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Hello, welcome to World Business Report from the BBC World Service.
My name's Ed Butler.
On today's edition, we're examining the industrial use of human slaves in Southeast Asia to scam people around the world, why these places exist, and the tale of one woman who managed to escape.
Also in the show, China hits back at Canadian tariffs, with a wave of tariffs of its own, and Russia and Ukraine's muted ceasefire on energy infrastructure.
Which side, we wonder, will really benefit the most?
It will definitely be very beneficial for the Russian economy because it would allow Russia to sell this oil at a higher price.
Would it bring down the oil price?
I'm not really sure.
All of that to come later in the show.
In recent weeks, thousands of people from various countries around the world have begun their journeys home after being freed by rebel groups from so -called scam centers in Myanmar. These Chinese -run institutions have, for the last few years, been using forced labor to target people around the world with fraudulent schemes online.
35 -year -old Annika Borham from Sri Lanka is one of those who finally managed to get out of there.
She was duped into travelling into what she believed would be a legitimate job in IT.
She's been telling me about what she and others were forced to go through.
They just train us how to chat to each other, pretending to be a girl.
you have to build the customer's trust, so that we will know whether he's a wealthy person or not.
And then that's how we scam people.
How many other workers were there in these scam centers?
Our office may be 500, mostly Africans.
Asian countries, Philippines.
But at this point you know you're involved in a scam.
Did you complain? Did you try and refuse to do this work?
Actually, we saw when people refused what happened today Some people don't have their teeth their hands are broken their legs are broken they need clutches to walk Even the women in one month or so when they don't perform You cannot even look at their faces So we three Lankans, we thought of doing whatever they said.
For Anika, recalling the sense of personal terror is combined with the sense of guilt as well.
She was being made to lure unsuspecting men into speculative investment schemes.
Most of them are very old and lonely people who wants someone to care for them.
We use cryptocurrency exchanges like Binance, OKEx. So then that is the point where the customer gets scammed actually.
The sums that they needed to invest would start to spiral rapidly to the tune of thousands of dollars.
Last year this month I was very lucky.
He was a very old person.
maybe 80 years old.
I think he put more than 38 ,000 USD.
He was like bankrupt and he was still trusting and he was still talking, telling about his sorrows and he was losing his house and everything it's horrible.
Even now I feel like crying.
You said you were very lucky.
What do you mean by that?
Yeah, because we didn't have any option.
If we didn't do, we are getting beat.
We have to save ourselves.
If you can't earn dollars, they don't even let you eat.
Some people were killed, beaten to death.
You saw people being beaten to death?
Yes. Thousands of forced labourers who've been released from scam centres along the Thai -Myanmar border are stranded in makeshift camps in Myanmar. From late last year after the Thai government cut electricity supplies to the border area, the rebels, controlling the scam centres, submitted to international pressure.
They began releasing some of those held there.
Annika was one of them.
She'd been trapped for some 14 months.
It was like a dream.
I didn't ever think I will return.
It's a terrible nightmare.
The words are of Annika Boram from Sri Lanka, you can hear more of that interview in today's edition of Business Daily here on BBC World Service.
Now, she is one of some 220 ,000 people in the United nations estimates have been held in these places, mostly there in Myanmar Myanmar and Cambodia.
What is the situation now though?
And what's been done to fix this crisis for so many people?
Jeremy Douglas is the Chief of Staff at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
Well there's been thousands released primarily from Myanmar but there have been some released in other locations as well.
And they've been released from around the world.
So you see citizens from Africa, from South Asia, from Southeast Asia itself, basically those who can target those different language groups that the different criminal gangs were trying to target to take money from.
How many are still there though?
I mean, there was a quote from a chief of police in Thailand, I think, this week, suggesting that there were still as many as 100 ,000 who could be on the across the Myanmar border from Thailand?
I mean, honestly, it's hard to tell.
I mean, you've got thousands, for sure.
Hundreds, 100 ,000 is a big number, but definitely you've got thousands.
I wouldn't be surprised if you look at the three areas I've described, Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia, that you're looking at tens of thousands.
Again, it's one of those kind of phenomenon where you can't quantify it, right?
Because there's people coming in from around the world.
This is clandestine, no one is really knowing how many are going in.
So it's, you find out when people come out how many have actually gone in.
But, you know you see another phenomena taking place now which is like professionals going in as well.
So there's traffic to people going in but you also have professional scammers around the world going in and you see increasing technology.
You see the use of AI in these scams targeting people around the world as well.
So it's increasingly complex, increasingly hard to target it and so what you hear from the police, police general in Thailand, is an estimate really, honestly.
Yeah. And yet this is a very specific location.
