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Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Earth Policy Institute : China Losing War With Advancing Deserts

China is now at war. It is not invading armies that are claiming its territory, but expanding deserts. Old deserts are advancing and new ones are forming, like guerrilla forces striking unexpectedly, forcing Beijing to fight on several fronts. And worse, the growing deserts are gaining momentum, occupying an ever-larger piece of China's territory each year. Desert expansion has accelerated with each successive decade since 1950. China's Environmental Protection Agency reports that the Gobi Desert expanded by 52,400 square kilometers (20,240 square miles) from 1994 to 1999, an area half the size of Pennsylvania. With the advancing Gobi now within 150 miles of Beijing, China's leaders are beginning to sense the gravity of the situation. Overplowing and overgrazing are converging to create a dust bowl of historic dimensions. With little vegetation remaining in parts of northern and western China, the strong winds of late winter and early spring can remove literally millions of tons of topsoil in a single day—soil that can take centuries to replace. For the outside world, it is these dust storms that draw attention to the deserts that are forming in China. On April 12, 2002, for instance, South Korea was engulfed by a huge dust storm from China that left people in Seoul literally gasping for breath. Schools were closed, airline flights were cancelled, and clinics were overrun with patients having difficulty breathing. Retail sales fell. Koreans have come to dread the arrival of what they now call "the fifth season"—the dust storms of late winter and early spring. Japan also suffers from dust storms originating in China. Although not as directly exposed as Koreans are, the Japanese complain about the dust and the brown rain that streaks their windshields and windows. Each year, residents of eastern Chinese cities such as Beijing and Tianjin hunker down as the dust storms begin. In addition to having problems with breathing and the dust that stings the eyes, people are constantly working to keep dust out of homes and to clean doorways and sidewalks of dust and sand. Farmers and herders, whose livelihoods are blowing away, are paying an even heavier price. A report by a U.S. embassy official in May 2001 after a visit to Xilingol Prefecture in Inner Mongolia (Nei Monggol) notes that although 97 percent of the region is officially classified as grasslands, a third of the terrain now appears to be desert. The report says the prefecture's livestock population climbed from 2 million as recently as 1977 to 18 million in 2000. A Chinese scientist doing grassland research in the prefecture says that if recent desertification trends continue, Xilingol will be uninhabitable in 15 years. A more recent U.S. embassy report entitled "Desert Mergers and Acquisitions" says satellite images show two deserts in north-central China expanding and merging to form a single, larger desert overlapping Inner Mongolia and Gansu provinces. To the west in Xinjiang Province, two even larger deserts—the Taklimakan and Kumtag—are also heading for a merger. Highways there are regularly inundated by sand dunes. In the deteriorating relationship between the global economy and the earth's ecosystem, China is on the leading edge. A human population of 1.3 billion and a livestock population of just over 400 million are weighing heavily on the land. Huge flocks of sheep and goats in the northwest are stripping the land of its protective vegetation, creating a dust bowl on a scale not seen before. Northwestern China is on the verge of a massive ecological meltdown. While overplowing is now being partly remedied by paying farmers to plant their grainland in trees, overgrazing continues largely unabated. China's cattle, sheep, and goat population tripled from 1950 to 2002. The United States, a country with comparable grazing capacity, has 97 million cattle. China has 106 million. But for sheep and goats, the figures are 8 million versus 298 million. Concentrated in the western and northern provinces, sheep and goats are destroying the land's protective vegetation. The wind then does the rest, removing the soil and converting productive rangeland into desert. (See data.) The fallout from the dust storms is social as well as economic. Millions of rural Chinese may be uprooted and forced to migrate eastward as the drifting sand covers their land. Expanding deserts are driving villagers from their homes in Gansu, Inner Mongolia, and Ningxia provinces. An Asian Development Bank assessment of desertification in Gansu Province reports that 4,000 villages risk being overrun by drifting sands. The U.S. Dust Bowl of the 1930s forced some 2.5 million "Okies" and other refugees to leave the land, many of them heading from Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas to California. But the dust bowl forming in China is much larger, and during the 1930s the U.S. population was only 150 million—compared with 1.3 billion in China today. Whereas the U.S. migration was measured in the millions, China's may eventually measure in the tens of millions. And as a U.S. embassy report entitled "The Grapes of Wrath in Inner Mongolia" noted, "unfortunately, China's twenty-first century 'Okies' have no California to escape to—at least not in China." Planting marginal cropland in trees helps correct some of the mistakes of overplowing, but it does not deal with the overgrazing issue. Arresting desertification may depend more on grass than trees—on both permitting existing grasses to recover and planting grass in denuded areas. Beijing is trying to arrest the spread of deserts by encouraging pastoralists to reduce their flocks of sheep and goats by 40 percent, but in communities where wealth is measured not in income but in the number of livestock owned and where most families are living under the poverty line, such cuts are not easy. Some local governments are requiring stall-feeding of livestock with forage gathered by hand, hoping that this confinement measure will permit grasslands to recover. China is taking some of the right steps to halt the advancing desert, but it has a long way to go to reduce livestock numbers to a sustainable level. At this point, there is no plan in place or on the drawing board that will halt the advancing deserts. The entire world has a stake in China's winning the war with the advancing deserts given its economic leadership role. But winning will not be easy. Qu Geping, the Chairman of the Environment and Resources Committee of the National People's Congress, estimates that the remediation of land in the areas where it is technically feasible would cost $28.3 billion. Halting the advancing deserts will require a massive commitment of financial and human resources, one that may force the government to make a hard choice: either build costly proposed south-north water diversion projects or battle the advancing deserts that are marching eastward and could eventually occupy Beijing.

