Chinese walker

June has been a hectic month for Lester R Brown, president and founder of the Washington-based Earth Policy Institute. While launching versions of his Plan B 3.0 — subtitled “Mobilising to Save Civilisation” — in Chinese, Hindi and four other languages — Brown also is keeping well abreast of the “fast-unfolding food shortage“ that is “engulfing the entire world, driving food prices to record highs”.

In reviewing the English-language version of the book, published in January, chinadialogue noted that Brown “doesn`t just write books about the environmental challenges facing the planet. He rewrites and updates them in a race both to keep up with the speed of changes and to persuade the world to pay attention before it is too late.” Spelling out his plan for human survival in Plan B 3.0, Brown argued that four main goals need to be addressed urgently and simultaneously: to stabilise climate, stabilise population, eradicate poverty and restore the planet`s damaged ecosystems.

Failure of any one of those goals, he says, will mean the failure of all of them – and Brown is determined not to let that happen. Ahead of the Chinese and other translations of Plan B 3.0, he already has issued updates on the Earth Policy Institute`s website. “Over the past half-century,” he wrote in April, “grain prices have spiked from time to time because of weather-related events, such as the 1972 Soviet crop failure that led to a doubling of world wheat, rice and corn prices.”

But today`s situation is entirely different, says Brown: “The current doubling of grain prices is trend-driven, the cumulative effect of some trends that are accelerating growth in demand and other trends that are slowing the growth in supply.”

“The world has not experienced anything quite like this before,” he continues. “In the face of rising food prices and spreading hunger, the social order is beginning to break down in some countries.” Pointing to rice-rustling in Thailand, hijackings of United Nations grain trucks in Sudan, food insecurity in Pakistan and violence in countries including Egypt, Morocco, Yemen, Cameroon, Brown asserts that “a politics of food scarcity is emerging” around the world.

“Most fundamentally,” according to Brown`s update, “it involves the restriction of grain exports by countries that want to check the rise in their domestic prices” – countries such as Russia, Ukraine, Argentina, Vietnam and Cambodia. Such export restrictions serve to drive up prices in a tight world market. Both supply and demand, he says, are being affected by the cumulative effect of several well-established trends.

“The challenge is not simply to deal with a temporary rise in grain prices, as in the past, but rather to quickly alter those trends whose cumulative effects collectively threaten the food security that is a hallmark of civilisation,” Brown asserts. “If food security cannot be restored quickly, social unrest and political instability will spread and the number of failing states will likely increase dramatically, threatening the very stability of civilisation itself.”

“On the demand side,” he says, “the trends include the continuing addition of 70 million people per year to the earth`s population, the desire of some 4 billion people to move up the food chain and consume more grain-intensive livestock products, and the sharp acceleration in the US use of grain to produce ethanol for cars.” (Annual growth in world grain consumption has risen from “roughly 20 million tons to 50 million tons” since 2005 due to ethanol demands, Brown says.)

On the supply side, he continues, “there is little new land to be brought under the plow unless it comes from clearing tropical rainforests in the Amazon and Congo basins and in Indonesia, or from clearing land in the Brazilian cerrado”, a savanna-like region. That, of course, has heavy environmental costs, including the release of sequestered carbon, animal- and plant-species loss, increased runoff from rainfall and soil erosion. Elsewhere, cropland has been devoured by construction, roads, highways and parking lots.

Even scarcer than new land are new sources of water for irrigation. Grainland productivity increases are slowing down. Higher oil prices drive up the costs of both food production and transportation, making biofuel (particularly ethanol production) a more profitable business option for grain growers.

“Beyond this, climate change presents new risks,” writes Brown. “Crop-withering heat waves, more destructive storms, and the melting of the Asian mountain glaciers that sustain the dry-season flow of that region`s major rivers are combining to make harvest expansion more difficult.”

In an update in March, Brown addressed that issue specifically. “Mountain glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibet-Qinghai plateau are melting,” he wrote, “and could soon deprive the major rivers of India and China of the ice melt needed to sustain them during the dry season. In the Ganges, the Yellow and the Yangtze river basins, where irrigated agriculture depends heavily on rivers, this loss of dry-season flow will shrink harvests.” The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has reported that many of the Himalayan glaciers are receding so quickly that they could melt entirely by 2035.

