Just when we're beginning to pay attention to our candle that, for too long, has been burning at both ends, we may now be about to put a blowtorch to it.
The two most populous nations on earth, India and China, are poised to become the world's next economic superpowers. Each has more than a billion people, most of them by western standards pretty backward folks. You get two advantages out of that: cheap labour and a pent-up market for consumer goods. That's the gasoline and the match.
A real problem, for them and eventually for the rest of us, is that China and India didn't break into the billion club without a lot of environmental degradation along the way. The very prosperity that seems to have arrived on their doorsteps could be a very mixed blessing.
China has a good lead on India in terms of industrial development. The Chinese government has already recognized that pollution poses not just a serious health threat to its people but a bottleneck to further development. The government has been motivated, out of self interest (is there any better motivation) to pass stringent environmental protection measures but it may be too little, too late.
According to "The Economist", 600-million Chinese are left to rely on contaminated water. A recent survey found that 70 per cent of five of China's seven major river systems was "unfit for human contact." Forget about drinking it, just touching it is dangerous.
A lack of safe fresh water is compounded by severe air pollution. This isn't particularly surprising in a country where most of its electricity is generated by coal-fired plants and many homes are heated with coal. The Chinese government's own Environmental Protection Administration found that fully two-thirds of the 300 cities it surveyed fail to meet World Health Organization minimum standards.
Yet another looming ecological crisis is desertification, a term that refers to the exhaustion of once fertile, farmland and its transformation into desert. This is a problem that besets China, some other parts of Asia and quite a bit of Africa. The advancing desert and the sandstorms that this creates has already had officials pondering whether they might have to relocate the capital, Beijing.
Farmland to Desert
Peasant farmers are being hard hit by all of this. Their produce doesn't grow properly, sometimes at all, and, due to the pollution of sources of irrigation, the end product is, itself, contaminated. A recent article from the Knight Ridder news service noted these environmental problems are now so serious. "...they've begun to generate social instability."
"Choking on vile air, sickened by toxic water, citizens in some corners of this vast nation are rising up to protest the high environmental cost of China's economic boom.
"In one recent incident, villagers in this hilly coastal region grew so exasperated by contamination from nearby chemical plants that they overturned and smashed dozens of vehicles and beat up police officers who arrived to quell what was essentially an environmental riot.
"'We had to do it. We can't grow our vegetables here anymore,' said Li Sanye, a 60-year-old farmer. 'Young women are giving birth to stillborn babies.'
"Across China, entire rivers run foul or have dried up altogether. Nearly a third of cities don't treat their sewage, flushing it into waterways."
Across the Himalayas in India, the situation isn't much better. India's current population stands at between 1.1 and 1.2-billion and increases by 42,000 every day. It's population growth rate suggests that India's population will pass China's in the coming decades.
India is overcrowded. It has 3.5 times the population of the United States but only a third of its land area. The land is under stress as are the country's water resources. Sanitation is a terrific problem. In the countryside it's estimated that only around 14 per cent of the population has access to a latrine. Given the shortages of water, hand washing remains a real problem and, with it, the spread of sanitation-related diseases. It is estimated that diarrhea claims 1600 lives every day.
It isn't only the rural poor who have difficulty getting clean water. In the cities, the well-to-do often find it a struggle. The New York Times recently looked at the case of Ritu Prasher of New Delhi:
"Every day, Mrs. Prasher, a homemaker in a middle-class neighborhood of this capital, rises at 6:30 a.m. and begins fretting about water.
"It is a rare morning when water trickles through the pipes. More often, not a drop will come. So Mrs. Prasher will have to call a private water tanker, wait for it to show up, call again, wait some more and worry about whether enough buckets are filled in the bathroom in case no water arrives.
“'Your whole day goes just planning how you’ll get water,” a weary Mrs. Prasher, 45, recounted one morning this summer, cellphone in hand and ready to press redial for the water tanker. “You become so edgy all the time.'”
"In the richest city in India, with the nation’s economy marching ahead at an enviable clip, middle-class people like Mrs. Prasher are reduced to foraging for water. Their predicament testifies to the government’s astonishing inability to deliver the most basic services to its citizens at a time when India asserts itself as a global power.
"The crisis, decades in the making, has grown as fast as India in recent years. A soaring population, the warp-speed sprawl of cities, and a vast and thirsty farm belt have all put new strains on a feeble, ill-kept public water and sanitation network.
"The combination has left water all too scarce in some places, contaminated in others and in cursed surfeit for millions who are flooded each year. Today the problems threaten India’s ability to fortify its sagging farms, sustain its economic growth and make its cities healthy and habitable. At stake is not only India’s economic ambition but its very image as the world’s largest democracy.
“If we become rich or poor as a nation, it’s because of water,” said Sunita Narain, director of the Center for Science and Environment in New Delhi.
"Conflicts over water mirror the most vexing changes facing India: the competing demands of urban and rural areas, the stubborn divide between rich and poor, and the balance between the needs of a thriving economy and a fragile environment.
"New Delhi’s water woes are typical of those of many Indian cities. Nationwide, the urban water distribution network is in such disrepair that no city can provide water from the public tap for more than a few hours a day.
"An even bigger problem than demand is disposal. New Delhi can neither quench its thirst, nor adequately get rid of the ever bigger heaps of sewage that it produces. Some 45 percent of the population is not connected to the public sewerage system.
"Those issues are amplified nationwide. More than 700 million Indians, or roughly two-thirds of the population, do not have adequate sanitation. Largely for lack of clean water, 2.1 million children under the age of 5 die each year, according to the United Nations.
As bad as India's water problems are, its air pollution levels are worse. It's estimated that polluted air in India causes 5 million deaths a year. Again, New Delhi is the worst with suspended particulates ranging between 350 to 800 micrograms per cubic metre of air, far greater than the World Health Organization's standard of 50 micrograms or less.
If China and India merely had to clean up the existing mess there might be some scope for optimism. However the looming population growth and industrial development suggests these problems are only going to get worse. Global warming will only compound their growing environmental crises.
Opponents of Kyoto cite India and China as justification for not meeting their greenhouse gas commitments. After all, if these countries are going to keep polluting, why shouldn't everybody? That logic, of course, makes no sense. The goal must be to persuade China and India and the rest of the developing world to curb their growth and address their environmental problems and we won't have much credibility if we, the wealthiest nations, don't lead by example.
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