China, India Urged To Shun Western-Style Waste
By Emad Mekay
13 January, 2006
Inter Press ServiceWASHINGTON, Jan 11 (IPS) - The rising economic powers of India and China, and their appetite for raw materials, could pose the "gravest threats" to the world's ecological health if they fail to follow a conservation-based development model, warn two studies released here.
According to the latest edition of the Worldwatch Institute's annual "State of the World" report, published Wednesday in Washington, the two Asian giants, with their huge populations, are fast joining the United States and Europe as superpowers whose voracious demands on the world's resources will eventually exceed those of developed nations.
Though their per capita resource consumption is still low, the two countries, especially China, are bringing heavy pressure on resources because of their commodity-intensive manufacturing activities.
Both nations need to be watched closely as they make their economic and political choices in the future, the Institute's 2006 report says.
"Rising demand for energy, food and raw materials by 2.5 billion Chinese and Indians is already having ripple effects worldwide," said Worldwatch President Christopher Flavin at the launch of the report.
Like many recent publications in the industrialised countries that have warned against the economic rise of India and China, the 244-page report says that the past two years offered a worrisome preview of a future in which China and India follow the economic model of Western nations, notorious for their unchecked consumption patterns.
The report notes that China's economy has averaged a 9.5 percent growth rate. Last year, the country consumed 26 percent of the world's crude steel, 32 percent of the rice, 37 percent of the cotton and 47 percent of the cement. It says that soaring oil and other commodities prices show the strains on the world's resource base because of demands from India and China.
India has rising car ownership levels and expanding highways, and is spending heavily on airports, roads and ports. Its use of oil has doubled since 1992. China, which was oil-sufficient in the mid-1990s, was the second largest oil importer in 2004.
The report's authors also point a finger at the two nations for increasing demands on Africa's forests and fisheries, flourishing export markets in soybeans and mineral ores from South America and Southeast Asia, and the loss of semi-skilled manufacturing jobs in Central America and Southeast Asia.
The world's resources cannot sustain the combined demands of Western nations and the two Asian giants, especially because the dominant global economic model is resource-intensive, the report argues.
China is now the world's most populous nation, with more than 1.3 billion people, trailed by India in second place, with more than 1.1 billion. By 2030, India is expected to overtake China with nearly 1.5 billion people.
As Chinese and Indian incomes rise, the use of foodstuffs, energy and raw materials will also continue to climb, the report forecasts.
Last week, the Earth Policy Institute (EPI), another Washington-based research group that has recently focused on increasing consumption patterns in Asia, said that if China's economy continues to expand at its typical eight percent a year, its income per person will reach the current U.S. level in 2031.
By EPI's reckoning, if China one day has three cars for every four people -- the current U.S. ratio -- it will have a total of 1.1 billion cars. The whole world today has 800 million cars.
To provide the roads, highways, and parking lots to house this vast fleet, China would have to pave an area equal to the land it now plants in rice, noted Lester Brown, an environmental researcher who also chairs the EPI.
"The Western economic model -- the fossil-fuel-based, auto-centred, throwaway economy -- is not going to work for China. If it does not work for China, it will not work for India, which by 2031 is projected to have a population even larger than China's," Brown said.
In a book published last week, the veteran researcher said that the economic model of the United States and Europe, if repeated in China and India, will not work for the three billion other people in developing countries either.
However, the Worldwatch Institute report acknowledges that European nations and the United States are still by far the largest consumers of global resources.
The United States consumes three times as much grain per person as China and five times as much as India. The carbon dioxide emissions rate for the United States per person is still six times that of China and 20 times that of India.
"If China and India were to consume resources and produce pollution at the current U.S per capita level, it would require two planet Earths just to sustain their two economies," says the report.
The organisation struck a more optimistic note in its analysis, saying that opinion leaders in China and India are aware of the problems that their nations will face if the Western consumption model is further replicated.
"We were encouraged to find that a growing number of opinion leaders in China and India now recognise that the resource-intensive model for economic growth can't work in the 21st century," Flavin said.
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