The Route Of The Problem
Tom Philpott
April 13, 2007
Grist contributing writer Tom Philpott farms and cooks at Maverick Farms , a sustainable-agriculture nonprofit and small farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. This article first appeared in Grist.In what surely counts as one of the greatest feats in the history of global trade, the United States has essentially outsourced its manufacturing base to China in little more than a decade.
It all starts with shuttered factories.
But in doing so, the U.S. has helped unleash new trends in global agriculture that threaten global climate stability and biodiversity. In short, China is rapidly plunking down factories and apartment buildings on prime farmland, and polluting much of what remains with industrial runoff.
To feed its rapidly urbanizing and meat-hungry population, China is in turn outsourcing its agricultural production to Brazil, particularly soybeans for livestock feed. In response, Brazil is plowing up its vast savanna (and even rainforest) lands to plant soy, negating vitally important natural sponges for global carbon emissions and swallowing habitat in one of the world's richest stores of plant and animal life.
...(snip)...
You can hear Wal-Mart's prices falling all the way from China.As for coal, The New York Times reported last year that China already consumes more than the U.S., Japan, and the European Union combined. The Times added—chillingly for anyone who understands the true horror of coal use—that China has "increased coal consumption 14 percent in each of the past two years." Moreover, as oil prices rise, China is investing heavily in technologies to convert coal into liquid car fuel.
Thus China's industrial boom has obvious—and dire—consequences for climate change. What does it mean for global agriculture? For one thing, China's voracious demand has helped ratchet up oil prices over the last five years, and high oil prices have sparked a global rush to transform food crops into fuel. The U.S. government has hotly promoted this trend, inspiring record plantings of corn, our most environmentally destructive crop.
More directly, as China's industrial footprint grows, its farmland shrinks. About a year ago, the Chinese government revealed that the nation had surrendered about 8 million hectares of farmland over the previous decade—6.6 percent of its arable land, and about two-thirds the amount of land that's under cultivation in Iowa.
Industrial pollution has taken out another similar-sized chunk of China's farmland. On Monday, the government acknowledged that 10 million hectares had been "ruined " by build-up of heavy metals, mainly from coal-fired factories.
...(snip)...
Thus, to go back to the beginning of our story, our insatiable appetite for cheap goods from Wal-Mart and other big-box retailers comes at a steep price. We can't stop China from devouring and fouling its farmland, or unleashing vast stores of carbon by burning through oil and coal. Nor can we stop Brazilians from ripping into indigenous homelands and precious stores of biodiversity (though it should be noted that many U.S. citizens have participated in the Cerrado land grab).
But we can demand that the U.S. government stop using supranational institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the WTO to supercharge cross-border trade and capital flows. And we can also, as consumers, opt out as much as possible from the Wal-Martization of everything, and work to rebuild local economies. .......
The complete piece is at:
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2007/04/13/the_route_of_the_problem.php 
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