Ecologies in East Asia

and Lies, damn lies and Chinese statistics By Florence Chan (Asia Times, 23 October)

The state statistical system of China is divided into five grades ranging from village through county, city, province, up to the central government. As a rule, the first grade hands in the data to the second, then the second to the third, and so forth. The fact is, secretaries of villages located in the same area find out from one another the GDP data they are going to report. To work things right, the figures must not be too good or too bad, for it would incur either jealousy or contempt. Likewise, the data are "adjusted" along the other grades as well, exaggerating the inaccuracy.

China's bureaucracy: A virus's best friend By Francesco Sisci (Asia Times 22 April 2003)

The Chinese bureaucracy of today is arranged so as not to give a large amount of power to one man. This is to avoid the excesses experienced during the years of Mao Zedong, when Mao could do and undo whatever he wished without any government checks. The present system in effect forestalls any dictatorship but impedes swift reaction to virtually any emergency. The system is geared for stability: reaching a large consensus on any given policy. This makes it cumbersome, although stable and quasi-democratic, in the sense that any policy has a very wide support among the hierarchy. However, there are no clear limits to the power exercised by top leaders and there is no opposition to any given policy, as any voice in the one-party system will be accounted for and included in the decision process. The system then folds and buckles under sudden threats and pressures, and thus can't effectively withstand the challenges of the fast-moving globalized system.

"Ecology" is a portmanteau word, used in ways and settings convenient for authors who want to convey something of the flavor of interconnectedness in living systems, the "relations of living organisms" in the OED's phrase. The Greek root oikos means 'house' or 'dwelling', and "economy" (with the explicit sense of managing the household) comes from the same root.

An Ecology joins everything together, or (as we might rephrase that) is basically interested in interlinkage, and almost inevitably critical of single-factor or hyperdisciplinary (and especially economic or political) approaches, and the short-term view. People who identify themselves as ecologists are not necessarily in mutual agreement on frameworks or methods --see "deep ecology" and A critique for ecology (Robert Henry Peters [ QH541 .P438 1991]) for the contrast.

The fundamental metric for the empirical study of ecology is energy flux, ultimately the pathways of energy in its transformation from photons from the Sun to dissipated heat, summarized in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. (See Life as a Manifestation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics (Schneider, E.D, Kay, J.J., 1994, Mathematical and Computer Modelling, Vol 19, No. 6-8, pp.25-48 --see also Environment Canada Science Note). One way to see ALL of human history is as a saga of appropriation of Energy for human purposes: efforts to redirect inevitably entropic energy streams, refigurations of natural systems to suit human purposes.

Where does this get us if we apply the framework to a society or a physiographic region? We look at negentropic efforts: at schemes to create and maintain human notions of order, and to extract energies in one form and transmute them into other forms.

Case in point: think back to Chinese efforts to control water in the North China Plain, via dyking and channeling of the Huang River and its tributaries. Vast expenditures of human energy over thousands of years... punctuated by episodes of catastropic flooding, changes of course of the Huang across the North China Plain, and a subtext of daily/yearly movement of goods and people, via canals and roads... the everyday realities of Chinese civilization, based in efforts to control and transform natural systems.

In hindsight, the engineering marvels of the past have a sort of inevitability: the Great Wall and the Grand Canal were built (and maintained and rebuilt...) because decisions were made to allocate resources to the projects, and they "changed everything" once they were in place. We're too far away from those decisions to know if they were controversial, or to gauge what their short-run costs were. Even those megaprojects (to say nothing of building the walls around cities, or of epics of terraforming hillsides into terraces to increase agricultural productivity, or of Ming-era shipbuilding) seem to be just part of the background in the long run of Chinese history.

Today I want to look at two quite different cases of ecological transformation --and there are many among which to choose, so these are just the ones foremost in my mind at the moment, not necessarily the "right" ones to address the general point... which is that resource allocation is almost always controversial, and especially so when it's done on a very large scale. The big question, outside of the specifics of East Asian societies, is: how do you decide which claims to accept, what information to "privilege", and why?

So we're going to look at big dams, and at chickens...

The Largest Dam in the World: the Chinese have embarked on the Epic of harnessing the Yangtze via the Three Gorges project [caption]... and a couple of maps to show context.

