Category Archives: foreign policy

A Risk for Future Food Prices?

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Or of land…acquisitions…or both?

About one tenth of China’s farmland is polluted by lead, zinc, and other heavy metals to “striking” levels exceeding official limits[.]

And

About…8 million acres…of China’s farmland is too polluted to grow crops, a government official said on Monday, highlighting the risk facing agriculture after three decades of rapid industrial growth.

The area of China’s contaminated land is about the same size as Belgium.

The Wall Street Journal reports that

Figures released by the Ministry of Land and Resources on Monday in Beijing indicated as much as 2.5% of China’s soil could be too contaminated by heavy metals and other pollutants to farm.  Meanwhile, the share of China’s land that is arable fell by a fifth of a percent during the three years ended in 2009 due to pollution, urbanization, and other reasons….

And

The pollution figure equals about 2.5% of China’s 2.027 billion mu [roughly 340 million acres] in total arable land in 2012, according to a calculation by The Wall Street Journal.  The total arable land figure, down about 0.2% from 2.031 billion mu [338 million acres] in 2009, was also…newly released by the [Land Bureau] on Monday.

Further, much of the PRC’s farmland starts out as not good farmland:

Almost a quarter of China’s arable land is located in areas considered poor for farming, such as hillsides, the bureau said.

One result is this:

In recent years, China’s land shortage has helped drive facets of its foreign policy, from state-supported purchases of farmland and agro-business groups around the world to its appetite for foreign agricultural commodities like US corn.

The PRC also is concluding a deal to lease 3 million hectares (7.4 million acres) of Ukrainian farmland for the next 50 years, for instance.

This comes on the heels of another pessimistic report on the viability of Chinese farmland.

Chinese demand—need—for food won’t explode overnight, or even necessarily over the next few years.  If Chinese demographics don’t improve, the demand might not get much larger than it is today.

Still, for a world that has trouble feeding itself, at least in part through the affordability of food, this is a matter on which it’s useful to keep an eye.  Among other things, as the competition for farm-grown food heats up, so will prices and the competition for fisheries, including those in the South and East China Seas.

China Doesn’t Like It

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So it can’t be all bad.

China’s Foreign Ministry on Monday accused Japan’s prime minister of hypocrisy and said he would not be welcome in China after he visited a shrine honoring Japan’s war dead.

The People’s Republic of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs Spokesperson Qin Gang said,

[Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo] Abe’s hypocrisy in his claims of prioritizing relations with China and hopes for dialogue with the Chinese leaders has been fully revealed.

The Chinese people do not welcome him.  Now, Abe needs to admit his mistakes to the government and people of China, cut loose from the past and make a new start.

Because a nation’s leaders honoring their war dead is wrong.  And because the People’s Republic of China gets to dictate to other nations how those nations must behave internally.  Sure.

Withal, that’s of a piece with dictating to other nations how they must behave in international waters and airspace—like the South and East China Seas and the airspace above the East China Sea.

In the end, I have to ask: when will the PRC cut loose from the past and make a new start?

Puff Piece

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…by a newspaper that masquerades itself as a serious journalism producer?

The New York Times published their report on the Benghazi terrorist attack that included the murders of our ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, and three ex-SEALs who were trying to protect him.

Months of investigation by The New York Times, centered on extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack there and its context, turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault.  The attack was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi.  And contrary to claims by some members of Congress, it was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.

The NYT spent six “chapters” in that vein.

Never mind actual facts, from eyewitnesses on the ground during the attack.  Eyewitnesses who reported no particular gathering for a protest over a video, indeed no protest at all.  One special operator said

Guys were coming into the compound, moving left, moving right…and using IMT (individual movement techniques).  …  That’s not a spontaneous attack.

One guy was shooting, one guy was running.  There are guys watching the gates.  …  The bosses on the ground were pointing, commanding and coordinating—that is a direct action planned attack.

Never mind that the leader of the attack, Ahmad Abu Khattallah, is tied in with Ansar al Sharia, al Qaeda’s primary affiliate in Libya.

Never mind that the mortar fire in the second phase of the terrorist attack was too accurate, too rapid-fire for amateurs or spontaneous rioters to have been able to get going at night with no line of sight to their targets.

Never mind real-time reporting from within the compound back to State describing the terrorist attack underway.

Never mind searches that turn up no mention of any video in the social media until after the terrorists’ attack was over.

Never mind pesky any of those facts.  It’s Republicans and their sycophants who keep on about them; they can be discounted entirely, given the source.

It’s not even a very puffy piece.  Just foolishly fatuous.  Another cover-up attempt.

Iran, Centrifuges, and Negotiation

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Tehran has announced that during the present six-month…deal…they’ll be testing a new generation of centrifuges that are capable of more efficiently and quickly spinning down uranium.  And of course, there’s no better way to test this new generation than by ops testing them through spinning down…uranium.  This during that just concluded arrangement wherein Iran agreed they would not spin down more uranium.  Such a deal President Barack Obama has negotiated.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Menendez (D, NJ) has the right of it:

If you’re talking about producing more advanced centrifuges that are only used to enrich uranium at a quicker rate…the only purposes of that and the only reason you won’t give us access to [a military research facility] is because you’re really not thinking about nuclear power for domestic energy—you’re thinking about nuclear power for nuclear weapons[.]

Forty-seven Senators are co-sponsoring legislation that would tighten sanctions on Iran further, should Iran fail to come to a permanent agreement or violate the current arrangement.  Yet,

Obama argues that Congress could step in at any time to approve new sanctions if Iran violates the terms of the agreement.  Further, he argues that legislation at this stage could imperil the hard-fought Geneva deal.

When has Obama ever successfully negotiated anything in the last five years?  He doesn’t control the mullahs like he did Congress his first two years, so he can’t railroad his wants through with no negotiations at all.  He’s negotiated no deal domestically or globally since.  Why should his protestations here be taken seriously?

Why Are We Abandoning the High Ground?

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China’s first lunar rover has successfully separated from the probe that carried it into space has and made its first track upon the surface of the moon, Chinese state media reported Sunday.

Here’s the rub:

The soft landing—the term for a landing in which neither the spacecraft nor its equipment is damaged—was the first on the moon by any nation in 37 years

And not only was it not done by us, it was done by a nation with clear enmity toward us and toward our friends and allies.  Moreover, the People’s Republic of China is making no bones about its future plans for the moon.  They’re planning a sample return mission in their present Chang’e series as soon as 2017 and an astronaut landing after 2020.

The US’ space program?  Well, we don’t have much of one, and none at all where the moon is concerned.  We send the occasional robot off to Mars (those are spectacular missions, doing important science, to be sure), but that’s about it.  American astronauts have to thumb rides to the space station on Russian rockets.  American private companies are (finally!) figuring out how to send supply missions all the way to the space station.  That’s about it.

As for the moon, we got nothing.

Never mind that the back side of the moon is an excellent platform for exploring space.  Never mind that the regolith on the moon—all that moon “soil”—is rich in rocket fuel (it’s loaded with oxygen and aluminum, each a key ingredient).  Or that producing that rocket fuel on the moon and loading it into rockets there considerably cheapens exploration of the rest of the solar system, since all that mass doesn’t have to be carried uphill out of Earth’s gravity.

Never mind that the moon is militarily useful high ground: rocks dropped from there impact Earth’s surface with force of nuclear bombs, and by destroying our launch facilities, any rock throwers will be able to deny us access to space entirely.  Other weapons launched from the moon will be able to destroy our satellites with impunity, which with no launch facilities, we’ll be unable to replace.

But we’re ceding all of that to the PRC.