LEARNING FROM CHINA
Chapter 1. The Economy and the Earth
Lester R. Brown, Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth
(W.W. Norton & Co., NY: 2001).
The flow of startling information from China
helps us understand why our economy cannot take us where we want
to go. Not only is China the world's most populous country, with
nearly 1.3 billion people, but since 1980 it has been the world's
fastest-growing economyexpanding
more than fourfold. In effect, China is telescoping history, demonstrating
what happens when large numbers of poor people rapidly become more
affluent.43
As incomes have climbed in China, so has consumption. The Chinese
have already caught up with Americans in pork consumption per person
and they are now concentrating their energies on increasing beef
production. Raising per capita beef consumption in China to that
of the average American would take 49 million additional tons of
beef. If all this were to come from putting cattle in feedlots,
American-style, it would require 343 million tons of grain a year,
an amount equal to the entire U.S. grain harvest.44
In Japan, as population pressures on the land mounted during a comparable
stage of its economic development, the Japanese turned to the sea
for their animal protein. Last year, Japan consumed nearly 10 million
tons of seafood. If China, with 10 times as many people as Japan,
were to try to move down this same path, it would need 100 million
tons of seafoodthe
entire world fish catch.45
In 1994, the Chinese government decided that the country would develop
an automobile-centered transportation system and that the automobile
industry would be one of the engines of future economic growth.
Beijing invited major automobile manufacturers, such as Volkswagen,
General Motors, and Toyota, to invest in China. But if Beijing's
goal of an auto-centered transportation system were to materialize
and the Chinese were to have one or two cars in every garage and
were to consume oil at the U.S. rate, China would need over 80 million
barrels of oil a dayslightly
more than the 74 million barrels per day the world now produces.
To provide the required roads and parking lots, it would also need
to pave some 16 million hectares of land, an area equal to half
the size of the 31 million hectares of land currently used to produce
the country's 132-million-ton annual harvest of rice, its leading
food staple.46
Similarly, consider paper. As China modernizes, its paper consumption
is rising. If annual paper use in China of 35 kilograms per person
were to climb to the U.S. level of 342 kilograms, China would need
more paper than the world currently produces. There go the world's
forests.47
We are learning that the western industrial development model is
not viable for China, simply because there are not enough resources
for it to work. Global land and water resources are not sufficient
to satisfy the growing grain needs in China if it continues along
the current economic development path. Nor will the existing fossil-fuel-based
energy economy supply the needed energy, simply because world oil
production is not projected to rise much above current levels in
the years ahead. Apart from the availability of oil, if carbon emissions
per person in China ever reach the U.S. level, this alone would
roughly double global emissions, accelerating the rise in the atmospheric
CO2 level.48
China faces a formidable challenge in fashioning a development strategy
simply because of the density of its population. Although it has
almost exactly the same amount of land as the United States, most
of China's 1.3 billion people live in a 1,500-kilometer strip on
the eastern and southern coasts. Reaching the equivalent population
density in the United States would require squeezing the entire
U.S. population into the area east of the Mississippi and then multiplying
it by four.49
Interestingly, the adoption of the western economic model for China
is being challenged from within. A group of prominent scientists,
including many in the Chinese Academy of Sciences, wrote a white
paper questioning the government's decision to develop an automobile-centered
transportation system. They pointed out that China does not have
enough land both to feed its people and to provide the roads, highways,
and parking lots needed to accommodate the automobile. They also
noted the heavy dependence on imported oil that would be required
and the potential air pollution and traffic congestion that would
result if they followed the U.S. path.50
If the fossil-fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy
will not work for China, then it will not work for India with its
1 billion people, or for the other 2 billion people in the developing
world. In a world with a shared ecosystem and an increasingly integrated
global economy, it will ultimately not work for the industrial economies
either. China is showing that the world cannot remain for long on
the current economic path. It is underlining the urgency of restructuring
the global economy, of building a new economy-an economy designed
for the earth.
ENDNOTES:
43. Ibid.; expanding economy from IMF, op. cit. note 10.
44. FAO, op. cit. note 10; population for per capita calculation
from United Nations, op. cit. note 25; conversion ratio of grain
to beef from Allen Baker, Feed Situation and Outlook staff, Economic
Research Service, USDA, Washington, DC, discussion with author,
27 April 1992.
45. Seafood consumption from FAO, Yearbook of Fishery Statistics:
Capture Production (Rome: various years); population from United
Nations, op. cit. note 25.
46. Joseph Kahn, "China's Next Great Leap: The Family Car," Wall
Street Journal, 24 June 1994; oil production and consumption levels
from BP, BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2001 (London: Group
Media Publications, June 2001), p. 7; for more information on the
calculations of paved area, see Lester R. Brown, "Paving the Planet:
Cars and Rice Competing for Crop Land," Earth Policy Alert 12 (Washington,
DC: Earth Policy Institute, 14 February 2001); rice harvest from
USDA, op. cit. note 3.
47. Calculated from FAO, op. cit. note 10, forest data updated 7
February 2001, and from United Nations, op. cit. note 25.
48. World oil availability from James J. MacKenzie, "Oil as a Finite
Resource: When is Global Production Likely to Peak?" WRI, www.wri.org/climate/jm_oil_000.html,
updated 20 March 2000; Richard A. Kerr, "USGS Optimistic on World
Oil Prospects, Science, 14 July 2000, p. 237.
49. United Nations, op. cit. note 25.
50. Ding Guangwei and Li Shishun, "Analysis of Impetuses to Change
of Agricultural Land Resources in China," Bulletin of the Chinese
Academy of Sciences, vol. 13, no. 1 (1999).
Copyright
© 2001 Earth Policy Institute
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