questioning of politics and longstanding tension in the region will again trickle down to the education system students have already been the biggest victims i think on the education their perspective will be if the situation doesn't improve the students say their day to day priority is not about politics but rather getting an education. of the young al-jazeera. so this is out there these are the top stories in $279.00 schoolgirls kidnapped in the northwest of nigerian state of zamfara have been released gunmen took them from a state run school on friday it is the latest of a series of abductions in the region but it us is the latest from in time for us. but the governor who just finished addressing the case here is saying that the process of taking them back took

a moment while he apologized for that and that basically it was a bit of penton bandits people who have repented and given up arms against the state that actually took the skills from donors who kidnapped them earlier now basically they has been a process of negotiations between the authorities here and people armed men who've been terrorizing communities across the zone for a state in other parts of north northern nigeria the biden administration is defending its decision not to apply sanctions on saudi crown prince mohammed bin sultan of the killing of journalists tomorrow so ji it reiterated that it seeking to recalibrate not rupture the relationship between washington and riyadh. we have urged saudi arabia to disband this group and then adopt institutional systemic reforms and controls to ensure that our anti dissident activities and operations cease and cease completely we have made crystal clear and will continue to do so

that the brutal killing of jamal khashoggi current 28 months ago remains an acceptable conduct at the same time our relationship with saudi arabia is important it's important to us interests and it requires continued progress and reforms to ensure that this important partnership rests on strong fundamentals and continues to advance our shared objectives in the middle east you know it's nations secretary general says he's disappointed by the outcome of a global during a conference for yemen roughly $1700000000.00 was raised less than half the $3500000000.00 target the u.n. says the money is urgently needed to avoid famine and a humanitarian catastrophe in his prime minister says he's ready to call a snap election to end a deepening political crisis more on that's another story the. right after counting the costs for me in the club it's good but. 4 months ago fine interrupted

in ivory coast after a disputed presidential election now it's time to choose members of parliament on march 6th voters constant ballots could the vote revive the fortunes of the main opposition and how will this affect the region the ivory coast elementary election on al jazeera. back to grow this is counting the cost on al-jazeera in look at the world of business and economics this week one of the world's biggest exporters of emissions is preparing to mine the seabed for wall materials no way misael the image of green living but it's got very rich off exploiting the worst economic tsunami been 300 years the biggest budget deficit since world war 2 its biggest tax generated diminished by breck's it's how lonely you case finance minister where the books and

china is export of cherries to china hit by social media rumors we talked to the vice minister of trade. thank you for joining us no way became the 1st country in the world where the sale of electric cars over took those powered by combustion engines a remarkable achievement for a country that in another world 1st plants and the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2025 but like most headlines is a huge contradiction in no ways comment changed credentials while the country is western europe's biggest exporter of oil and gas and has managed to save one trillion dollars and its sovereign wealth funds from exports last month off $61.00 offshore production licenses yes it plans to drill for more oil and gas that includes some 125 licenses to drill in the arctic barren see a relatively unspoiled corner of the planet while he continues to. do summations at home if x.

14 emissions overseas mostly to china in facts no way is the 7th biggest exporter of emissions after cotta the top 3 being russia saudi arabia and australia not satisfied with exploiting national resources of its coast the demand for green technology could see no way start seabed mining it could license companies as early as 2023 to start mining for copper zinc cobalt gold and silver metals that are needed for wind turbines solar farms and electric vehicle batteries off the coast the norwegian university of science and technology says it could be up to $21700000.00 tons of copper more than the world's copper output in 29 t. deep sea mining could generate up to $20000000000.00 in annual revenue for no way towards 2050 can bet to around $61000000000.00 from oil and gas in $29000.00 and create about $20000.00 jobs was no base consultancy by stat energy has estimated

but it's not the only country that plans to mine the seabeds for minerals china and japan have similar plans joining us now via skype from bergen in norway is peter holguin he's the program director at the institute of marine research and professor at the geophysical institute of the university of beg and very good to have you with us peter thank you for your time so why is there a rush to mind seabeds well i think there may be several reasons it's been coming back the last couple of years but i actually 3040 years ago there was also a rush of people realize that there were minerals on the sea but i think no there may be so reasons there is electrification of the economy. and the various suppliers but in this realization in general alone i would also thought so will the suppliers from from learn based mineral exploration there is some geo political hay. specs not all minerals are available on every market and

people then look for other places to find these minerals and speaking of these other places many advocates of seabed mining say china has a monopoly on rare earth minerals so we must all find other reserves you agree with that well i understand their concern that when resource is located only one place and you need it for a long term whether it's china or somewhere else it doesn't really matter you'd like to have more and more supplies and more turnitin so it's an understandable reason i believe there are of course a lot of concerns when it comes to seabed mining t.v. natural as david asked for a one this year that deep sea mining risk creating quote terrible impacts that cannot be reversed what are your thoughts on that how bad is your damage me on the environment yes it could be bad hern and i think the jury is still out remember the deep sea bird is the least known and well meant on earth and we don't understand how it works we don't even know what organisms are there how the eco systems are

