KT, Zonder, Yiwu, MF, any takes on this article on grains?
Here's a portion of a Lester Brown speech indicating that China & the US will need each other big time in the coming decades.
Lester Brown
We were talking in a group this afternoon and I was pointing out in response to questions that I think the wake-up call is going to come in the form of rising food prices and the event that I think that's going to trigger this dramatic rise in food prices will be when China comes into the world market for massive quantities of grain. Between 1950 and 1998 China increased it's grain production from 90 million tons to 392 million tons, increased it's grain production more than 4 fold. It's one of the great success stories, one of the great economic success stories of the last half of the last century. But since 1992 its grain production has dropped to 322 million tons, a drop of 70 million tons in 5 years. One of the reasons is spreading water shortages, there are other reasons, the conversion of cropland to non-farm uses, an economy that's growing at 7 or8 % per year means a lot of buildings are being built, factories, warehouses, stores, homes and they're beginning to develop a love affair with the automobile in China just like in the United States. 2 million new cars sold each year, that means for every million new cars sold you have to pave the equivalent of 100 thousand football fields, if you can visualize a 100 thousand football fields, it takes a lot a paving, roads, streets, parking lots to accommodate automobiles. The drop in China's grain production, 70 million tons exceeds the entire grain harvest of Canada, thus far China has been covering this decline in its grain production largely by drawing down its once massive stocks of grain but they are now largely depleted and with wheat it has already turned to the world market. Wheat buying delegations from China to Australia the US and Canada have bought 9 million tons of wheat since the beginning of November. Automatically making China the worlds largest wheat importer but China will shortly be importing not only more wheat, more than that but also large quantities of rice and corn which is the principle feed grain, wheat and rice the principal food staples corn the principal feed grain.
When China comes into the world market for 30, 40, 50 million tons of grain, more than any other country imports by far, it will necessarily come to the United States because we control close to half of the worlds grain exports. So we're looking at a fascinating geo-political situation where we have 1.3 billion Chinese consumers who have a trade surplus with the US of 120 billion dollars, that trade surplus alone is enough to buy the entire US grain harvest twice. So it's not a question of will the Chinese be able to compete with us for our grain and drive up our food prices, they will. Now 30 years ago if any country had done that we would have lowered the boom and we would have restricted exports or even embargoed exports but today we have a political stake in a stable China. China is not only the economic engine powering the Asian economy it's the only large economy in the world that's had a full head of steam in recent years. The entire world has been leaning on China to keep the world economy growing. Within a few years I fully expect we will be loading 1, 2, 3 ships a day of grain heading across the Pacific to China, that long line of ships is going to tie the 2 economies together with an intimacy that we've never experienced before with China or indeed with any other country. Managing the flow of grain between the US and China and trying to satisfy the interests of consumers in both countries will be one of the big foreign policy challenges of the years ahead.
We're moving into an era that's new and it's different from anything that we've known, for the Chinese it will mean for the first time in their history they will be heavily dependent on the outside world for part of their food supply and for us it will mean that like it or not we're going to be sharing our food with 1.3 billion Chinese consumers. It will be a new world.
earth-policy.org./
Main portion of speech 52:39 28 meg
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