It is a very specific population, as you say, of mostly want to be migrants from relatively poor countries looking for jobs in IT, and What is the political authority that is keeping these places open?
Because in most countries, you'd just be able to go in and shut them down, wouldn't you, with the help of the government?
Yeah, but this is not most places.
So what you're looking at is locations where Myanmar is a country with maybe less than half the countries under the control of the junta, which is the military authority which overthrew the democratic government.
And you have these armed groups that control the other territories.
Most of which finance themselves from different illegal economies, like drugs and scams, like you see now, or what we're talking about now.
And in places like Cambodia, you see special economic zones where there's these kind of places where you can set up a business with no rule of law, no law enforcement authority.
society, so you have criminal gangs are attracted to these zones.
They can form partnerships with the local elites, the armed groups or the people that control those zones.
So you've got no rule of law, essentially, in these locations.
And this is what we're dealing with.
There's no central authority that you can talk to, almost. So what we talked to, who we talked to is the ties.
We talked to the central governments, and we talked to international partners to try to build pressure on those zones to get people out.
So there's impunity effectively, or to a large degree at the moment, for these organisations.
Have you seen anything on this scale ever before?
I mean, it is extraordinarily the scale of it, as you've described it.
Oh, it's phenomenal.
I mean, you've got a scale that these zones have global reach through technology, right?
So they're autonomous, and they're in places where you can access good technology, good connectivity to the rest of the world, essentially through Thailand, because they're on the border of Thailand.
But they're not in Thailand.
So there's no opportunity to really intervene in these independent states.
And within those states, zones which are not touchable.
So it's a phenomenon in which I think we've really really got to find a solution to deal with.
The UN's Jeremy Douglas on Southeast Asia's scam centres.
A fresh chapter has opened in the global tariff disputes that we've been seeing lately.
This time, it doesn't involve Donald Trump.
Canada finds itself in China's crosshairs.
As of today, Beijing has slapped a 25 percent tariff on a range of Canadian seafood exports, a direct response to Ottawa's earlier decision to impose tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles.
The seafood duties are part of a broad package of trade penalties targeting Canadian agriculture and food.
They're worth an estimated $256 billion.
Dan Wang is China director at Eurasia Group in Singapore.
He told my colleague Andrew Peach this could have significant consequences for Canada's exports.
To us, it is mostly like a warning shot to any countries that are trying to align too closely to the US trade policies.
What sort of damage could this do to the Canadian economy at a time when it's already under pressure and, of course, the country's got new leadership, and is heading towards elections?
All those agricultural items combined is about 20 billion US dollars.
It's less than 20 % of all the agricultural exports of Canadian goods and less than 3 % of Canadian GDP.
and China is only targeting a small fraction of all those agricultural exports.
So for the Canadian economy as a whole, I don't see too much damage.
But for the agricultural sector, of course, those farmers will take a pretty big hit.
Yeah, China spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on Canadian seafood.
Christina Burridge, the executive director of the British Columbia Seafood Alliance, described what type of seafood we'd be talking about we're talking about maybe a dozen different species from here some of which are very very dependent on the Chinese market having been built up over the last 20 or 30 years.
The one that would probably be most familiar to people is crab which we export about $230 million to China every year the strangest one is gooey duck which is a $75 million in exports to China.
It is also entirely dependent on the Chinese market, so 95 % of production goes to China.
And what's the impact going to be of the tariffs that have now been introduced?
Well, our fleets at the moment are tied up, because we don't really know what's going to happen.
And so the exporters have said, let's just wait it out for a bit and keep our fingers crossed that something will happen in the reasonably near future.
Jason Vale Christine O 'Bourage, speaking there to the BBC's Andrew Peach. Well, that's seafood.
Let's hear now about canola, or rapeseed oil as it's also known.
This is also facing 100 % Chinese tariffs as of now.
Chris Daveison is president and CEO of the Canola Council of Canada.
Chris Daveison China is Canada's number two market for export in terms of economic activity.
So it's a highly valued market by the Canadian canola industry.
It came in at about $4 .9 billion Canadian dollars of export value in 2024, and these tariffs that have been announced apply specifically to Canadian canola meal and oil, which represents about 20 % of that $4 .9 billion.
And you can't find another market to replace that?
Well, we have a long standing focus in the industry on diversification.
but what I would say is that markets that are the size of China that we're talking about are not plentiful, they don't grow on trees.
So we need to make sure that we've got good relationships with our trade partners and make sure those are working well to support smooth and predictable trade.
And then we look at things in terms of complementary activities to those existing markets not necessarily as replacements for them but as complements too.
And we are present and active in a number of other markets around the world, including some countries in Southeast Asia that have small but growing feed industries, for example.