put together. you can save some and some some of them the other brokers would could say that now we have a scientific study that says that if we do it this way it will not disturb very big area on the other hand i think we know so little about the deep sea environment and we need to know a lot more before you can approve activity so on real mining and speaking about right now off the coast of namibia for example the government of namibia and de vere's the diamond company are scooping up the sea bed to find diamonds which you know hardly is hardly central many people would say and scientists believe that this could take up to a decade to restore the seabed there the other so that's a special case i know that case and. you know it shows that i mean not only the interests that are expressed are not also applies i think to some extent to the to the green transition and the need. for minerals for electric vehicle batteries and

so on so there may be other all the reasons why people are mine or want to mine and i think also in some places the oil and gas industry is looking for other things to do to use their technology and their base and would like to see new markets like activity for deep sea mining to which so so we should always be critical to the to the rationale for these various actors in the in this game the various actors including the united nations which is quite surprising the un issuing licenses for seabed mining in international waters which you know a lot of people find surprising and they're collecting the royalties to pay for u.n. work away not all compromised by commercialization i think yeah i mean that with the u.n. has it international sea better authority which was created as a follow up of the convention on the law of the sea almost 40 years ago and that came about because of the interest and the awareness of the world minerals on the seabed and people were putting this mechanism in place maybe not with the same

environmental consciousness that we have today and the awareness of the of the complexities of the deep sea eco system so so that is an issue. that we have to deal with here i have to ask from a norwegian perspective norway has done well from oil and gas but the rhetoric of advocating climate change policy sits on easy when it's one of the top 10 exporters of emissions yes this this is a complicated issue and it's a political area which has many aspects to it. and the you can also talk about who is to blame for the c o 2 emissions is it the producer or is it the user of these products. and that's a political question what is the best way to solve it by putting you know putting the responsibility on the producer or the use or. but of course for norway the oil and gas has been

a very very important in come to the country and then it's politically difficult to to to turn down but that activity peter hogan thank you very much for talking to us about this thank you for your time. thank you. now that breaks it it's done its biggest tax revenue generator the city of london has lost its status as europe's biggest share trading capital to amsterdam a shocking transfer of wealth as the finances of the country rapidly deteriorate on march 3rd finance minister an advocate of bricks it will need to find money to pay for the pandemic when he delivers his budget the $2.00 trillion dollar economy slumped to its worst economic performance in 300 d. is the country's on course to report a budget deficit of $400000000000.00 pounds britain spain $1.00 trillion dollars in tax a year but the big question is what tuxes to increase to pay off the deficit after a decade of austerity are the people of u.k.

ready and willing to pay and according to the resolution foundation $2600000.00 people expect a new said jobs this year that's about 8 percent of the working population. so what will the finance minister do joining me now from london via skype is natta fan blade the ad is an economist and chief executive at the new economics foundation very good to have you with us miata on counting the costs so should rising debt be a consent in short no it shouldn't be a concern and it should be concern for 2 reasons the 1st thing is that the key issue is not really the size of the debt it's the has sustainable that debt is and you ability to pay it down and we have this strange thing where the depor than this country looks big but actually the cost of financing that there is because of 0 to essentially negative interest rates is a historic kolo so actually if ever there was a time to borrow this is the time to borrow and the key thing is that 2 thirds of

the long term cost of that debt is locked into these really low interest rates the other reason why we shouldn't worry about it is because we've had a big change in policy from the bank of england and what listening is that the bank of england is essentially underwriting government debt by borrowing bottoms so you know the bank of england is essentially purchased about half of government bottoms and so those 2 reasons means that actually the dynamics around debt to completely change and so this is absolutely trouble policymakers to be in that but for a nation that's simples austerity unnecessarily sometimes what is the fascination with containing debt that is a very good question i mean look it's born out of a long orthodoxy i did a good the rational argument is if our debt becomes too big if it's unsustainable if the money markets think that we're not a safe bet because we can't pay back that debt and credit agencies decide to

downgrade us that's bad for us economically that's bad for us i'm actually and it happens our capacity to borrow in the long term the but the truth is that i think his argument has always been. the state because underlying them is a more or stronger ideological drive that essentially is trying to constrain public spending because it's trying to constrain the scope the space in the size of the state so i think when people have used debt as an argument for constraining the contraction of the public sector it's often been driven underpinned by the political and ideological piece rather than the economic piece and speaking of the political the you have joe biden the u.s. president the i.m.f. the u.s. federal reserve all saying that now is a time to spend to spend money do you think the u.k. is willing conservative party is listening that's a very good question i mean they are in so far as they have spent so you know our our our our deficit has gone up in the region of 400000000000 so they have been

