CHINA:
Harbinger of Our Future?
Background information in
the following article was gleaned from many Internet
sources and also the August 1, 2004, issue of the
New York Times and the April 29, 2004, issue of
The Christian Science Monitor.
Twenty-five years ago China dismantled
its communes and started its drive towards industrialization.
In the countryside former commune members were switched
to land contracts (Chinese farmers are not allowed
to own their land) and farm productivity greatly
increased. Grain output rose from 90 million tons
in 1950 to 392 million tons in 1998. Hundreds of
millions of people had their lives improved as the
economy was restructured.
Today China has the world's fastest-growing
economy and is increasingly becoming urbanized.
With 1.3 billion people and the addition of 11 million
more each year, demand for goods keeps rising. More
people with higher incomes means increased consumption
of pork, poultry and eggs-all from grain-fed animals.
In 2003 two million autos were sold; that is the
number of cars already on the roads just around
Beijing with another million predicted to join them
next year. China is now the world's second largest
oil consumer after the U.S. The country is having
to find new housing for the millions of farmers
leaving the land to take higher-paying factory jobs.
Shanghai alone is planning to build ten "satellite
cities" around the existing one-with no plans
for public transportation.
Of course, this drastic national
change in lifestyle has not been without its down
side. The government has focused on building urban
manufacturing and financial centers to the detriment
of rural areas and their populations. Entrepreneurs
have illegally seized farmers' land to build industrial
parks and upscale housing developments for the country's
newly rich. Industry and cities are being given
preference in the competition for scarce water supplies,
with water tables falling and major rivers now drying
up long before reaching the coast. Overgrazing,
unsustainable farming methods and drought have caused
massive erosion of the land, particularly in the
north, where most of China's wheat is grown. Dust
storms are sweeping across the land, dumping their
load on the cities of eastern China and even on
Japan. Air pollution has become a problem with the
proliferation of industries, automobiles and dust
storms. Since the 1950s China has lost 36,000 square
miles to desertification, with the Gobi desert now
only 150 miles from Beijing. China's grain harvest
has fallen in four of the last five years, with
wheat production last year being 19 million tons
less than consumption. Reasons given are loss of
farmland to non-farm uses and desertification, lack
of water, insufficient labor as former farm laborers
flock to the cities looking for work, and the shift
to higher-value crops as prices paid to farmers
for grain crops drop.
The social cost of this new economy
has been high. It has created wide disparity between
the urban rich and the rural poor. "This year
the number of destitute poor, which China classifies
as those earning less than $75 a year, increased
for the first time in 25 years. The government estimates
that the number of people in this lowest stratum
grew by 800,000, to 85 million people, even as the
economy grew by a robust 9 percent. . Rural governments
get almost no support from wealthier areas. They
tax local farmers and impose endless fees to finance
schools, hospitals, road building, even the police."
(Joseph Kahn and Jim Yardley, NY Times, August 1,
2004) Many villages survive only because people
leave each year and send money back to relatives.
Events in China may seem interesting
but far away. However, they are already affecting
the rest of the world. Because its cheaper manufactured
products are swamping developed countries, China
has vast foreign exchange reserves and can afford
to compete in the world economy. In order to feed
its people, the country recently started importing
wheat, rice and soy, in the process driving up global
food prices. If this trend continues, basic food
for people in Third World countries will not be
affordable and starvation will increase drastically.
Even in "developed" countries, low-income
people who are already having to make choices between
food, housing and medicine will suffer. In future
years, "a rice shortfall of 20 million tons
[in China] in a world where annual rice exports
total only 26 million tons could create chaos in
the world rice economy." (Lester R. Brown,
Earth Policy Institute, March 10, 2004) With an
increasing number of cars on its roads, China is
competing for diminishing oil reserves, again contributing
to escalating prices. Although China's leaders are
now concerned about food security and are offering
subsidies to farmers to grow more grain, there is
no guarantee that the other factors leading to low
grain production will change and that China will
once more become food self-sufficient.
The situation in China provides
a unique opportunity to get a perspective on the
genesis of the many problems now impacting the rest
of the world-particularly the "developed"
world. Seeing the industrialization that has taken
place in China in just twenty-five years is like
watching a fast-forward movie of our own process
of moving from a rural to an industrial economy.
Cause and effect become much more apparent. We can
see that withdrawing water from the earth at a faster
rate than it is replaced will cause water shortages;
that unwise and unsustainable farming practices
will erode the land and cause pollution; that encouraging
industrialization at the expense of agriculture
will lead to food shortages; that ignoring a widening
disparity of income structure and services will
create an underclass of disaffected and perhaps
rebellious people. Perhaps most important, we can
see that building an economy on a rapidly depleting
resource is unrealistic.
China is a good reminder that
Earth is a small planet whose ecosystems have been
severely impacted by our non-optimal actions. We
are all affected and all need to open our minds
and hearts to help create and pursue solutions. |