Our China-based recovery is a naïve delusion

Water problems in Asia today are severe - one out of five people (700 million) do not have access to safe drinking water and half of the region's population (1.8 billion people) lacks access to basic sanitation.

As population growth and urbanisation rates in Asia rise rapidly, stress on the region's water resources is intensifying. Climate change is expected to worsen the situation significantly. Experts agree that reduced access to freshwater will lead to a cascading set of consequences, including impaired food production, the loss of livelihood security, large scale migration within and across borders, and increased economic and geopolitical tensions and instabilities.

China's double-digit economic growth has greatly increased water demand for industry while decreasing the quality of supply because of rampant waste dumping and pollution by the industrial sector.

Desertification concerns have also been echoed by Guardian reporter Jonathan Watts last week:

The government says more than 150 million people will have to be moved. Water shortages exacerbated by over-irrigation and climate change are the main cause. The problem is most severe in the north-west, where desert sands are swallowing up farmland, homes and towns ...

Then there are factors like China's real unemployment figures; the potential social unrest highlighted by Vincent Kolo; the security concerns raised (PDF 114KB) by the Oxford Research Group in its report Tigers & Dragons: Sustainable Security in Asia and Australasia; and the environmental fallout from and military risks associated with the Three Gorges Dam Project (PDF 85KB), to name a few.

Back in Australia Treasurer Wayne Swan said recently:

But there are also good reasons to be confident that growth in China and other developing economies will provide an ongoing source of demand for mineral and agricultural commodities over the next few decades.

Give the man a cape. We're saved. It appears that Treasurer Swan has a plan up his sleeve to save Australia's largest food bowl from imminent death so we can export food to the Chinese! Happy days!

And if the government is coy about confessing it will be taking us into debt to the extent of $300 billion, what about Australia's private foreign liabilities?

You can't ignore them if you're looking at our country's indebtedness. What does the government have to say about our total foreign debt (deducting our total gross foreign assets - assuming, of course, that they are realistically valued - from our total gross foreign liabilities) already standing at about $714 billion at the end of December 2008?

In her book The Coming First World Debt Crisis, Anne Pettifor warned: