Recently in China Category

Years ago, I frequently commuted between Los Angeles and Seattle by air.  The contrast between the two cities was always a bit jarring, particularly in July and August -- high summer on the west coast of North America -- when the lawns in Seattle are brown while all the residential yards in Los Angeles are a beautiful emerald green.  Summer rainfall in Seattle is usually about 1.8 inches spread over those two months, while Los Angeles is essentially dry.

A couple of weeks ago I flew into LAX from the east coast and got another perspective on water use there.  My first glimpse of the basin was the smog lapping up against the rim of the San Gabriel Mountains. I managed to snap a quick photo after we had flown over the ridge (the smog is on the lower left, though the contrast was more impressive when we were looking from the east side).

Even in May it looks a little dry 'round those parts.

A few minutes later, I noticed large green patches covering the sides (usually the west side) of hills.  This continued all the way to downtown LA, and we were high enough for most of that time that I couldn't figure out why the locals were spending so much of their precious water keeping the sunset sides of hills green.  Then, finally, we passed over one low enough that the purpose jumped out at me.

Cemeteries.

Even in death, Los Angelinos maintain their homage to William Mulholland by keeping him eternally damp.  And in death, Los Angelinos continue to contribute to the smog shown above -- the grass covering the land of the dead is trimmed quite short.  Many, many square miles of it.  A cushy life, have those dead people.  And to be fair to Los Angeles (which, admittedly, is hard for me), Seattle, too, uses a great deal of water and hydrocarbons to keep our decaying ancestors covered with a trim layer of green.  It happens everywhere here.  Welcome to America.

Even the way the US irrigates land to feed the living represents a profligate use of water.  According to the USDA, 80% of the water consumed in this country goes to agriculture. (Note that "use" and "consumption" are often confused.  Agriculture and thermoelectric power generation both "use" about 40% of the nation's freshwater, but while almost 100% of the water used for power generation is returned to where it was taken from -- albeit somewhat warmer than when it was taken -- much of the of water put on crops is does not reach the roots or is evaporated and lost to the atmosphere.)  Notice that I did not use the word "waste", because some of the leakage winds up back in groundwater, or otherwise finds its way into the environment in a way that might be classified as "beneficial".

And pondering water use here in the US, and the impact on our economy, my thoughts turn to water use in Asia.  Much ado was made in the last couple of years about the IPCC report of anomalous melting of Asian glaciers, followed by the discovery that there was no actual data behind the assertion.

A recent paper in Science adds some much needed analysis to the story.  Walter Immerzeel and colleagues set out to understand the relative importance of meltwater and rainwater to river flows in Asia.  It is interesting to me that this sort of analysis wasn't done before now: "Earlier studies have addressed the importance of glacial and snow melt and the potential effects of climate change on downstream hydrology, but these are mostly qualitative or local in nature."

For five large river basins the authors used a combination of precipitation data, snow melt models, and evaporation rates, to calculate the Normalized Melt Index (NMI).  The NMI is the ratio of snow and glacier discharge to downstream discharge.  If all the water in a river downstream is from melting, then this ratio is obviously one; if the ratio is less than one, rainfall contributes more than meltwater, and if it larger than one, more water is lost through evaporation or other processes (like agriculture) and meltwater is more important for total flow.

Here are the results.  For each of the rivers, the authors calculated the percentage of the total discharge generated by snow and glacial melt:
 

Indus	151%
Brahmaputra	27%
Ganges	10%
Yangtze	8%
Yellow	8%

In other words, water supplies in the Indus river valley are largely dependent on meltwater, whereas the large river systems in China appear to be less dependent on meltwater.  That is a very interesting result, because the story told by lots of people (including myself) about the future of water in China is that they are in big trouble due to glacial melting in the Himalayas.  Assuming this result holds up, China may be better off in a warmer world that I had anticipated.

The authors also used various projections of snow and rainfall to estimate what water supplies would look like in these rivers in 2050.  As you might expect, a warmer world leads to less snowfall, more melting, and lower river flows.  But as the warmer world brings increased rainfall, the impact is smaller than has been widely assumed.  I am not going to bother putting any of the numbers in here, because, as the authors note, "Results should be treated with caution, because most climate models have difficulty simulating mean monsoon and the interannual precipitation variation, despite recent progress in improving the resolution of anticipated spatial and temporal changes in precipitation."

But they went one step further and tried to estimate the effects of potential decreased water supply on local food supplies.  Couched in terms of crop yields, etc., Immerzeel et al estimate that the Brahmaputra will support about 35 million fewer people, the Indus will support about 26 million fewer people -- that's food for 60 million fewer people in India and Pakistan, if you are counting -- and the Yellow about 3 million more people.  Finishing up, they write:

We conclude that Asia's water towers are threatened by climate change, but that the effects of climate change on water availability and food security in Asia differ substantially among basins and cannot be generalized. The effects in the Indus and Brahmaputra basins are likely to be severe owing to the large population and the high dependence on irrigated agriculture and meltwater. In the Yellow River, climate change may even yield a positive effect as the dependence on meltwater is low and a projected increased upstream precipitation, when retained in reservoirs, would enhance water availability for irrigated agriculture and food security.

