Who's Hu and When's Wen Coming?
Due to this week's state visit, The Guardian has been running a short series of articles on China. Shame their website hasn't been working terribly well lately.
Their Beijing correspondent Jonathan Watts is clearly something of a good egg, though how he manages to hop from China to Brazil and write such a well-researched feature article to boot I don't know. Perhaps he had a bit of help.
The articles are here:
A Miracle and a Menace
A Hunger Eating Up the World
A couple of paras are worth noting for some interesting stats:
Once self-sufficient in many primary products, China now gobbles up global resources. Imports rose 40% last year as it surged past the US as the most important player in global commodity markets. According to the Asian Development Bank, China took 40% of the world's steel, 30% of its coal, and 25% of its aluminium and copper. It is now a major importer of grain, soya and even rice because so much farmland is given over to factories, malls and housing.
In the past two years, Chinese demand has been credited with pushing international commodity prices to record levels. China has accounted for 40% of the growth in demand for oil over the past four years, overtaking Japan last year as the second biggest importer. With a trade surplus of $10.4bn, foreign exchange reserves of $745bn and a currency that strengthened this summer for the first time in 10 years, China can afford to spend. Recently, it has bought - or bid for - $24bn of US treasury bills, fleets of jumbo jets and companies such as IBM, Rover and Marconi.
Some of this is perhaps to be expected, since the Chinese comprise 20% of the world's population - but if China is using 40% of world resources than to me the maths doesn't work long term. Even after decades of underdevelopment due to Maoism etc. I make that twice as much as they are entitled to. Also:
The past 25 years of economic growth have devastated China's environment; another 25 could do the same worldwide. The Earthwatch Institute says that if China's 1.3 billion people consumed at the same rate as Americans, global production of steel, paper and cars would have to double, oil output would need to rise by 20m barrels per day and miners would have to dig an extra 5bn tonnes of coal. If they followed the US appetite, China would chew its way through 80% of current meat production and two-thirds of last year's global grain harvest.
This may be a good reason to put some restrictions on American movies and TV. Finally:
Since 1995 satellite images show the Amazon has shrunk by 1.7m hectares (4.2m acres) a year - equivalent to a forest almost the size of Israel being turned into farmland every 12 months. During the same period China has lost more than 6m hectares of arable land to cities, factories, roads and deserts. Self-sufficient in most food and energy commodities 15 years ago, China must now import millions of kilocalories to fuel its workers just as it needs lakes of international oil to keep its production lines running. Most of the protein comes in the form of soya beans from Brazil, which are used to fatten pigs, poultry and fish that end up on the dinner tables of the world's most populous country.
There's a quote later on that really sums up what the world is up against. Get this for lack of foresight - from of all people a professor of economics:
"Foreign environmental activists worry too much about a few trees, a few species and a few tribes. They don't want us to develop. All we want is health and money," Jomar Nascimento Neves, an economics professor at the local university, told a recent conference sponsored by several big agricultural firms.
This is not only callous but ignores the enormous dangers that Brazil, China and the rest of the world may face in the medium and long term if this kind of 'progress' continues. I'm not a professor of economics but I reckon that if a few trees, species and tribes are lost then no-one will care until a few more are lost. And so on, until the bitter end.
The reality is that if the environment is destroyed at this rate and the population continues to grow, at some point there will be a Malthusian catastrophe where the demand for food and resources really does outstrip our capacity to produce.
More recent China articles from The Guardian:
US uneasy as Beijing develops a strategic string of pearls
Sudan at the head of a global sweep to mop up world's oil resources
Leader: The substance and the ceremony