spent i think the piece that they maybe not listening to was the fact that you know what all of those organizations are staying in indeed organizations here is don't stop spending the economy is still really precarious as we come out of the pandemic as we start easing it businesses are in these people are struggling do not stop supporting and invest in the economy and this is where i think the government hasn't quite grasped that it's not least because if we look back at the all term budget statement that the chance he gave what he did it was choose to cut day to day spending by about 10 to 12000000000 every year so the drive to cut the drive to go back to consolidation is pretty strong and as well those of us there are going that the long term cost of that far far greater the little short term impact of increasing the deficit we're not interesting you say people are struggling and that's

a reality where expecting what 2600000 people to lose their jobs how can the chancellor help me there are 3 things that he's going to do the 1st is protect jobs so you know if the government. did well to introduce the furnace they would have done better if they just introduced it for one or 2 year period rather that's a good thing that they've done but the philistines been a massive lifeline and has saved many jobs that would have been lost and so as we now look at easing out of looked and it's really important that the chancellor keep the furnace place for a period of time so i would say for a year but critically gradually move this into a part work part subsidize non-working scheme and what that would do is allow businesses to keep people on board and the state the government to subsidize the time that people are working and in that time they're not working off or training so that you can get people sectors that might have to reduce the number of people employed like hospitality like the aviation industry you can train those people up

and then try and get them into other jobs the 2nd is it's going to create jobs this is the time for the stimulus we're arguing they need a big green this will sit stimulus 20300000000 would i'm not 400000 jobs if they were to invest not a 20000000000 in public services and social sector 700000 jobs and then finally they got to support people it's really really hard for so many people out there and our social security system is completely inadequate they need to be think you have how the balls to that are you talked about of course the u.k. is slowly easing out of coronavirus restrictions are the lockdown what do you think is going to have the biggest impact on the economy will it be the pandemic or bracks it has a very good question i mean i think in the end in the short term it is without a doubt the pandemic i mean you know the economy shrank by 11 percent because the government essentially had to freeze economy that is unprecedented you know the

scale of the impact you know the worst contraction and the contraction for 300 years so in the near term the pandemic is all consuming and it's definitely the. drive of any economic worries that we have i think as we move into the medium where we like the so short term shock of the pandemic is there will be. we know there's going to be a break the impact of all that would actually suggest for long you know 202530 years and i think that's where it gets played so it's definitely if you look at the numbers the u.k. is no worse than other countries and in part to do with the still pretty dynamic but that's been kind of marked by the big coated shock but as we sort of move out and we saw the economy regains its soft rebound the impacts of drugs that were long long road to recovery thank you very much me out of a speaking to us me at a fund from the new economic sound ation on counting the cost thank you for your time thank you for having me now exports cherries from chile to china have taken

a hit and it appears to be all because of a rumor unsubstantiated reports began circulating on chinese social media that traces of covert 19 were found in some boxes a latin american at ascendancy and human has a story from santiago. was all year long producers wait for this moment when their cherries go to the final stage of selection 10 occasions and packing before being shipped off to china for the chinese this color red britain's good fortune so they import cherries millie from chile to celebrate the chinese new year. but when an unsubstantiated story went viral on chinese social networks it brought misfortune to chile's multi-billion dollar cherry industry if the money for my so not the same this was the result of non-official information in china a rumor that's provoked

a steep drop in demand that our government is working round the clock with the private sector to see what we can do. when claims began circulating that some important cherries had been found to be tainted with coded 19 overnight exports plummeted from 500 to 0 containers a day australian cherry producers have also been impacted but not nearly as much as in chile which exports much larger quantities noice all know what we've never been formally accused of anything by chinese symmetry or customs with already stressed a story in the media that was never retracted the ones who suffer most of the small and medium size produces it invested everything they have and we've had to be singing basing on a good year. the president of the exporters association says exports are picking up but at the cherries are being sold at a loss and time is running out it's summertime in the southern hemisphere goods

companies carries the click of a lead valuable because they are crap and shipped have a specific time for the chinese market but others like these great these cherries will spoil it in just a matter of weeks. chile has launched an intense counter offensive in china using influencers and scientists on social networks to try to convince consumers that their cherries are safe to eat all this is more than just bad luck it underscores just how vulnerable food exporters are to a negative tweet or story substantiated or not. lucien human a latin america editor in santiago there let's get more now on those cherry exports where the road rager young years was chile's vitamin a sort of trade and he joined us via zoom here in doha thank you very much mr young years for being with us so terry's a 1600000000 dollar export industry for chile let me ask ask you 1st if you were surprised that the chinese government did very little to face down these almost why