I am perplexed by the take on these results over at Nature News by Richard Lovett.  His piece carries the title, "Global warming's impact on Asia's rivers overblown".  I'll give Lovett the out that he may not have written the actual headline (Editors!), but nonetheless he sets up the Immerzeel paper as a big blow to some unnamed group of doomsayers.  Perhaps he imagines that Immerzeel completely undermines the IPCC report?  This is hardly the case.  As I wrote last January, sorting out the mistake over Himalayan melting rates is an example of science working through a blunder.  Instead overturning some sort of vague conspiracy, as best I can tell Immerzeel is simply the first real effort to make quantitative assessments of something to which much more attention should have been paid, much earlier than it was.

And even Lovett appears to acknowledge that reducing the human carrying capacity of the Brahmaputra and Indus river valleys by 60 million people is something to be concerned about.  From Lovett: 

The findings are important for policy-makers, says Jeffrey Kargel, a glaciologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. "This paper adds to mounting evidence that the Indus Basin [between India and Pakistan] is particularly vulnerable to climate change," says Kargel. "This is a matter that obviously concerns India and Pakistan very much."

Indeed.  As they should concern us all.

• China Daily recently carried an Op--Ed asserting that "Giant leap" in education spurs nasty slump in academics.  (Oddly, the piece appears to be badged as an article, but the URL suggests it is an opinion piece.)  The piece asserts that "According to the education bureau, the number of university applicants in Beijing this year has decreased by 20%, and Shanghai has failed to meet its recruitment demand for three consecutive years."  Those are numbers I will have to dig into.  Another story from China Daily reports that, due to reduced enrollments and accumulated debt, "Universities face bankruptcy".
  
• Slashdot has a brief blurb on how "China's Research Ambitions Hurt By Faked Results".  For those who haven't been following this story, while China has been climbing the world rankings of published scientific papers, so has the number of fraudulent papers.  I have to wonder what the real numbers are, though.  The Slashdot story links to a specific example of 70 crystal structures shown last year to be completely fabricated, but other accounts are mostly "just so" stories.
• China's economic growth jumped to 11.9% in the first quarter of 2010.  The NYT also reports that Beijing raised fuel prices to help keep inflation in check.  Exports rose 46% in March, year on year, while imports rose 45%.
  
• According to the NYT, China's Premier Wen Jiabao recently said that "China would pour money into strategic industries, boosting research and development and infrastructure spending to "capture the economic, scientific and technological high ground." Among the areas he singled out were biomedicine, energy conservation, information technology and high-end manufacturing."
• Earlier this year, for the first time, Chinese oil imports from Saudi Arabia surpassed US imports.  As a result, China ran a trade deficit in March for the first time in years, and is buying up oil production in Canada.  Re-reporting a story from the China Securities Journal, China Daily asserts the sudden drop in the trade deficit is "a result of China's strive for a trade balance by taking measures to encourage imports and stabilize exports".
  
• Here is the full text of China's recently published "Report on the Implementation of the 2009 Plan for National Economic and Social Development and on the 2010 Draft Plan for National Economic and Social Development" (via Xinhua).
• Xinhua asserts that "China's trade surplus with US misread".  Among other revelations, it is apparently all our fault for refusing to export high tech items to China.
• China has been blocking release of monetary data to the IMF since 2007, which makes it hard for the international organization to make any judgements about currency manipulation: "China allowed the release of its reports until the monetary fund's executive board decided in June 2007 that reports should pay more attention to currency policies. China has quietly blocked release of reports on its policies ever since, without providing its specific reasons to the I.M.F.
  
  A person who has seen copies of the most recent report last summer said that the monetary fund staff concluded the renminbi was "substantially undervalued."
  
  The monetary fund regards a currency as substantially undervalued if it is more than 20 percent below its fair market value."
• Genetically Modified rice has been given a safety certificate by the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture, but the strain has to clear further hurdles before hitting the shelves.  Here are some interesting numbers: "China now yields around 500 million tons of grain annually. With the population expected to increase to 1.6 billion by 2020, 630 million tons of grain will be needed, experts said."  Wow -- that's a 25% increase in 10 years.
• China has announced "A big plan to wipe out overcapacity".  According to China Daily, "The China Banking Regulatory Commission, China's watchdog on banks, has asked banks to retain strict controls on loans to industries with high energy consumption, high emissions or overcapacity. For instance, no loans are now allowed for any new projects in six industries with overcapacity and ship making unless these projects have approval from the National Development and Reform Commission, China's top economic planner. The six industries are steel and iron, cement, glass sheet, chemical processing of coal, polysilicon and wind power equipment."  Hmmm...the government of a centrally-planned economy proclaiming a drive for efficiency.  Best of luck with that.
  

China Daily is reporting that Sinopec is buying ConocoPhillips' stake in Syncrude for $4.65 billion.  This on top of purchases last year by Sinopec of a piece of Total's oil sands project, and by PetroChina of the Athabasca Oil Sands Corp.

This is interesting in light of last month's Chinese trade deficit of ~$7.2 billion (Xinhua), attributed to the cost of commodity imports (including oil).  A report late last month put Chinese petroleum use growth at about 5% for the next five years.  More deficits to come, perhaps.

(Updated to include the overall local-national GDP discrepancy of at least ~2.5%.)

We often see headlines loudly proclaiming certain things to be true about China.  They are taking over!  No, wait, they are collapsing!  It's raining!  No, it's a drought!  How is one supposed to make sense of any of this?

One small part of the answer is that even the Chinese don't have a great idea of what is going on.  As a result, last Thursday (March 11), based on Chinese government data, the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal carried stories on the state of the Chinese real-estate market that came to completely opposite conclusions.  Here's the WSJ headline: "China's Real-Estate Boom Appears to Cool."  And here is the FT: "Fears grow over China property bubble despite efforts at cooling."  Both stories cite identical statistics about price increases over the last year, though the WSJ leans on reduced sales volumes reported by the Government and by a consultancy that tracks sales.  (Imagine this, if you can -- a reduction from 50% to 37% in the annual increase in sales is seen as a "cooling" of the market!)

The main problem with this reporting is that there is very little reason to believe the underlying data is accurate.  See, for example, this story from Xinhua a few weeks ago: "China statistics chief admits errors in property data calculation".

Due to staff shortages, housing price data mainly stemmed from reports by real estate developers, said [Ma Jiantang, director of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS)], who cited Beijing as an example where only one or two officials were responsible for collecting data from hundreds of real estate companies.

"Under the circumstance, we have to rely on the employees of property companies after giving them short-term training," Ma said. "And some of the employees lack professionalism and a sense of responsibility."

And of course the real-estate developers have every reason to want the government (and the public) to conclude that prices are not out of control.  Beijing is attempting to put the breaks on a housing bubble, but the developers are making out like bandits.  There does not appear to by any reason for them to report accurately on pricing and volume.

Beyond the real estate market, even assessing the overall economic activity of the country is somewhat opaque for Beijing.  See this recent story from Xinhua, "China mulls unified GDP calculation":

China's top economic planning body has confirmed that China is considering bring local GDP under unified calculation in an effort to prevent local officials from cooking economic growth figures for political benefits.

...In the first half of 2009, the sum of provincial GDP figures was 1.4 trillion yuan more than the national figure, calculated by the NBS independently. Almost half of the provincial governments reported a double-digit GDP growth whereas the national growth figure was only 7.1 percent.

Leaving aside the cumulative difference in growth rate, that 1.4 trillion yuan imbalance amounts to an absolute yearly discrepancy of ~2.5% just for the first six months of 2009, which would severely complicate sorting out domestic economic policy.  It would also make strategic judgments by other countries rather problematic.
 
For what it is worth, my man on the ground is an architect who has been working in China for more than a decade now, building everything from government offices, to residential towers, to subdivisions, and beyond.  His latest big project under construction is a kilometer-long building containing housing, offices, performing arts spaces, sports fields along the "ridgeline" on top, and an interior train running the length of the entire structure.  It sounds like a fantasy land.  Perhaps it is.

In other news, the architect reports his firm just completely sold out a mid-range 40 story condo tower to individual purchasers in two days, as fast as the paperwork could get signed.  When asked if he thought this indicated a healthy market and real economy: "No way!" 

What Happened to March?  I got on a plane this morning headed for New York, but somehow arrived on April 1st.  It's the only explanation for this:

Portland hurts Tibetans
(China Daily)
Updated: 2010-03-11 07:51

While many in the international community are watching with anxiety to see if Washington moves to repair its ties with Beijing, a reckless decision by an American city is rubbing salt into the unhealed wound of the world's most important bilateral relations.

The city of Portland, Oregon, proclaimed Wednesday, March 10, their "Tibet Awareness Day" despite strong opposition from the Chinese government.

While most people and most countries in the world recognize Tibet as part of China, the decision by the American city interferes in China's internal affairs and is an open defiance of China's state sovereignty.

It could have an adverse effect on Sino-US relations, which has yet to recover from major deterioration following Washington's $6.4-billion arms sale to Taiwan and US President Barack Obama's meeting with the Dalai Lama.

The designation of the "Tibet Awareness Day" was apparently orchestrated by the Dalai Lama clique, which has been engaged in activities aimed to separate China and undermine Tibet's stability in the guise of religion.

It is still beyond our belief that politicians in Portland have chosen to celebrate a handful of fanatics trumpeting Tibet independence while turning a blind eye to either history or the status quo of present-day Tibet. History has told us that Tibet has always been a part of China, and there is ample evidence proving the fact that Tibetan people now enjoy a much better life and enjoy the full freedom of religion.

Americans are well-known for putting individual freedom above everything. While the city of Portland entertains a few Tibet separatists, has it ever occurred to its decision-makers that their move are infringing on the interest of 2.8-million Tibetans here in China?

(Updated 9 Feb 2010 with new estimates of value captured by Chinese manufacturers.)
(Updated 12 Feb 2010 with cost estimates for the iPad.)

Wired's cover story this month proclaims that "In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the New Bits".  As I address this "revolution" in the last chapter of my book, and as we are thinking hard about manufacturing issues as the LavaAmp moves forward, I have a few observations about the topic.

Chris Anderson, the Editor of Wired and author of the piece, asserts as the core of his story that

The tools of factory production, from electronics assembly to 3-D printing, are now available to individuals, in batches as small as a single unit. Anybody with an idea and a little expertise can set assembly lines in China into motion with nothing more than some keystrokes on their laptop. A few days later, a prototype will be at their door, and once it all checks out, they can push a few more buttons and be in full production, making hundreds, thousands, or more. They can become a virtual micro-factory, able to design and sell goods without any infrastructure or even inventory; products can be assembled and drop-shipped by contractors who serve hundreds of such customers simultaneously.

To summarize (and oversimplify) Anderson's article, the future is about innovators -- individuals, really -- having access to manufacturing for small runs that can be scaled up as needed.  Design will be digital, and as the appropriate machinery continues to increase in capability and fall in price, manufacturing will increasingly be digital too.

In a full snark-on mode response at Gizmodo is Joel Johnson, with a blog post entitled "Atoms Are Not Bits; Wired Is Not A Business Magazine".  The snark distracts from some otherwise interesting analysis, which you can read and which I will get to below.  The comments on the post are unusually perceptive and many were made by people who are clearly plugged in at a professional level to the atoms-and-bits manufacturing story.

The summary of Johnson's argument is that small production runs equal small money, prototyping is not manufacturing, labor is cheap in China -- so what?, and some/all of the small production available now may be the result of oversupply due to the recession.  Many of these points are probably cogent.

But even when it comes to demonstrably successful examples of bootstrapping from rapid prototyping to international sales, Johnson is skeptical.  Wired's Anderson points to Aliph, makers of the Jawbone line of headsets, as an example of a virtualized business (ie heavy on creativity and IP, but with minimal capital infrastructure) that supports his case.  Johnson shoots back with this:

It's great that hobbyists can make ever more complex items, sell them on the internet, and have a small business. But the same process used by Aliph to manufacturer Bluetooth headsets (and bear in mind it takes 80 people just to coordinate this!) is exactly the same outsourcing process used by Apple to make iPhones.

Here Johnson makes a very interesting point, but is so full of kvetch that he trips over it and misses the significance of his observation.  Of the 80 or so people working at Aliph, only 8-10 will be actually working directly on engineering or manufacturing.  At least half the full count will be in sales, marketing, and customer service, with the rest distributed in IT, administration, and support, and finally with a few (probably 5-8) executives atop the whole thing.  The interesting bit is that those 8-10 people are able to coordinate the same sort of production infrastructure used by Apple and its many hundreds (thousands?) of staff in engineering and manufacturing.  

When it comes to manufacturing labor and cost, there are a few other observations that are worth pulling into this discussion.

• First up is an article from The Economist last week about the results of recent teardowns on smartphones.  The numbers from iSuppli are interesting: of the four leading phones they took apart, the cost of components falls in a very narrow range of $170-180.
• Next is a blog post from Slashdot a couple of months ago pointing to stories about the value breakdown on the retail sale price for consumer electronics.  The post refers to some analysis by Edmund Conway at The Telegraph suggesting the value added for an iPod assembled in China is only "a couple of dollars".  On a ~$200 widget that, let's call that $2, or 1%.  That number should hold for anything resembling a smartphone, which means assembly labor plus overhead (and local profit) adds only about $2 to the phone, too.  (Update 2: iSuppli evidently already has done a teardown on the iPad, and "manufacturing costs" are about 5% of the total component costs.)
  