The situation is critical: in Brown`s words, “the world has never faced such a predictably massive threat to food production” as that posed by the melting Asian glaciers. “China and India are the world`s leading producers of both wheat and rice – humanity`s food staples,” he writes. If the Gangotri Glacier, which supplies 70% of the flow of the Ganges during the dry season, vanishes, the river could become seasonal. It would flow during the rainy season, says Brown, but not during the dry season – when irrigation water needs are greatest. A similar situation faces the Yellow and the Yangtze rivers by 2060, leading to “an ecological catastrophe”, believes Chinese glaciologist Yao Tandong.

And there are other problems, now and ahead: overpumping of water is depleting underground resources; wells are drying up; politically unmanageable food shortages loom large; populations are growing. By 2050, India is projected to have 490 million more people, China 80 million more.

Given the current grain situation, Brown noted in March, any disruption of Chinese and Indian wheat and rice harvests because of water shortages “will greatly affect not only people living there but consumers everywhere”. China and India may even end up competing with Americans for the US grain harvest.

“The glaciologists have given us a clear sense of how fast glaciers are shrinking,” writes Brown. “The challenge now is to translate their findings into national energy policies designed to the save the glaciers. At issue is not just the future of mountain glaciers, but the future of world grain harvests.”

Brown`s message to China and India this month, as their people get the opportunity to consume Plan B 3.0 in Chinese and Hindi, is “to abandon business-as-usual energy policies” and move to cut carbon emissions – which contribute to climate change — by 80% by 2020. The first step, he says, is to ban new coal-fired power plants – an idea that is catching fire in the United States. And which two countries are planning to build most of those new plants? China and India — “precisely the ones whose food security is most massively threatened by the carbon emitted from burning coal”.

“It is now in their interest to try and save their mountain glaciers by shifting energy investment” to wind, solar and geothermal power, says Brown. “At issue is whether we can mobilise to lower atmospheric CO2 concentrations before high temperatures melt the mountain glaciers that feed the major rivers of Asia and elsewhere, and before shrinking harvests lead to an unraveling of our civilisation.”

World food security, Brown emphasises, will deteriorate further “unless leading countries can collectively mobilise to stabilise population, restrict the use of grain to produce automotive fuel, stabilise climate, stabilise water tables and aquifers, protect cropland and conserve soils.” Worldwide efforts need to focus of eradicating poverty and raising water productivity. Progress on all these fronts is essential, says Brown, and the good news, he believes, is that it can be done if we choose to do it.

Maryann Bird is associate editor of chinadialogue

homepage photo by Ngkkh

Alexandra Harney, the Financial Times`s former South China correspondent, is the author of The China Price, subtitled “The true cost of Chinese competitive advantage”. Isabel Hilton, chinadialogue`s editor, sat down with her for a chat about environmental aspects of Chinese manufacturing.

Isabel Hilton: Your book is about the cost to China and the rest of the world of the Chinese mode of development. How would you assess the environmental costs, to China, of the “develop now, clean up later” approach?

Alexandra Harney: We all know the figures of half a million people dying each year of pollution-related diseases. The Financial Times has reported that it`s more like three-quarters of a million people passing away every year. Then there are untold numbers of people who are suffering from environmentally related diseases in villages and cities across China who don`t come into those figures. So I think that we are only beginning to scratch the surface of the public-health implications of China`s environmentally related disaster.

I asked, in my visit to a town outside Taiyuan, how many people suffered from a basic level of rhinitis [internal nasal inflammation] and other diseases. I don`t even think I saw the people who were really suffering because I think they were probably dead. They were suffering because of all the particles in the air and they all knew that it was partly related to working in the coal industry, in mining, but also partly because of everyone using charcoal in their homes – the indoor pollution that people sometimes talk about in China.

And in areas like that, as I saw, you have a microcosm of China`s environmental problems. People were at least superficially aware of the problem, but the desire for economic advancement overpowered any desire for clean-up.

