HAPPY 33rd BIRTHDAY PM!!

http://www.golfmongolia.com - He wasn't joking. Neither am I.

Every day the Embassy sends a list of news articles that mention Mongolia. After reading one about a proposed golf course in Mongolia (coming 2011) in the San Diego Tribune, I decided to post the link here.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/feb/23/mongolia-facing-task-grass-golf/

However, the google search resulted in not just one article referencing Mongolia but THREE. All courtesy of San Diego's enterprising and curious (bored?) journalists.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/feb/23/mongolia-facing-task-grass-golf/

http://legacy.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20040704/news_1n4golf.html

You'll have to read a bit of this before the Mongolia pay off.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2009/may/20/golf-column-leonard-amy-mickelson-cancer9024/

And now the 'Political Commentary':

Mongolia is in a state of emergency in some far western and northern provinces (aimags). Severe weather (that's cold, not heat) have caused snow melt to freeze, rendering the grass/grazing lands inaccessible for sheep, horses and goats. Hundreds of thousands of animals have died since late 2009, with low income and poor livelihoods devastated. The implications are not only immediate, loss of arable land for months, precipitous drops in income and earning potential as well as food scarcity, but long term: unemployed herders flock to Ulaanbaatar for work, but due to lack of employment opps and housing, crowd around the city in gers, adding to the air pollution by burning anything from tires to plastic to generate heat and exacerbating unemployment rates, land ownership issues, social needs and capacity constraints of water, heating and electricity infrastucture.


The idea of taking some of this already meager grazing land to develop a golf course may be great for foreign business travellers, but not for Mongolia's development overall. This is again an area where the money making prospects trump common sense and sustainable development priorities. Unless, of course, thousands of herders decide to become caddies.

Hey, at least they're not cutting down rain forests to build golf courses, right?