ASIA's BIG QUESTIONS: Facing up to resource crisies?
Updated
Can Asia get the food and fuel to feed its people and build its future?
Asia has only four percent of the world's oil reserves, but it uses more than one third of it. Is the question of food and fuel moving beyond one of markets, to become one of national security and the global response to climate change?
Presenter: Graeme Dobell
Speakers: Professor Alan Dupont, director of the Centre for International Security Studies, Sydney University; Simon Tay, chairman of the Singapore Institute of International Affairs; Dr Padeep Dadhich of New Delhi's Energy and Resources Institute
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DOBELL: They are the basic human questions: Is there enough food? And is their enough fuel for life and work? For Asia, the context for these eternal issues is changing. Global recession now sits beside issues of climate change and global warming and new doubts about the capability or even reliability of markets. The linked issues of food and fuel are asking Asia some big questions about its future.
Strategic analyst Professor Alan Dupont.
DUPONT: I think it's to do with the growing perception that the world is going to be facing a series of resource crisis. We've talked about energy and food, but it's not only those two, it's also water. These are the key elements that sustained our civilisations and our societies for hundreds-and-thousands of years. Suddenly for the first time in human history, we're starting to be concerned about running out of some of these key commodities or having to pay much higher prices, which some countries cannot afford and that means that market mechanisms are not going to deliver the solutions to these problems. It's a real problem, but it's also a perception problem. There are solutions to these problems in terms of alternative energy sources, which we will be able to develop over 20 or 30 years or may be 50 years. But getting from this era of reliance on fossil fuel to an era cleaner energy resources means there is going to be lots of trade offs, there is going to a lot of costs, and many developing countries don't feel they can afford that or don't feel the market can supply the needs they want. Hence they are going out and doing something that we have not seen for hundreds-of-years, which is a form, if you like, of energy, colonialism or food colonialism for want of a better word, where countries are buying up resources in poorer countries usually exclusively for their own use. So that's anti-competitive and anti-market in the way in which they are operating and we're not talking about private companies doing this, we're talking about sovereign wealth funds, that is state-owned companies are now investing in things not just for commercial gain, but for strategic reasons and that is changing the way countries are conducting their foreign and national security policies. These have gone from being commercial problems or commercial issues to being national security issues.
DOBELL: Asian governments and their societies are still grappling with the claim that business as usual will no longer work, that the old ways cannot provide all the new answers. Climate change questions are driving fears about food and fuel, but individual countries are having a hard time deciding how they will be hit. The former head of Singapore's National Environment Agency, Simon Tay, whose chairman of Singapore's Institute of International Affairs.
TAY: On climate change, I think that every country has been trying to do their own studies, but frankly, the scientific basis for your estimates, what the sea level rise, what's the impact on temperature on food scarcity, on water resources. There is so much range of possibilities that ASEAN governments have not really come down to very solid studies at the national levels, not all of us.
DOBELL: That lack of national answers points to the importance of a study just released by the Asian Development Bank, which says South East Asia is highly vulnerable to climate change and is already suffering its affects through increased temperatures, changing rainfall and the growth in extreme weather events. The Development Bank even offers an estimate of the price of failing to act. It says the cost to the region of not tackling climate change now far exceeds the cost of adaptation and mitigation. The price of not acting for the four largest South East Asian countries, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam is put at nearly 7 per cent of the GPD over this century.
Simon Tay says that sort of work goes beyond moral arguments and calls for action on economic grounds.
TAY: The kind study that really says to ASEAN countries, this is not a moral issue for you to help the world as a whole or to bail the West out. This is really about your own fundamental survival. We need a map of the vulnerable spots. I mean just sitting here, I can tell you Bangkok is low-lying, Jakarta is low-lying, parts of Malaysia are low lying, so is Singapore obviously, Indonesia has suffered flooding in Jakarta for two years, Thailand has suffered flooding, unseasonal flooding. People don't realise what is at stake. A true disruption of the way we've lived, a true disruption of business as usual.
DOBELL: That fear of a great disruption is feeding into a new focus on food security. For the moment, the immediate reality of global recession has taken away the headline focus on rising food prices and fears about the reliability of international food markets. But Asian policymakers are thinking deeply about the food dilemma as expressed by Professor Alan Dupont.
DUPONT: The food issue for Asia is that the region is simply not going to be able to produce enough food to feed its burgeoning populations unless they change the way their approach to agriculture and the way they do business in terms of providing food. The huge increases in food prices we saw last year, which really had a major impact on Asia, your talking about rice doubling, tripling in price and so on. In my view, as a harbinger of the future, the food future the region is likely to face. Unless we take steps to develop strategic plans, to actually address the problems for short falls in food. It's very interesting that a number of countries in the region, the sort of vote of no confidence in the market. They are not prepared or able to go out into the market and buy food now. They feel a need to secure stable supplies of food, sometimes in other countries by buying up land or what's often been described as the land grab, where countries like China and South Korea are buying land in Africa, for example, to grow food to be exported back to China and Korea. Now that has enormous implications not only for supply and demand of food globally and in the market, but it also is bringing political tensions.
DOBELL: And just as with food, questions about reliability of energy supplies must have political implications. Competition for energy is already one of the looming issues that will define the relationship between Asia's two giants, China and India.
Dr Padeep Dadhich of New Delhi's Energy and Resources Institute, on how India and China will bump up against each other in seeking oil and gas.
DADHICH: There is going to be competition for oil resources abroad. There is also going to be competition on gas resources abroad and primarily because China has to import most of its oil and it does not have enough gas resources. And as far as India is concerned, its oil demand is quite high, its reserves are dwindling until most of the oil fields will dry up by 2025-2030. It is possible that India is going to heavily dependant on oil. So India has already started to invest in oil fields abroad, so there is definitely competition. Most of the time, India loses out to China for obvious reasons, which I mean China is very aggressive. It goes whole hog in getting assets in whatever manner it wants.
DOBELL: China and India already suffer because both countries don't have enough usable water in the right places. Climate change adds to the constant existing pressure from industry and urbanisation and while India and China may be facing off over oil and gas, they may also compete for the same renewable resource, water.
Professor Alan Dupont.
DUPONT: Fresh water, the major river systems of Asia are dependant on the melting of the glaciers in the Tibetan High Plateau. China is reputedly talking about diverting some of these waters that provide major source of fresh water for the downstream riperian states, India the Brahmaputru is an example, microcosm of the kind of problems that are arising. So the Indians are becoming increasing concern about what will happen to their water if China diverts it.
DOBELL: Is all this a recipe for water wars or conflict over food and fuel? Initially perhaps, the real pressures will be inside states, rather than between nations. Weak states will be even weaker if they lose out in the resources race.
Singapore's Simon Tay.
TAY: I think that before wars, we will see tensions, and tension signs are already there. I think that one of the first areas will be refugees. Some people already argue that we are seeing the first, you can call them climate change, climate refugees whether it is Bangladesh or the Rohinga in Myanmar. These kind of problems are starting to surface. So studies so that'show you classify it. Actual army military conflict, I don't know. I think it will come. By the time that happens though, it's kind of a lag indicator that you will actually see economic tensions, territorial contestation first, and then refugees and other human beings baring the brunt before really state security seems to be in peril.
