they can return home. Moreover, patients are usually informed of the medical procedures they require only after consultation with a doctor. They do not know beforehand what they would require in order to shop around effectively. This, together with the time constraint, makes it impossible for most patients to make an informed choice among doctors. Prior to 2006, the Singapore Medical Association (SMA) had a 'Guidelines on Fees' (GOF) for doctors in private practice. The GOF recommended a range of fees for various medical procedures. It was only a guideline, so doctors could deviate from the quoted fees if they wished. However, if they did so, they were expected to inform patients in advance. This enabled patients to know what was the 'premium' they were expected to pay for the exceptionally superior treatment their doctors were promising, and they could decide for themselves whether they wished to pay that premium. Sometimes, patients discovered they were charged much more than what was recommended in the GOF only after they received their bills. Some complained to the SMA as a result. In such cases, the SMA would request the relevant doctor to justify the extra charge, and if there was no reasonable explanation, it would advise the doctor to refund the difference. This advice was also transmitted to the patient who complained. Most doctors who overcharged without good reason followed the SMA's advice and refunded the money. The guideline worked, functioning both as a moral and practical rubric. In 2006, the SMA abandoned the GOF because it was encouraged to believe that the guidelines might contravene the Competition Act. Ironically, the purpose of the Competition Act was to protect consumers from being overcharged by allowing free-market forces to determine prices. And the GOF was designed precisely to protect patients from being overcharged by private medical specialists - always a possibility given the asymmetry of information between doctors and patients. To abandon the GOF on the grounds that it is anti-competitive is so illogical that I wonder whether anyone in the Competition Commission of Singapore understood that medical fees cannot be determined by free-market forces. The abandonment of the GOF has made patients the easy prey of unscrupulous private specialists. They can now charge as much as they think they can squeeze out of patients. Charges tend to vary, depending on the patients' addresses, whether they have medical insurance policies or are dressed expensively or wear jewellery. Foreign patients are more likely to be overcharged because they have no time to shop around. I know first-hand of an Indonesian patient who was charged $100,000 for a simple laparoscopic removal of a gall bladder, a procedure that usually costs $10,000 in the private sector. There have been enough cases of shameless profiteering to earn some private hospitals here a bad reputation. Public-sector doctors cannot overcharge because their fees are fixed by the Ministry of Health. Many of us in the public sector have had friends, both local and foreign, ask us for advice about which doctors in the private sector they should consult. They know that without medical information, they are unable to tell which are the good doctors, professionally as well as ethically. The current situation, with some specialists in the private sector overcharging, is bad for Singapore. The Government hopes to promote medical tourism. But news of overcharging spreads very quickly abroad. Unless action is taken soon, greed will kill the goose of medical tourism before it has had a chance to lay any egg, let alone golden ones. Overcharging is also bad for Singapore's medical fraternity. Young doctors watch what their seniors do and will overcharge too when they enter private practice. As it is, there is already an erosion of medical ethics here - not only because of overcharging, but also because of superfluous referrals to other specialists who are one's personal friends, unnecessary and expensive investigations and even some unnecessary procedures that carry risk of harm to patients. Medicine as a profession is a calling, and medical care cannot be treated as a mere commodity. If the medical fraternity does not act soon to cajole or coerce the black sheep among us to stop taking advantage of patients, Singapore's reputation will suffer and all its doctors will be tarred by the same brush. If we delay reforming the system, its faults will become more difficult to reverse. Reviving the GOF would provide one solution to the problem of overcharging. It is not a perfect solution but, as with many other problems in life, there is no perfect solution. We know that the GOF will work - because it did. The writer is Director of the National Neuroscience Institute. Think-Tank is a weekly column rotated among eight leading figures in Singapore's research and tertiary institutions.