The China situation and its implications as summarized by E.O. Wilson
The epicenter of environmental change, the paradigm of population stress, is the People's Republic of China. By 2000 its population was 1.2 billion, one-fifth of the world total. It is thought likely by demographers to creep up to 1.6 billion by 2030. During 1950-2000, China's people grew by 700 million, more than existed in the entire world at the start of the industrial revolution. The great bulk of this increase is crammed into the basins of the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, covering an area about equal to that of the eastern United States. Americans, when they started from roughly the same point, found themselves geographically blessed. During their own population explosion, from 2 million in 1776 to 270 million in 2000, they were able to spread across a fertile and essentially empty continent. The surplus of people, flowing like a tidal wave westward, filled the Ohio Valley, Great Plains, and finally the valleys of the Pacific Coast. The Chinese could not flow anywhere. Hemmed in to the west by deserts and mountains, limited to the south by resistance from other civilizations, their agricultural populations simply grew denser on the land their ancestors had farmed for millenia. China became in effect a great overcrowded island, a Jamaica or Haiti writ large.
Highly intelligent and innovative, its people have made the most of it. Today China and the US are the two leading grain producers of the world. The two countries grow a disproportionate share of the food from which the world population derives most of its calories. But China's huge population is on the verge of consuming more than it can produce. In 1997, a team of scientists reporting to the US National Intelligence Council predicted that China will need to import 175 million tons of grain annually by 2025. Extrapolated to 2030, the annual level is 200 million tons-the entire amount of grain exported annually at the present time. A tick in the parameters of the model could move these figures up or down, but optimism would be a dangerous attitude in planning strategy when the stakes are so high. After 1997 the Chinese in fact instituted a province-level cash program to boost grain level to export capacity. The effort was successful but may be short-lived, a fact the government itself recognizes. It requires cultivation of marginal land, higher per-acre environmental damage, and a more rapid depletion of the country's precious ground water.
According to the NIC report, any slack in China's production may be picked up by the Big Five grain exporters, the US, Canada, Argentina, Australia, and the European Union. But the exports of these dominant producers, after climbing steeply in the 1960's and 1970's, tapered off near to their present level in 1980. With existing agricultural capacity and technology, this output does not seem likely to increase to any significant degree. The United States and the European Union have already returned to production all of the cropland idled under earlier farm commodity programs. Australia and Canada largely dependent on dry land farming are constrained by low rainfall. Argentina has the potential to expand, but due to its small size, the surplus it produces is unlikely to exceed 10,000,000 tons of grain production per year.
China relies heavily on irrigation with water drawn from its aquifers and great Rivers. The greatest impediment is again geographic: 2/3 of china's agriculture is in the north but 4/5 of the water in the south - that is, principally in the Yangtze River Basin. Irrigation and withdrawals for domestic and industrial use have depleted the northern basins, from which flow the waters of the Yellow, Hai, Huai, and Liao Rivers. Added to the Yangtze basin, these regions produce three-fourths of China's food and support 900 million of its population. Starting in 1972, the Yellow River channel has gone bone dry almost yearly through part of its course and Shandong Province, as far inland as the capital Jinan, thence down all the way to the sea. In 1997 the river stopped flowing for 130 days, and then restarted and stopped again through the year for a record total of 226 dry days. Because Shandong Province normally produces one 5th of china's wheat and one 7th of its corn, the failure of the Yellow River is of no little consequence. The crop losses in 1997 alone reached $1.7 billion.
Meanwhile, the groundwater of the northern plains has dropped precipitously, reaching an average 1.5 meters per year by the mid 1990s. Between 1965 and 1995 the water table fell 37 meters beneath Beijing itself. Faced with chronic water shortages in the Yellow River basin, the Chinese government has undertaken the building of the Xiaolangdi Dam, which will be exceeded in size only by the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River. The Xiaolangdi is expected to solve the problems of both periodic flooding and drought. Plans are being laid in addition for the construction of canals to siphon water from the Yangtze, which never grows dry, to the Yellow River and Beijing respectively.