The flavor of the controversy over the 3 Gorges Dam can be appreciated by exploring some of these:

(results of a google search --and find more like The river dragon has come! : the Three Gorges Dam and the fate of China's Yangtze River and its people (Armonk, N.Y. : M.E. Sharpe, c1998. TC558.C52 T587 1998 --see some excerpts)

Prepared for the World Commission on Dams: Experience with Dams in Water and Energy Resource Development in the People's Republic of China [see 107-page pdf for whole report]

Three Gorges Probe news service

International Rivers Network

The River Dragon Has Come (New Paltz student site)

Three Gorges Dam Information on the Internet from Colorado State

China Three Gorges Project Resettlement: Policy, Planning and Implementation
Duan Yuefang and Shawn Steil Journal of Refugee Studies, Dec 2003; 16: 422 - 443.

Damming the Child of the Ocean: The Three Gorges Project

Joanna Gail Salazar Journal of Environment Development, Jun 2000; 9: 160 - 174.

Chinese Groups Seek to Halt a Dam and Save a Treasured Place By JIM YARDLEY (NYTimes 20 October)

google images ...and another

...all of which indicate how easy it is to find a SIDE to take. What is to be "privileged"? Flood control? Electric power generation? Ecological effects? Cultural sites? Resettlement? Schistosomiasis? Endangered species? Sedimentation? Human Rights? Financial Risk? Biodiversity?

Going Against the Flow in China (Xiong Lei Science, Vol 280, Issue 5360, 24-26 , 3 April 1998)

The Chinese have been transforming natural landscapes for... well, forever. Yi-Fu Tuan quotes E.H. Shafer: "...the most civilized of all arts was responsible for the deforestation of much of North China. The art was that of writing, which required soot for the making of black ink. The soot came from the burnt pine. Even before Tang times, the ancient pines of the mountains of Shantung had been reduced to carbon, and now the busy brushes of the vast Tang bureaucracy were rapidly bringing baldness to the Ta-hang Mountains between Shansi and Hopei..." (Tuan China in World's Landscapes series [Longman 1970], pg. 41)

Mark Elvin quotes a mid-18th century poem, "Lament for the Copper-bearing Hills":

...
The wood they must have is no longer available
The woods are shaved bald, like a convict's head. Blighted.
Only now they regret --felling day after day
Has left them no way to provide for their firewood
...
The Dark Force and Bright Force contract, then dilate
Like craftsmen unceasingly shaping their work
If humans take all there is, if they show no restraint,
Their force is enough to wear out both the Heaven and Earth.

The Grand Canal: a landscape transformation ==> linking North and South. Says William McNeill, "no inland waterway system in world history approaches this one as a device for integrating large and productive spaces... With its waterways the Chinese state from Song times forward kept under its control (most of the time) a huge diversity of ecological zones with a broad array of useful natural resources..." (Elvin & Liu pg 32, 33)

Furthermore, "Intensely anthropogenic landscapes require vigilant maintenance... it is fair to say that the Chinese landscape was unusually dependent on demographic and political stability, and unusually vulnerable to disruption by neglect... highly labile --susceptible to rapid and through change." (37)

"Probably the two greatest environmental changes in the last 3000 years of Chinese history have been the destruction of forests and the reorganization of surface waters..." (39)

"According to Elvin, China has pursued ecologically unsustainable patterns for 3000 years, avoiding total breakdown by periodically adapting to crisis with new technologies or new spatial expansions." (41)

The Green Circle is Chapter 1 of Stover's Cultural Ecology of Chinese Civilization (DS721 .S78 [1974])

The basic unit of Chinese folk culture --its minimal comunity-- is the peasant village and its surround of cultivated plats within walking distance of the settlement at the center, what its inhabitants call the ch'ing chuan, or Green Circle... at once the subject of its own community culture and an object of imperial control... Everywhere the Green Circle is an inward-looking, self-regulating folk society based on intensive hoe agriculture that presents imperial government with a target for taxation only, not for administration or political organization..." (pp 13-14)

Compare this to what Yi-Fu Tuan says:

The effect of man on the soil has also a constructive side. In the long-occupied and densely settled valleys and plains the nutrient level of the alluvium is largely a human achievement. The intensity with which the Chinese farmer fertilizes his land --using almost every conceivable source that can be locally obtained-- is well known. However, since an important proportion of the fertilizer occurs in the form of night soil, there is always a larger amount available near the big cities and towns than in the remote country districts. Large cities are therefore surrounded by irregular rings of fertile soil which extend at least as far as a man can walk and return in one day with a load. From the air, the city appears to be a green oasis which fades gradually to the brown of the distant countryside. This distinctive pattern is produced by the flow of nitrogen and other plant foods in the form of agricultural produce from the farms to the city and the return flow of faeces from the city to the farms; but only to farms within easy walking distance of the city, for greater distance would raise transportation charges sufficiently to make it uneconomical to transport night soil...
(Tuan China in World's Landscapes series [Longman 1970], pg. 30)

====

Ecology of protein production: We should look at both animal (pork and chicken, at least) and vegetable protein if possible...