• Minimum wages in China range from ~$.4 to ~$.7 per hour, so that $2 in labor would pay for several hours total time.  This has to be an overestimate, by a long way.  I'll bet the assembly doesn't require more than a few minutes of labor per unit, with the rest going to overhead and profit.  Another issue is that Apple is probably paying Foxconn and its employees above minimum wage in order to retain trained labor, keep IP inside the company, and keep down the "fair day's wage" complaints from shareholders and critics in the US.  But that is just a guess, of course.  (Update 1: In a February 8th column at the NYT, Roger Cohen reports that a watch manufacturer in Dongguan is pulling down 5-8% of the retail price of various brands.  Wages are running $150-200 per month in that part of China.  I don't think this changes the numbers I've used above and below.)
  
• With so little labor involved in the assembly, what other options are available to manufacturers today?  At the US minimum wage, spending that same few minutes assembling a doodad in the States would add a few more dollars to the cost -- not so much.  I'd pay that difference to know something was made here in the States.  The overhead on the factory is another matter, though.  It could be that paying for the real estate and the rest of the capital equipment makes assembly in the US uncompetitive.  (Though it would be the construction of the factor and the initial installation of the equipment that made the difference in cost -- the material cost of the building and the equipment would be roughly the same in China.)
  
• That said, there is plenty of industrial land in Detroit laying fallow at the moment.  Tax breaks to build assembly plants in depressed US cities could probably bring a lot of those jobs home.  Yes, they would be minimum wage, but there are a lot of people here waiting for any job.
  

If you add the value of the software to the cost (say ~$30 on an iPhone), then you dilute the value of the assembly labor even more.  Thus even more of the value of the object is in bits rather than atoms and their arrangement, and the difference in wages between China and the US is diluted further still.  Even the arrangement of the atoms is really about bits, since all the sub-components of an iPhone roll off of manufacturing lines with minimal labor involved.

Around the office, we have been pondering many of these issues as they relate to biological technologies and the LavaAmp in particular.

We continue to refine the hardware design of the LavaAmp, and it looks like we have the production hardware down to 5 or 6 components, 4 of which are injection molded plastic.  The labor will only be in assembly of the final box, as all sub-assemblies should all come off automated fab lines of one kind or another.  All the real cost is in the design and tooling -- once we get up and running the per unit costs should be quite reasonable.

The reason that this is worth a larger discussion is that Biodesic is exploiting all of the trends and resources that Anderson writes about, however we are building not a consumer electronics widget but rather a tool that will facilitate the manipulation of biological systems.  As the boundary between bits and atoms blurs in one area (consumer electronics), the resulting improvements in design and manufacturing capabilities create opportunities for further blurring the boundary between bits and atoms in biology.  The LavaAmp should enable many more people to query DNA in their environment, and possibly even to play with PCR assembly of genes and genetic circuits, which is an experiment I am keen to try.  Trends like this will continue to put technologies into the hands of an ever wider range of people around the planet.

If you work with this sort of technology on a daily basis, what I wrote above comes as no surprise.  But that describes a very small minority of hardware and wetware hackers.  Many more people will come to realize it soon.  New manufacturing realities and the resulting new tools are about to contribute substantial change to our economy.

Yesterday's New York Times carries a story by Andrew Jacobs on a new UN study that describes the effects of industrial pollution on China's health, environment, and economy.  The article contains some slightly different estimates than my earlier posts on this issue, The Future of China's Economy, and More on China's Economy, Food Production, and Food Demand.

Here is the press release about the report from UNEP, and here is the report itself, "Atmospheric Brown Clouds: Regional assessment report with focus on Asia".

Here are a couple of tidbits about China from the Times story:

Although their overall impact is not entirely understood, Professor Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a professor of climate and ocean sciences at the University of California, San Diego, said ...some studies suggest that the plumes of soot that blot out the sun have led to a 5 percent decline in the growth rate of rice harvests across Asia since the 1960s.

...Henning Rodhe, a professor of chemical meteorology at Stockholm University, says... “The impacts on health alone is a reason to reduce these brown clouds,” adding that in China, about 3.6 percent of the nation’s annual gross domestic product, or $82 billion, is lost to the health effects of pollution.

In addition to the general effects of warming that reduce agricultural yields in Asia, farmers are evidently facing a reduction due to decreased insolation.  As long as our energy production is "carbon-positive", this is going to be a problem.

The health impact estimate above is on the high end of those I have found, but I don't see any reason to discount it relative to the others.  I wonder how long it will be before Asian pollution starts to have a measureable effect on health here on the West coast of the U.S.  Is anybody looking for this explicitly?  A positive correlation would have very interesting consequences in our international political economy.

The IHT is carrying news of a new land policy in China.  Here is the lead:

The print version I picked up in Hong Kong today is a bit different.  It carries this crucial bit of information:

It is unclear how much the plan is intended to increase total per capita income in rural areas.  I think this is particularly important because it will strongly influence how much almost 800 milllion people (according to the article) have to spend on food.  Implementing the land reform plan may put a time scale on the increase in food demand that I speculated about recently in "More on China's Economy, Food Production, and Food Demand".