And we've also made significant investments our industry has here in Canada to expand our domestic processing capacity, which means we're doing more value added work here.
Okay. Humanize that for us.
A billion dollar industry.
How many jobs is that at risk?
We have about 40 ,000 Canadian farmers who grow canola every year.
And so the impact certainly comes directly to them at the farm gate.
But I would point out we recently completed an economic impact assessment of the value of the Canadian industry to the Canadian economy, and the Canadian canola industry delivers 43 .7 billion Canadian dollars of economic activity annually to the Canadian economy.
That includes 16 billion dollars in wages and some 206 thousand jobs.
So we're talking about a very significant contribution.
Are you dissatisfied with the political behaviour, if you like, of your own government here?
I mean, how do you see this?
Well, what I would say is that the situation that we find ourselves in with China is not a result of any action by our industry.
It's a direct response by one government, in this case China, to actions that were taken by the Canadian government.
And so it's very much a political issue and we need the Canadian government to engage in a meaningful and substantive way with its Chinese counterparts to address it.
So, it's a political issue, and it's going to need a political solution.
You said your number two market is China.
What are they doing with the canola?
The seed that it gets from Canada puts through its own processing facilities in China China, and turns it into canola oil for use in the Chinese market.
China is the largest vegetable oil consumer in the world, and the meal that's produced becomes part of the feed rations for a variety of animal and livestock species.
Do you think it's just about who can last the longest with this kind of war of wills?
Yeah, I'm not sure about that.
And I guess what I would say is rather than worry about the cause or the motivation or the source of this particular action and responses.
We just need to make sure that we're working hard so we've got good, effective relationships with a variety of our trade partners.
In fact, all of our major trade partners in support of smooth and predictable trade.
I don't know of any successful business that just relies on one partner for its success.
And so we I need to make sure that we find a way to have effective relationships with all of our major partners.
Chris Davison there of the Canola Council of Canada.
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You're with World Business Report from the BBC World Service.
Let's turn to Walter Todd now of Greenwood Capital with a look at the markets.
markets, hi, Walter.
There's been more fallout from yesterday's hold on interest rates in the U .S., hasn't there?
President Trump has urged the Fed to cut rates despite the Fed deciding to hold them on Wednesday.
Yeah, shocking. A former real estate developer wants lower interest rates.
So the market actually rallied post the press conference yesterday, obviously gave a little back today, but I think the market was pleased that Powell wasn't more hawkish in the press conference.
But the the word of the of the day was uncertainty.
He used it half a dozen times or more in that press conference.
Does Donald Trump have a point though in the sense that the country does need to prepare in some way for the impact that terrorists could have on inflation particularly if he decides to impose them?
Yeah, Powell got a lot of questions on that.
They lowered their growth outlook but they raise their inflation outlook.
That's not a great combination.
They raise the inflation outlook because they believe tariffs are going to be inflationary.
So they're kind of stuck a little bit because if they cut rates that would encourage more inflation but yet help potentially a slowdown in growth.
So it is a tough spot for the Fed to navigate but the market still expects them to cut two to three times this year.
Sticking with America, though, Accenture.
It has come up with its share price has dropped over it.
The CEO has warned that cutting of government funding, this is government programs, government I guess civil servants is impacting the amount of public sector work that it could be getting.
Yeah, it's just about 8 % of the of their revenue.
So I think the stock overreacted specifically but The concept of those companies that are exposed to the US government, they've actually been under pressure since the election in expectation of this potential volatility around revenue.
So, you've seen defense contractors, industrial stocks exposed to government contracts all underperformed.
Accenture is the latest one to do that.
But between you and me, I think it's an opportunity to potentially add to that company on this sell -off.
Okay. Well, to Todd, thank you very much, indeed.
We have been hearing all sorts of stories recently about a possible peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.
President Putin seemed to reject the idea of an immediate ceasefire.
He did, though, suggest a limited cessation of attacks on energy facilities.
This hasn't happened yet, of course, both Russia and Ukraine have reportedly been continuing with such attacks, but we could be getting something soon, given talks in Saudi Arabia over the weekend or upcoming, the all important energy sector we thought needed looking at.
So we've been asking Anastasia Shapodchkinna.
She's founder and president of Eastern circles, a French -based think tank on geopolitics of energy and defence.
Who has benefited most?
First Ukraine. It cares enormously, of course, about this.
The continuous strikes by Russia on Ukraine energy infrastructure, including the Kivovka hydro dam, which caused immense damage, the numerous attacks on the coal -based and gas -based infrastructure has really undermined Ukraine's industrial capacity, the capacity of doing business.
It's a scare way investors.
However, Ukraine has adapted to this and the people and the businesses have adopted in three years, especially thanks to the European experts of electricity to it to the extent that there were no backouts for residential consumers over the winter, which was a real big threat and and every single energy expert talks about it.