These measures may or may not suffice to maintain Chinesein agriculture and economic growth. But they are complicated by formidable side effects. Foremost is silting from the upper river loess plains, which makes the Yellow River the most turbid in the world and threatens to fill the Xiaolangdi reservoir, as soon as 30 years after its completion. China has maneuvered itself into a position that forces it continually to design and redesign its lowland territories as one gigantic hydraulic system. But this is not the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is that China has too many people. In addition, its people are admirably industrious and fiercely upwardly mobile. As a result their water requirements, already oppressively high, are rising steeply. By 2030 residential demands alone are projected to increase more than fourfold to 134 billion tons, and industrial demands fivefold to 269 billion tons. The effects will be direct and powerful. Of china's 617 cities, 300 already face water shortages.
The pressure on agriculture is intensified in China by dilemmas shared in varying degrees by every country. As industrialization proceeds, per capita income rises, and of the populace consumes more food. They also migrate up the energy pyramid to meat and dairy products. Because fewer calories per kilogram of grain are obtained when first passed through poultry and livestock instead of being eaten directly, per capita grain consumption rises still more. All the while the available water supply remains static or nearly so. In an open market, the agricultural use of water is out-competed by industrial use. A thousand tons of fresh water yields a ton of wheat, worth $200, but the same amount of water in industry yields $14,000. As China, already short on water and arable land, grows more prosperous through industrialization and trade, water becomes more expensive. The cost of agriculture rises correspondingly, and unless the collection of water is subsidized, the price of food also rises. This is in part the rationale for the great dams at Three Gorges and Xiaolangdi, built at enormous public expense.
In theory, an affluent industrialized country does not have to be agriculturally independent. In theory, China can make up its grain shortage by purchasing from the Big Five grain-surplus nations. Unfortunately, its population is too large and the world surplus to restrictive for it to solve its problem without altering the world market. All by itself, China seems destined to drive up the price of grain and make it harder for the poorer developing nations to meet their own needs. At the present time grain prices are falling, but this seems certain to change as the world population soars to nine billion and beyond.
The problem, resource experts agree, cannot be solved entirely by hydrological engineering. It must include shifts from grain to fruit and vegetables, which are more labor intensive, giving China a competitive edge. To this can be added strict water conservation measures in industrial and domestic use; the use of sprinkler and drip irrigation in cultivation, as opposed to the traditional and more wasteful methods of flood and furrow irrigation; and private land ownership, with subsidies and price liberalization, to increase conservation incentives for farmers. Meanwhile, the surtax levied on the environment to support China's growth, although rarely entered on the national balance sheets, is escalating to a ruinous level. Among the most telling indicators is the pollution of water. Here is a measure worth pondering. China has in all 50,000 kilometres of major rivers. Of these, according to the U.N. Food and agriculture organization, 80% no longer support fish. The Yellow River is dead along much of its course, so fouled with chromium, cadmium, and other toxins from oil refineries, paper mills, and chemical plants as to be unfit for either human consumption or irrigation. Diseases from bacterial and toxic waste pollution are epidemic.
China can probably feed itself to at least mid-century, but its own data show that it will be skirting the edge of disaster even as it accelerates its lifesaving shift to industrialization and mega-hydrological engineering. The extremity of China's condition makes it vulnerable to the wild cards of history. A war, internal political turmoil, extended droughts, or crop disease can kick the economy into a downspin. It's enormous population makes rescue by other countries impracticable.
China deserves close attention, not just as the unsteady giant whose missteps can rock the world, but also because it is so far advanced along the path to which the rest of humanity seems inexorably headed. If China solves its problems, the lessons learned can be applied elsewhere. That includes the U.S., whose citizens are working at a furious pace to overpopulate and exhaust their own land and water from sea to shining sea.
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