Posted by: sarah quek

Sarah's commentary:
The never expansion of china's deserts pose a serious theat to the livelihoods of millions of people , the majority of them being the rural population. The expanding desert threatens the survival of China because as the desert "eats" up arable farmland,there is less farm produce for the people of Chnia. The farmers who have lost their farmland cannot move to the city because of the restricting hukou system. Even with the slight relaxation of this policy, they will still face discrimation and are not allowed accesss to healthcare and social security. With more people moving into the cities, it could lead to massive overcrowding in already very crowded cities. Peolple have also been moving into Inner Mongolia because of the desertification and this may be seen as an attempt to "invade" into their territory by the mongolians. thus it could also lead to social tensions as seen in the Xinjiang issue of "invading" Han migrants. Thus, the loss of arable land may lead to many issues that may rock social stability in China.

Sarah 07A201

Labels: China's Environmental Issues, loss of arable land, Political, Sarah 07A201

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Economist Intelligence Unit ViewsWire: China's food safety

A new plan to improve standards of food and drugs

When pet cats and dogs in the US started dying in April, few would have thought that the deaths would have much relevance for the Chinese export juggernaut. But the issue looks like spiralling into a major problem for international traders, and in an effort to cool the controversy China was forced to release on June 6th its first five-year plan to improve food-and-drug safety standards. The plan has a political as well as practical motive, as the government is keen to undo the reputational damage from scandals ranging from food contamination to the sale of fake antibiotics. However, implementation of the plan is likely to be difficult.

China is no stranger to quality problems, be it in food, drugs or toys. The US pet deaths—stemming from the contamination by melamine, a chemical toxin, of a vegetable protein used in animal foods—were not all that different from many other past cases in China. However, the massive scale of the pet-food recall, involving thousands of retail products, was unprecedented. The issue also touched on an unusually emotive subject at a time of rising Sino-US trade tensions. That was not all. The story was followed by a plethora of articles in the foreign media highlighting similar cases, ranging from a series of alleged deaths in Panama last year caused by the use of industrial toxins in cough medicine exported from China to the US Food and Drug Administration's warnings over chemicals in Chinese-made toothpaste. China was on the verge of a global PR disaster.

Investigations into such cases have thrown light on the tangled morass of the Chinese regulatory system. The State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA), the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine and other agencies have a tendency to pass the buck between each other, denying responsibility for mistakes. That allows producers and traders to get on with business as usual. In many cases a lack of regulatory clarity and co-ordination prevents the authorities from tackling abuses. In others, businesses simply buy the required documentation.

Deadly consequences
It has been an ironic coincidence that the latest furore has come as the former head of the SFDA, Zheng Xiaoyu, was on trial for accepting bribes in return for granting government approval for various medicines in 2005. Amid the international uproar over tainted Chinese products, there was little surprise when the court imposed the death sentence when he was found guilty. But for regulators still trying to save their necks, they now have the unenviable task of sifting through all the drugs and pharmaceutical firms approved for licences under Mr Zheng in an attempt to make sure they did not breach standards.
As Mr Zheng's case—which did not involve exports—showed, this is not purely a problem for foreigners who buy Chinese products. It is a safe to say that many more Chinese people than foreigners are harmed by ingesting toxic or substandard foods and drugs each year. In one particularly tragic case in Anhui in 2004, for example, several babies died of malnutrition after consuming fake baby-milk powder. Investigative programmes exposing factories, farms and restaurants engaged in various nefarious practices with food are a stomach-churning staple of Chinese television.

Yet Chinese officials' reflexive response to more serious cases remains the cover-up. The pet-food case saw a classic hash of a government PR job. First came denial: "The poisoning of American pets has nothing to do with China," claimed a report in the People's Daily. This was followed by a blustering counter-attack noting that food contamination occurred both within the US and with US exports to China. "No food-inspection system is foolproof," pointed out Li Yuanping, director general of the Import and Export Food Safety Bureau. "It's like an airplane. Flying is said to be the safest way to travel, but sometimes you have plane crashes".
Only later did officials start revealing more substantive measures to address the problem, including the release of the five-year food-and-drug safety plan. The plan calls for more inspections of food exports, improved procedures for recalling faulty or tainted products, more pollution monitoring in food-producing areas, as well as an improved structure for monitoring--and blacklisting--food trading companies. According to the Chinese state media, the plan also aims to implement a system of special inspections for 90% of food producers. It also calls for more stringent controls on the use of additives and pesticides, and for nationwide monitoring of the ill effects of medication. However, despite the plan's laudable aims, corruption and inefficiency will continue to leave doors wide open for companies wanting to cut corners.

