Xstrata said on Tuesday it had shut down a ferronickel mining and processing operation in the Dominican Republic for at least four months due to soaring energy costs and lower nickel prices.

The Switzerland-based mining group said that its Falconbridge Dominicana (Falcondo) operation, which each year produced 29,000 tonnes or 2 per cent of the world's primary nickel, would be suspended until market conditions improved.

The race by food-importing countries to secure farmland overseas to improve their food security risks creating a "neo-colonial' system, the United Nations' top agriculture official has cautioned.

The warning by Jacques Diouf, director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organisation, comes as countries from Saudi Arabia to China plan to lease vast tracts of land in Africa and Asia to grow crops and ship them back to their markets.

Saudi Arabia has no permanent rivers or lakes. Rainfall is low and unreliable. Cereals can be cultivated only through expensive projects that deplete underground reservoirs. Dairy cattle must be cooled with fans and machines that spray them with water mists. This is not, in short, a nation that would normally be associated with large-scale agriculture.

PG&E, a California power company, has placed an order for what are believed to be the world's two biggest photovoltaic solar farms, giving a strong endorsement to a technology that few power generators have yet considered to be ready for utility-scale use.

Between them the two farms, due to come on-stream in 2010 and 2011, are planned to generate 800 megawatts at peak capacity, or more than the 750 MW of the entire photovoltaic grid capacity in the US at the end of last year.

BP resumed exports of Azerbaijani natural gas through a pipeline across Georgia to Turkey yesterday. But the company's oil pipeline to the Georgian Black Sea port of Supsa remained out of action.

Both pipelines were closed by the British energy group on Tuesday amid concerns about security.

"BP began filling the South Caucasus pipeline again today because we believe it is now safe enough to do so," said Toby Odone, a BP spokesman.

The battle between Toyota and Honda for supremacy in the hybrid petrol-electric car market is set to heat up with both Japanese carmakers set to introduce distinctive new models early next year.

Honda disclosed details on Wednesday of a hybrid hatchback that will be smaller and cheaper than its existing Civic hybrid sedan.

Toyota is due to unveil a larger version of its popular Prius. It has so far kept a low profile on the new model to avoid damping sales of the existing Prius.

Mining group Anglo American has held secret talks with Zimbabwe's opposition, that could see Anglo Platinum, its majority-owned subsidiary, regain lucrative concessions recently ceded to the regime of Robert Mugabe, the president.

In a sign of how the convulsions in Zimbabwe could affect some of the world's most coveted resources, two senior figures in the Movement for Democratic Change told the Financial Times that the party had held discussions with the mining company, which has a 76 per cent stake in Anglo Platinum.

UK politicians, academics and farmers yesterday rounded on Prince Charles, heir to the throne, after he claimed that a -global shift towards gen-etically modified crops would destroy the earth's environment.

The prince, who started an organic food brand 18 years ago, argued in an interview with the Daily -Telegraph newspaper that increased global planting of GM crops would lead to "disaster".

He said "clever genetic engineering" by "gigantic corporations" would "cause the biggest -disaster environmentally of all time".

As the collapse of the trade talks in Geneva in July made clear, there is no longer any meaningful trade negotiation without the main nations from the emerging world. The year 2008 may go down in history as the one in which rich countries discovered that this applies to macroeconomic policies, too.

Opec pushed its oil production to the highest level in its 48-year history last month, even as demand was slipping in the US and Eur-ope, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said yesterday.

The combination of surplus supply and weaker demand has pushed oil prices to $113.50 a barrel, down 24 per cent in the last month and the lowest level since late April.