IH: Do you think that remains true when people understand what the cost is?

AH: No. I think, for example, that when you visit one of these villages – the cancer villages, the villages where women are all widows because their husbands have died from injuries or illnesses contracted in manufacturing, or the villages where crops have been decimated by polluted water — people are smart. It`s perfectly clear to them how the environment is directly affecting them and their health.

There is increasing amounts of activism around the issue by the NGOs, who are doing interesting work. And I was really struck by all the protests by people in Xiamen and Shanghai, middle-class people who were taking to the streets about environmental issues. That`s massive. The numbers of environmental refuges are also interesting. [Deputy environment minister] Pan Yue himself says that there are tens of millions of environmental refugees – people pushed off their land, for instance, by environmental pollution. Those people are certainly aware of what is happening to them.

IH: Is there much understanding that there is a clean-up bill that has to be paid – and that there is a failure to discuss how this burden should be shared across society?

AH: I don`t think that the debate in China or elsewhere is that sophisticated yet. It would seem from the perspective of a Chinese factory manager that environmental compliance equals increased cost at a time when all of his other costs are rising. He knows that no one is going to share that cost with him, so why make the investment? He doesn`t even know if he will have a business next year.

And from the perspective of a local government – there are lots of kinds of officials in China. Some are genuinely concerned about the welfare of their citizens, while others are more concerned about their own personal welfare. Particularly in the countryside, I was very concerned about how negligent officials can be.

So I just don`t think that there is a sophisticated debate about these issues yet. In certain circles there is, but as a society I think it`s just at the very beginning.

IH: Nevertheless, China has a lot of regulations now. It has laws; it has a freedom-of-information law and right-to-know laws, as well as laws on pollution. In your view, what is the biggest problem about these laws being effective?

AH: Sometimes I think it`s a different conception of the law. I often heard, while researching my book, that a law was a “beautiful” law, that it was aspirational. Everyone knew that it was there as a goal to be attained, but that we needn`t bother about attaining it today.

So, I think that, in certain respects, there may be a different concept of the law. Certainly in Japan I saw that there was. So perhaps that`s part of it. Perhaps also there`s a genuine lack of priority on these issues and — as with the labour issues — there aren`t enough people on the ground to enforce it. Often the same people who are responsible for enforcing it are invested in the enterprise they are supposed to be policing.

That`s clearly a political issue and one that can`t be addressed with more laws, but with political reform. So perhaps it`s partly conception and partly a slow awakening to the realisation that “clean up later” comes at a great cost — and perhaps we need to start fixing it now.

IH: And in the years that you have been reporting on this, have you seen attitudes changing?

AH: People in business, who are involved in manufacturing, say that there has been an increase in supervision. I was struck by the man in the chemicals industry who told me that for particular projects above US$100 million, they would apply to the local government. The local government would put it to the central government, which would say: “That`s fine, but give us your environmental impact assessment — not just for your particular plant but for the entire region”.

And the company would say: “The local government officials would have that information, so why don`t you ask them?” And the central government would say: “They won`t tell us. You go and find out.”

So, essentially, the Chinese government was using a foreign company to do its homework for it because it had more leverage. Such an interesting development. The businessman said that he found much more scrutiny of their large chemical plant projects and that it`s much more difficult to get them approved right now. That strikes me as a substantial change.

Of course every day, across China, there are all sorts of environmental infractions going on, but in cities like Dongguan and Shenzhen there`s much more awareness. It may simply be that people would prefer, as one factory manager told me, to have upscale residential housing to dirty factories. But whatever is driving it, I see it fairly clearly in southern China at least, if not in inland areas.

Alexandra Harney covered Japan and China for the Financial Times. From 2003 to 2006 she was the paper`s South China correspondent. The China Price is her first book.

Isabel Hilton is editor of chinadialogue .

Homepage photo by mrk_photo

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Future Generations

The international conservation group Future Generations has produced a stunning and comprehensive book on the topography, natural history and conservation of Tibet. Across the Tibetan Plateau is available in English, Chinese and Tibetan. Here is a selection of the book`s impressive photographs.