Businesses have adopted by installing generators as small businesses and major businesses, yes, they've incurred problems, however, the government has provided an uninterrupted power supply for weapons production, which is extremely important for the continuing defence of Ukraine.
So it won't make your saying a massive economic difference to Ukraine even to have a 30 -day pause in those energy infrastructure attacks?
Yes. First of all, the winter is over and the critical phase, when that could really make a difference, say in December and January, today is not at all the same.
It doesn't really change the overall situation, economic situation in Ukraine.
So what is the dividend potentially for Russia if there were a cessation of Ukrainian drone attacks, which we have of course been seeing, against energy installations inside of Russia.
Very important dividend, because they've yielded attacks on energy infrastructure in about ten different cities across Russia.
Yeah. I mean, I was seeing an estimate by Reuters recently that there had been a 10 % reduction in Russian refining capacity for crude oil for oil because of these attacks.
Exactly. The refining capacity is important for Russia's internal needs.
So that supplies the patrol for the army with continuous war effort.
Second, refined products is an important part of Russian energy exports abroad, which make up more than half of Russian exports, which are crucial to pay, especially for the missiles it buys, for example, from North Korea, or the Shahads it buys from Iran, anything it needs to make its own weapons.
So, if there's such a much larger dividend as you're suggesting for the Russian side, why do you think Ukraine is even considering their steel?
Ukraine is going to consider and take pretty much the deal that the US is going to say it supports, especially since the fallout between President Zelensky and President Trump in the Oval Office a week ago.
So, beggars can't be true, so to say, however, from experience, Ukraine knows that no matter what deal Russia is going to sign, it will violate it as soon as it signs.
The ink is not going to even have the time to go dry.
So this is not something that is a viable good faith truth that America is seeking, it is rather a way for Russia to prolong the negotiations.
The thoughts there of the Engie analyst Anastasia Shapochkina speaking to me of a potential limited cease fire in the Ukrainian Russian attacks there in the war.
Artificial intelligence is giving a lot of companies a bit of a headache right now.
But you might not expect one of the great tech innovator companies to be having such issues.
Apple though is reported to have shaken up its AI team after delays to its Siri technology, Our tech correspondent Lilly Jamali joins us from San Francisco.
What's going on here, Lilly?
Yeah, well Apple is installing a new leader to head up its Apple Intelligence unit.
Bloomberg is reporting that as part of this shake -up, the creator of the Vision Pro group will be moving over to lead its AI efforts.
If people remember the Vision Pro or those $3 ,500 goggles that have actually also been something of a flop.
So this is kind of an interesting choice.
But Apple Intelligence was supposed to be a critical offering for Apple, supposed to help them sell new phones.
And part of the promise was that there would be this rollout of a new and improved Siri, the voice assistant, and that hasn't happened so far.
Not as intelligent as it's made out to be.
I mean, is that a big embarrassment, you'd say, for a brand like Apple?
It is a big embarrassment.
And it's also very counter to the way that, I think a lot of consumers and certainly analysts view this company.
You mentioned in your intro, this is one of the great technology innovators, and they haven't had a big hit in a while.
They canceled their Apple car project, which was kept under wraps for years.
They kind of downgraded their AI ambitions and decided, you know, we're not gonna go all out on our own.
We're gonna partner with other companies and do these features.
And then here you have even that, you know, not going according to plan with these timelines being pushed out, so much so that a lot of consumers who actually went out and bought the phones are realizing, well, you know, this phone is a great phone, but it doesn't have all the promised features that I was looking forward to.
Now, the company is also facing a federal lawsuit.
What's this about? Yeah, I mean, it's related to what I just mentioned a moment ago, where people actually did go out and purchase new iPhones that could support these new Apple Intelligence features.
So this lawsuit was filed on Wednesday in a US district court in San Jose, California, that's in Silicon Valley.
And the claim by these consumers who want this to become a class action lawsuit is that Apple overhyped the promise of Apple Intelligence in order to sell new phones.
This was supposed to be this huge revenue generator for the company, but what we're seeing is in a bid to kind of turn around the flagging sales of Apple iPhones, people feel like they were sold a product that just wasn't quite ready.
People shell out a lot of money to buy an iPhone versus some competitor from Google or from Samsung or the like, and now they say, well, these features aren't ready now and Apple knew about it and we want our money back.
Indeed. Thank you very much. The thoughts there of our tech correspondent, Lily Jamala, Mark Jamali, joining us from San Francisco, Apple seemingly somewhat in the wars this week.
That's just about it for this edition of world business report for me, Edgar Butler, and the rest of the team.
Thanks very much for listening.
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