Left Flank

Philip Brasor writes a great piece about the conflict between the market and agricultural traditions and government trade policies. With only a change, from «rice» to «maize», a farmer in Iowa could feel a Japanese farmer's pain.

Though they paid lip service to the farmers' hard work, some of the studio participants wondered out loud if there wasn't something stone-headed about government support for rice. University of Tokyo Professor Masayoshi Honma said that the main reason the government promotes rice consumption right now is that rice is the only crop that holds up the self-sufficiency rate, as low as it is.

In response, the farmers' position in advocating the continuation of government protection through tariffs and subsidies became increasingly defensive. They said that if the Japanese rice market collapsed, the rural environment would deteriorate, small communities would disappear, and Japan's connection with its agrarian past would cease to exist. While these developments would certainly be dire, they have little to do with the problem's source, which is that Japanese people don't want to eat as much rice any more.

The government's rice protection policy was formulated during World War II, when the citizenry was starving. After the war, production increased and rice was pretty much all there was. The quality wasn't very good, but everybody ate it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Consumption peaked in 1963, when the average Japanese person ate five bowls a day. That statistic decreased to 3 1/2 bowls by 1978 and now stands at 2 1/2.

There's a simple reason for this: more choice. Japan's standard of living is among the highest in the world. Japanese people can eat anything they want, and they famously do. There is no reason to eat as much rice as they once did, or any at all, for that matter; but as the arguments on the NHK program showed, rice has a powerful hold on the Japanese imagination.

Halfway through the three-hour marathon, the moderator put this question to the studio participants and the viewers: Should Japanese people eat more rice? Again, the voters at home overwhelmingly sided with the farmers: yes, they should. But a number of people in the studio took issue with the question itself.

«Why can't I eat anything I want?» asked one student, even though he said he ate more rice than the national average. And Honma seemed offended. «That question is pointless,» he said. Whether or not Japanese people «should» eat rice was irrelevant to the debate, since you couldn't do anything about people's preferences in a free society.

There's no PR in the world can compete against free choice and affluence.

People and resources get sacrificed, to maintain an average of 10% growth a year. Ask the residents of Hongwei.

The Hongwei Petrochemical Park is just outside the city of Daqing. Celebrated in Maoist myth as the scene of heroic industrialisation, Daqing is still the fourth most productive oilfield in the world. Of the six companies operating in the park, the largest is Daqing Lianhua, a PetroChina subsidiary.

For eight years residents of Hongwei have been waging a fruitless struggle to find the cause of high rates of serious illness in their midst. Out of a permanent population of 3,400, at least ten children have been born with an affliction diagnosed by local doctors as cerebral palsy. It is unprecedented for the incidence of cerebral palsy to «cluster» in this way. Foreign experts think from the symptoms and clustering that the disease is akin to Minamata Syndrome, a neurological condition caused by exposure to mercury in the womb. Cancer rates are twice the national average.

Legal efforts to establish a link between the plant and the illness have failed. But in 2003 the local government acknowledged the seriousness of Hongwei's pollution and called on Daqing Lianhua to relocate the villagers. But nothing has come of this, nor of offers to find jobs at the firm for protesting locals.

Or, Zhang Zhongmin.

«People who are buying apartments aren't thinking about whether there will be water in the future,» said Zhang Zhongmin, who has tried for the past 20 years to raise public awareness about the city's dire water situation.

For three decades, water has been indispensable in sustaining the rollicking economic expansion that has made China a world power. Now, China's galloping, often wasteful style of economic growth is pushing the country toward a water crisis. Water pollution is rampant nationwide, while water scarcity has worsened severely in north China - even as demand keeps rising everywhere.

China is scouring the world for oil, natural gas and minerals to keep its economic machine humming. But trade deals cannot solve water problems. Water usage in China has quintupled since 1949, and leaders will increasingly face tough political choices as cities, industry and farming compete for a finite and unbalanced water supply.

One example is grain. The Communist Party, leery of depending on imports to feed the country, has long insisted on grain self-sufficiency. But growing so much grain consumes huge amounts of underground water in the North China Plain, which produces half the country's wheat. Some scientists say farming in the rapidly urbanizing region should be restricted to protect endangered aquifers. Yet doing so could threaten the livelihoods of millions of farmers and cause a spike in international grain prices.

For the Communist Party, the immediate challenge is the prosaic task of forcing the world's most dynamic economy to conserve and protect clean water. Water pollution is so widespread that regulators say a major incident occurs every other day. Municipal and industrial dumping has left broad sections of many rivers «unfit for human contact.»

Meanwhile, there's too much water near the Three Gorges Dam:

Wang [Xiaofeng, director of the administrative office in charge of building the dam] cited a litany of threats, especially erosion and landslides on steep hills around the dam, conflicts over land shortages and «ecological deterioration caused by irrational development».

The strikingly frank acknowledgement of problems comes weeks before a congress of the ruling Communist Party that is set to consolidate policies giving more attention to environmental worries after decades of unfettered industrial growth.

Wang revealed that Premier Wen Jiabao had used a cabinet meeting earlier this year to discuss the environmental problems surrounding the dam.

Tensions over residents resettled to steep hills where good farmland is scarce had been reduced and water quality in the dam was «generally stable», Xinhua said.

But the officials and experts were worried about the landslides threatening densely populated hill country.

«Regular geological disasters are a severe threat to the lives of residents around the dam,» senior engineer Huang Xuebin told the forum.

Huang described landslides into the dam waters making waves dozens of meters high that crashed into surrounding shores, creating even more damage.

The dam has displaced 1.4 million people and is retaining huge amounts of sediment and nutrients, damaging fish stocks and the fertility of farmland downstream, researchers say.

Trade, emigration, and a little technical help might tackle these crises.