If the numbers in that post are mostly correct, this would mean that if China is going to stay self-sufficient with respect to food supply needs to increase its domestic production by something like 20% in the next 11 years.  They have their work cut out.

What a difference a few years makes.  SB 1.0 was mostly a bunch of professors and grad students in a relatively small, stuffy lecture hall at MIT.  SB 2.0 in Berkeley expanded a bit to include a few lawyers, sociologists, and venture capitalists.  (I skipped 3.0 in Zurich.)

At just over 600 attendees, SB 4.0 is more than twice as big as even 3.0, with just under half the roster from Asia.  The venue, at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, is absurdly nice, with a view over the ocean that beats even UCSB and UCSD.  Kudos also to the organizers here.  They worked very hard to make sure the meeting came off well, and it is clear they are interested in synthetic biology, and biotech in general, as a long term proposition.  The Finance Minister of Hong Kong, John Tsang, spoke one evening, and he was very clear that HK is planning to put quite a lot of money and effort into biology.

Which brings me to a general observation that Hong Kong really cares about the future, and is investing to bring it along that much sooner.  I arrived a day early in order to acclimate a bit and wander around the city, as my previous visit was somewhat hectic.  Even amid the financial crisis, the city feels more optimistic and energetic than most American cities I visit.

I will have to write up the rest of the meeting when I get back to the States later this week.  But here are a few thoughts:

As of the last few days, I have now seen all the pieces necessary to build a desktop gene printer.  I don’t have prediction when such a thing will arrive on the market, but there is no doubt in my mind that it is technically feasible.  With appropriate resources, I think it would take about 8 weeks to build a prototype.  It is that close.

Ralph Baric continues to do work on SARS that completely scares the shit out of me.  And I am really glad it is getting done, and also that he is the one doing it.  His work clearly demonstrates how real the threat from natural pathogens is, and how poorly prepared we are to deal with it.

Jian Xu, who is better known for his efforts to understand the human gut microbiome, spoke on the soup-to-nuts plant engineering and biofuels effort at the Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology, run by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (QIBEBT).   The Chinese are serious about putting GM plants into the field and deriving massive amounts of energy from biomass.

Daphne Prauss from Chromatin gave a great talk about artificial chromosomes in plants and how they speed up genetic modification.  I’ll have to understand this a bit better before I write about it.

Zach Serber from Amyris spoke about on their biofuels efforts, and Amyris is on schedule to get aviation fuel, diesel, and biogasoline into the market within the next couple of years.  All three fuels have equivalent or better characteristic as petro-fuels when it comes to vapor pressure, cloud point, cetane number, octane, energy density, etc.

More soon.

Over the next two decades the Panda may begin to feel peckish. A hard look at China's food production and resource availability suggests more difficult times ahead. And this is just one potential problem. Throughout my travels and reading over the past 5 years, I have noticed that people with lots of experience on the ground in China question whether the current pace of development is sustainable.

The upshot of all this may be that the easy gains have been made. In the years to come, China will be faced with extremely hard choices about how to simultaneously maintain economic growth, clean up its environment, and feed its population, particularly when it appears that most of the expected increase in food demand due to rising incomes has yet to be realized. So, following up on last week's post about The Future of China's Economy, here are a few more thoughts that frame future potential stumbling blocks.

Running Out of Cheap Labor, and Coming Home for L.A.'s "Clean" Air

John Pomfret, formerly the Beijing Bureau Chief for the Washington Post, definitely has a lot of experience in country. In "A Long Wait at the Gate to Greatness", he asks, "Is China really going to be another superpower?"

His short answer is, "I doubt it." In more depth:

It's not that I'm a China-basher, like those who predict its collapse because they despise its system and assume that it will go the way of the Soviet Union. I first went to China in 1980 as a student, and I've followed its remarkable transformation over the past 28 years. I met my wife there and call it a second home. I'm hardly expecting China to implode. But its dream of dominating the century isn't going to become a reality anytime soon.

Too many constraints are built into the country's social, economic and political systems. For four big reasons -- dire demographics, an overrated economy, an environment under siege and an ideology that doesn't travel well -- China is more likely to remain the muscle-bound adolescent of the international system than to become the master of the world.

Pomfret goes through the same sort of list of potential stumbles that I compiled for last week's post, and adds a few more. He notes that that population control policy has produced an inverted population pyramid, which requires a smaller, young population cohort to support a larger, older cohort as the latter leave the workforce. This while life expectancy has more than doubled in the last fifty years. Thus the expectation is that the workforce will shrink over the coming decades, labor costs will rise, and more of that labor will be put toward supporting non-working elders.

Pomfret also observes that:

One important nuance we keep forgetting is the sheer size of China's population: about 1.3 billion, more than four times that of the United States. China should have a big economy. But on a per capita basis, the country isn't a dragon; it's a medium-size lizard, sitting in 109th place on the International Monetary Fund's World Economic Outlook Database, squarely between Swaziland and Morocco. China's economy is large, but its average living standard is low, and it will stay that way for a very long time, even assuming that the economy continues to grow at impressive rates.