Legal fallout?
For foreign businesses, the lack of quality control in China is not someone else's problem. Several lawyers have argued that, since Chinese regulatory bodies are demonstrably unfit for purpose, any company accepting Chinese exports with official quality or safety certificates could theoretically be held liable for problems that subsequently emerge. Once again, this dilemma highlights the importance for companies of detailed knowledge of their supply chains in China, and of not taking documentary or verbal assurances at face value. To help deal with such challenges, bigger companies should establish their own internal quality-control mechanisms. But for smaller traders, the costs of such systems could undermine their profitability. For many importers then, the best acid test may well be that if a product's price looks too good to be true, it probably is.

Posted by: sarah quek

Labels: Economy, Food safety, Political, Sarah 07A201

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The Associated Press: Officials fear tainted goods will harm China's stability

BEIJING: China's fight against the production of shoddy food and drugs must be intensified or the country faces social unrest and a further tarnishing of its image abroad, senior party and regulatory officials said.
The toll exacted in the past year has been grim for victims in Panama and China who died after ingesting tainted Chinese-made pharmaceutical ingredients, and for the State Food and Drug Administration itself, with two high-level employees sentenced to death for corruption.
Attendees at a seminar in Beijing over the weekend were told to "draw profound lessons" from former SFDA director, Zheng Xiaoyu, who was sentenced to death in May for taking bribes to approve substandard medicines, including an antibiotic blamed for at least 10 deaths within China.
"We must face the fact that there are still some problems which cannot be ignored," SFDA Commissioner Shao Mingli was quoted as saying in a seminar transcript posted on the agency's Web site Monday.
"Some areas are not fully aware of the importance, hardship and complexity of this work. They fear the difficulties and suffer battle fatigue," Shao said.
China's pharmaceutical industry is lucrative but poorly regulated. Some companies try to cash in by substituting fake or substandard ingredients.
Fears abroad over Chinese-made items were sparked last year by the deaths of dozens of people in Panama who took products contaminated with diethylene glycol, a thickening agent in antifreeze, imported from China. It was passed off as harmless glycerin.
A top Panamanian prosecutor has said tests show at least 94 people have died from taking medicine contaminated with diethylene glycol since July 2006, and 293 more deaths are under investigation.
In North America earlier this year, pet food containing Chinese wheat gluten tainted with the chemical melamine was blamed for the deaths of dogs and cats.
Since then, U.S. authorities have turned away or recalled toxic fish, juice containing unsafe color additives and popular toy trains decorated with lead paint.
"Food security problems have impeded Chinese agri-products and food many times in international trade, and damaged our national credibility and image," Sun Xianze, a food supervision officer with the SFDA, told the conference in Beijing.
He cited a laundry list of domestic food scares from the past year, including drug-tainted fish, banned Sudan dye used to color egg yolks red, and pork tainted with clenbuterol, a banned feed additive.
He said more such cases would "not only affect the healthy development of the industry, but could also impact local economies and social stability."
Qu Wanxiang, the vice minister of supervision for the Communist Party's Central Commission for Discipline and Inspection, said the former SFDA director Zheng's corruption "shook the government's regulatory foundation and damaged the government's image."
Under Zheng's 1998-2005 tenure, his agency approved six medicines that turned out to be fake, and the drug makers used falsified documents to apply for approvals, state media have reported.
Zheng's death sentence was unusually heavy even for China, believed to carry out more court-ordered executions than all other nations combined, and likely indicates the leadership's determination to confront the country's dire product safety record.
On Friday, China sentenced another official, one of Zheng's former subordinates, to death for taking bribes.

By: sarah quek

Sarah's commentary:
The issue of sub-standard food and other products made in China has created a huge uproar form the public on food and product safety. It does make most of us wonder every time we buy something that says "Made in China" , whether or not we will be 'poisoned'. Seeing reports of tainted food products every few months is quite worrying because reports like these will inadvertently affect the world's perception of China's products. this could lead to massive banning of goods from China, like Japan banning the importation of gyoza dumplings from China. Not only that, this could lead to adverse effect on retailers worlwide as seen in the Mattel toy recall case where too much poisonous substances were found in children's toys. The repercussions of selling/producing sub-standard products can affect China's economy and political standing. As countries cut down imports from China, the Chinese government may not be able to sustain the rate of economic growth and as such, there could be social upheaval if there is massive unemployment resulting from a potential slowdown in economic growth.

Sarah 07A201

Labels: Political, Sarah 07A201, Social, Tainted Goods

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