do you think that is well actually the governments at the local level made statements to clarify the situation and the public officials from the health sector in china gave interviews explaining to the people there that consumption of cherries and fruit were generally and food was safe so we have been in contact permanently with the chinese authorities we've got their support in terms of disseminating the proper information the proper news they issue is that this is a huge market and this year we're expecting to sell over $2000000000.00 u.s. dollars in cherry's so the report will said we were working round the clock to change the wave against these the fake news around consumption and i think we have an impact in price that it's absolutely correct but we were able at the end of the day to be covered this is let's talk about the relationship with china

a bit more chile is a very open economy of course and there are concerns across political parties there that beijing is slowly taking huge stakes in the polygraph and their efforts to legislate against this right now why well this is something that is said i would say a hot topic in addressing today about it but it's where do and when. any country like china. which is our top trading partner it's natural that they also start becoming more important in in its investment in france and we do not have any city . in terms of investment that distinguishes or discriminates region or admits any country and that would remain a search but there is a discussion which for us it's something that should be consuming for instance we see the standards when thinking on doing some sort of rescreening which all countries including china if you do so that's an ongoing discussion we're not close

to it but regardless of the mechanism what we want to convey to all foreign investors is that you luis and will remain an open country which will not discriminate any origin or any country i say china is a big trading partner they invest $1000000000.00 in the food sector alone again politicians in your country fear that china is taking advantage of the pandemic right now do you share those concerns well not really because the operations it's not that we have seen a jump or or or booming of chinese investments given the pending. this was started to happen before and what we see is that there are a lot of opportunities to be grassed a very different countries in china and some in legislators certainly have more concerns about it but we have faced it at the congress also trying to display the tools that there are issues that are also recognized by their practices and that's

the role that we want to keep and mending our let's move on and talk about the pandemic any threat is had on your economy vaccines of course are now being rolled out around the world and chile has the most advanced rollout of vaccines anywhere in latin america tell us how much damage the pandemic has caused on you today an economy well big in fact we will perhaps. own we were finished last year with a 6 percent decrease in our in our economy nevertheless were among the least affected countries along with precedent given we've been them in weeks. ect bounce back this year and out you can it should expand by 5.5 to 6 percent you know that there is a big commodity prices boom right now and half of our exports relate to mining so we expect to to recover and also one of the pillars of the thick of it is our vaccination campaign which is 16 lee ambitious we hope to get 80 percent of our

population you know related by june and we are doing today our backs needed and we expect to close march with 5 so the government in that sense has made it the top priority at the betting you know on different platforms back scenes and again like i said in the beginning our principle is it not discriminating any potential solution so we can't face or we get astra zeneca we got so you know back from china we're talking with sputnik 5 as well and that i think that pragmatic approach i think has let us have the position that we have no terms of the rollout of the vaccination so messy and has you here in the middle east talking sovereign wealth funds looking into investing in infrastructure and green hydrogen which is produced from renewables what progress have you made and what do you hope to get out of this visit well we talked about trade and the whole china for instance the south the

trading partner but we are saying nope and small distant country need to again look for new frontiers for trade and that's what we're doing here at the d c c countries also given the momentum that their need is going through in particular the g.c.c. after the blockade. of a cutter and that and what we did in riyadh was to signed an historical 1st agreement with the d.c.c. which we hope will lead to start an f.d.a. negotiation with with the d.c.c. countries in the future and what we look also is that just more trade but also more investment so that's why. meeting with all soaring fans of g.c.c. countries in this visit because the additions that we have seen that we have seen in this country are going to bury world with the opportunities that we can offer you mention green hydrogen according to macand see gillette is where we well positioned for that race in the future but we also talked about infrastructure we also talked about digital economy we are in by that we have invited these countries

to join did their pact limited to telecommute partnership agreement that we have with singapore and you've seen and and food security which. is very important for these countries and with chile has a lot a lot to offer us a very strong food exporting country thank you for your time or degree angle is the vice minister for trade for chile thank you i'm going there and that is our show for this week get in touch with asked by tweeting me at for the bat a g.e. or drop us an e-mail counting the cost at al-jazeera dot net is our address there's more for you on line at al-jazeera dot com slash c t c that will take you straight to our page which has entire episodes for you to catch up on and that is it for this edition of counting the cost i'm fully back to bow from the whole team here in doha thank you for watching news on al-jazeera is next. the

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world. sneeze into your own. and on the clock in the hall the top stories here on al-jazeera and $279.00 schoolgirls kidnapped in the northwestern nigerian citizen for have been released gunmen took them from a state run school on friday it is the latest of a series of abductions in the region let's speak to i'm going to address susan the town of kusa in zamfara state and joins us now so i mean it's a huge amount of relief at this. absolutely here jim on to relieve on the part of parents the students and the government of the forest.