Unlike many observers, he doesn't discount the potential drag on economic growth from pollution, leading off with a personal anecdote:

When my family and I left China in 2004, we moved to Los Angeles, the smog capital of the United States. No sooner had we set foot in southern California than my son's asthma attacks and chronic chest infections -- so worryingly frequent in Beijing -- stopped. When people asked me why we'd moved to L.A., I started joking, "For the air."

Pomfret is perplexed about why Westerners seem to be ignoring pollution's ~10% hit to the Chinese GDP: "Somehow, though, the effect this calamity is having on China's rise doesn't quite register in the West." As I discussed in the earlier post, this shortsightedness confuses me, too, particularly when you combine the effects of pollution with the demands on domestic water and land to provide food for a hungry population.

Missing Food Demand

In a report last year from the Economic Research Service of the USDA, Fred Gale and Kuo Huang suggest that China may face increasing difficulties in meeting domestic food demand. I find their argument quite compelling and will later state it even more firmly than they do.

Gale and Huang observe that growth in food demand has, unexpectedly, not kept pace with overall economic growth. Here is the conundrum: "Given the responsiveness of food demand to income growth, China's rapid growth of 9-10 percent per year suggests that its demand for food is growing faster than its production capacity. ...How is it that China's surging income growth has not pushed its demand for food beyond its domestic production capacity?"

The main factor the authors identify is that while a small, wealthy fraction of the population now evidently has enough to eat, and thus spends additional income on quality rather than quantity, a large majority of consumers have yet to fill their bellies.

The underlying cause for lagging food demand is not surprising once you think about it. Because economic benefits, in particular income gains, disproportionately go those with already high incomes, and because those with high incomes tend to spend on quality rather than quantity, the total volume of food consumed by the Chinese population has risen only slowly. The authors note that:

...Expenditures by the top tier of households--China's emerging class of professionals and entrepreneurs -- have grown at double-digit rates. Food expenditures were nearly stagnant for the bottom 20 percent of urban households. Food expenditures by rural households grew 2.6 percent annually.

...Income growth for low-income urban and rural households--the majority of China's households--was well below GDP growth. ...Average income for the lowest decile of urban households actually declined slightly between 2000 and 2003.

This suggests to Gale and Huang that, "Food consumption and income growth patterns may explain how China has been able to remain self-sufficient in most food items." The authors stop their argument here, but I think they could go further.

The Still-Hungry ~1 Billion

The lag between GDP growth and food consumption has important implications for future increases in food demand.

Based on the statistics compiled by Gale and Huang, it looks to me like more than 90% of the Chinese population has a per capita annual income below 10,000 Yuan. This is an interesting figure for considering future food demand because Gale and Huang also demonstrate that pork consumption in China continues to rise as a function of income until about 10,000 Yuan. Poultry and seafood consumption also rise strongly as a function of income, but notably don't saturate like pork at 10,000 Yuan. More meat consumption requires more grain and more water to raise the animals (see a previous post, "China and Future Resource Demands").

Here is where I think the argument could be made more forcefully.  As best I can make out, what all the above means is that most of the increase in food demand we might expect from rising incomes in China has yet to be realized; more than 80% of the population is, "Still at income levels where they demand increased quantities of many foods as their income rises."

So where is China going to get all this food? One answer is imports, another is to go offshore to buy or rent farmland (see the "China and Future Resource Demands" post), and yet another is to push domestic production. But the latter may be difficult.

"Who Will China Feed?"

This is the question asked by Fred Gale and Bryan Lohmar in an essay in Amber Waves, the USDA magazine. They elaborate their surprise at China's ability to feed its population: "While China has emerged as the world's leading importer of soybeans, vegetable oil, cotton, wool, rubber, and animal hides, it has been surprisingly successful at meeting the basic food needs of its population of more than 1.3 billion people, and it has stepped up as a major food exporter."  (They make no mention of the income inequality and consequent food spending gap explored above.)

Given the pace of growth and limited resources, they ask, "How long can China sustain this momentum?"

China imports only small amounts of premium-grade rice, minor amounts of wheat in most years, and no corn. China has maintained agricultural self-sufficiency in grains as it carries out the world's largest and fastest urbanization and industrialization. Economic development is increasing competition for scarce resources in China, but growing incomes are allowing most consumers to increase consumption of fruit, vegetables, and livestock products.

China has become a significant food exporter by ramping up production in many sectors and gaining world market share. Indeed, China has been a net food exporter for most of the last three decades. China dominates world markets in a variety of products areas, including garlic, apples, apple juice, mandarin oranges, farm-raised fish and shrimp, and vegetables. At times, it seems that China has suspended the law of scarcity by boosting production in many sectors and selling at low prices without having to sacrifice production in other sectors.

