Monday, July 14, 2014

MALAYSIA:::If local cuisine is no longer authentic

The Penang state government is going to develop policies to ban foreign workers from working as main cooks in hawker food businesses to preserve the authenticity of local hawker cuisine. Once the ban is implemented, hawker licences of violators might be revoked.
Hawker food and heritage sites are Penang's main selling points to attract tourists and thus, they should be preserved and protected. In fact, having foreign workers as main cooks is not a problem faced only by Penang, but also other states, particularly big cities like Kuala Lumpur, where eight out of 10 cooks in hawker stalls are now foreign workers. If the government still takes no appropriate actions to curb the problem and hawker owners still do not face it seriously, hawker food business might soon face self-destruction. Once traditional cuisine losses its authenticity, what else is left in Malaysia's traditional culture?

World Cup workers struggle for basic rights

As many enjoy the World Cup games in Sao Paolo, most remain oblivious to the abusive working conditions of labourers.


Many labourers migrated from rural areas to Sao Paolo looking for work and financial opportunity [Getty Images]

As hundreds of thousands of football fans enjoy the beautiful games in Sao Paulo, many rural 

migrants drawn to Brazil’s commercial capital to build stadiums and other infrastructure projects
 say their lives have been anything but pretty in the lead-up to the mega-event. In fact, many
 labourers who worked on construction projects ahead of the World Cup say they  experienced 
rights abuses, including long hours and dangerous conditions.Flavio, who hails from the Alagoas
 region in northeastern Brazil and didn’t want his real name  published, said weeks of carrying
 50kg bags of concrete and working at heights of 50 meters was too much for some workers.