One way to look at this is that China is exporting high value "food products", not staples that the majority of Chinese themselves consume. This strategy contributes to the trade surplus, but the use of land to grow crops for export must clearly be balanced with domestic demand for staples. This balance also points to the fact there is some room for moving crop land now used for exports back into production to satisfy domestic demand.

Here are two key paragraphs on how China has increased its food production yields:

Investments in research and development raised the quality of inputs and the efficiency of their use over the past two decades. Research into improved varieties and quality of seeds surged after the late 1970s. By the turn of the century, China had more agricultural researchers than any other country, and a larger budget for public sector agricultural research than any developing country. Fertilizer quality in China also has improved over the past two decades, as farmers move away from applying pure nitrogen fertilizer to applying more nitrogen-phosphorous- potassium blends. China has been importing breeding animals--which are often crossed with domestic breeds--to improve efficiency of weight gain, improve disease resistance, and raise milk output. The government has offered subsidies to farmers for dairy herd improvement for several years.

China today is the world's largest agricultural producer and consumer. With an estimated 10 percent of world land resources and 6 percent of world water resources, China produces 30 percent of the world's rice, 20 percent of the world's corn, a fourth of the world's cotton, an estimated 37 percent of the world's fruit and vegetables, and half of the world's pork. For most products, China's world share of production is close to or exceeds its 20-percent share of world population. China, however, has exploited the means of coaxing food and fiber out of a limited natural resource base to the extent that additional gains will be more difficult than in the past.

Gale and Lohmar go on to discuss water and soil quality issues, fertilizer and pesticide use, and industrial pollution, while briefly addressing labor costs:

China has been able to maintain low-cost production in international agricultural markets largely because of low labor costs. Historically, Chinese farms have raised large amounts of output from small plots by using labor-intensive production strategies, such as growing multiple crops per year, intercropping, and growing vegetables in courtyards. But hundreds of millions of rural workers have found nonfarm employment over the last two decades. The flow of labor from rural areas enabled China's industry and cities to boom, while wage growth was relatively stagnant for much of the last two decades.

China's rapid economic expansion appears to have finally exhausted the pool of under-employed workers. Since 2003, wages have been rising at a double-digit pace. The dwindling pool of available rural workers is resulting in increased mechanization of harvesting and planting. Anecdotal evidence also suggests that intensive agricultural practices, like double-cropping, transplanting seedlings by hand, and small-scale hog production, have decreased due to labor shortages and high wages.

So, as John Pomfret suggested in his piece in the Washington Times Post (!), labor costs are already affecting food production. But the bigger issue is in trying to identify where, exactly, future gains in production are going to come from.  Rough estimates of the probable increase in demand give some context for the magnitude of the problem.

Returning to the correlation of meat consumption and income: It appears from FAO and USDA data that China is bound to eat more meat, especially pork, as incomes continue to rise.  Growing meat for human consumption creates a big lever in water and grain markets.  Producing a kilo of pork requires approximately three kilos of grain, and producing a kilo of beef requires about eight kilos of grain.  Based on the data in Gale and Huang, in appears that as income rises from 3000 to 10,000 Yuan, pork consumption increases by about 50%, to ~23 kg, which will require about 70 kg of grain.  This in addition to the ~30% increase in grain products (~6 kg) directly purchased by households as incomes rise over that range.  Fish and poultry demand about doubles, too, from ~8 to ~16 kg per capita, but estimating the additional grain consumption here is hard.  I'll hand wave and make a low-ball estimate that it will take only another 16 kg of grain to feed the the fish and poultry.

Adding this all together, that is an additional per capita  increase in grain demand of more than 90 kg.  Here is the kicker: that number appears to hold for at least 500 million people, perhaps as many as a billion.  That amounts to at least 45 million tonnes (metric!) of grain, perhaps as much as 90 million tonnes.  The Chinese population would then still be consuming only about 80% as much animal protein per capita as Europeans, and only a little over half as much as us gluttons in the U.S.

China produces about 500 million tonnes of grain per year (see the USDA ERS China Ag and Economic data page), so supplying increased meat demand with domestic grain supplies would require a (very rough) increase of between 10 and 20% in total yield.  That doesn't necessarily sound like much -- I actually expected the increase to be a larger percentage of current harvests -- and might be accomplished by breeding, genetic modification, and better farming practices.  But as detailed in my earlier posts, China is losing both arable land and usable water.  With only 7% of the globe's arable land to work with (ignoring losses to due climate change and prior poor farming practices), the country is going to have to work very hard indeed to squeeze more grain out of those limited resources.

That leaves imports, which means competing on the world commodity markets for food.  In combination with rising labor costs at home, all this points to rising domestic prices and rougher going for the Chinese economy.