Pork:

Prediction of Pork Production Structure and Consumption in China ( Chien Hsiaoping)

...Chinese Swine Feeding Practices...

Traditional household or "backyard" producers continue to raise the vast majority of hogs in China. In 1965, backyard producers accounted for 83 percent of total Chinese pork production. With the dissolution of many collective farms and the institution of the Household Responsibility System (HRS) in the early 1980s, backyard production increased to 92.9 percent by 1982. China’s rapid transition toward a more market-orientated economy in the 1980s and 1990s reduced backyard pork production to 80.7 percent by 1995, as an increasing number of households began specializing in pork production. This trend toward specialized and commercial production is likely to continue as China’s agricultural economy continues to modernize.

Traditional pork producers in China have typically exhibited low feeding costs and low net income. "Raising cattle for plowing fields and feeding hogs for fertilizer for crop cultivation" has long been the slogan depicting the motivation for Chinese farmers to keep cattle and hogs. There has been little emphasis on quality and efficiency, and this is reflected in the feeding practices of small household producers.

The quantities and types of feed consumed by Chinese livestock, particularly hogs, are quite different from those consumed by animals for meat output in western countries. Hogs in China frequently consume large amounts of green roughage such as water plants, vegetable leaves, tubers, carrots, pumpkins, and various crop stalks. Based on data from a survey conducted by the University of Arkansas (UOA) and the Research Center for Rural Economy (RCRE) in China’s Ministry of Agriculture,1 green feeds account for 18.5 percent of total feed consumption in backyard hog operations. Grain by-products, such as bran and hulls, are also frequently used to feed swine. Meal products made from soybeans, peanuts, cottonseed, rapeseed, fish, cocoons, and bone are used as supplemental sources of protein or minerals. Based on the survey data, by-products from restaurants and manufactured food processes, such as alcohol, tofu, and bean and tuber noodle production, averaged between 2 and 6 percent of total feed in backyard production.

China's unsafe farming practices may be breeding more than pigs (Hamish McDonald)

Foshan, a city of more than 3 million people, is one of the specialised manufacturing cities that make southern China's Guangdong province a workshop for the world. Foshan is probably the global bathroom and toilet capital, with street after street of showrooms full of porcelain and ceramic wares.

But currently it is more noted for another possible export. It was here, mid-November, that the first known case of the lethal pneumonia called severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) has been pinpointed. The Chinese public servant who came down with it recovered, but infected four other people and the disease has since spread worldwide, claiming 82 lives.

Guangdong and the nearby autonomous former British colony of Hong Kong, however, have been hardest hit, and the SARS epidemic has refocused attention on this region's record as a source of devastating new epidemics of influenza, including possibly the "Spanish flu" which swept the world in 1918-19 killing over 20 million people.

Dongxing is just one example of how Guangdong's 80 million people live close to the animals, poultry and fish they eat. At another piggery close to Mrs Yang's, a farmer keeps young chickens next to his pigs. All the piggeries empty their waste into the ponds where shrimp and grass-carp are raised for the table.

In other places, battery chickens are kept above the pig pens, feeding their waste into the pigs' food troughs. The close proximity and cross pollution adds to the risk of animal viruses infecting humans, either directly or via pigs

"It's a complete soup of chemicals and viruses," says Christine Loh, a former legislator and head of the Hong Kong think-tank Civic Exchange, who is one of the city's leading analysts of environmental questions.

INTEGRATED LIVESTOCK-FISH PRODUCTION IN CHINA (Y.C. Chen)

While the usual pond fish raising may produce about 4 tons of fish per hectare, the integrated system may produce more than 10 tons per hectare (12.2–19.5 tons) or 2 to 3.9 times more. Moreover in this system many species of animal are suitable for integration, for example, duck, goose, sheep, hens, cattle, pigs, etc. With duck being the most common among them.

Why So Many Disease Strains Come From China

Lots of new strains of influenza first show up in China. The reason is that tens of millions of humans live in close contact with a large variety of farm animals in conditions which encourage viruses to jump between species...Of course it would be great if Chinese farming practices were changed in ways that would reduce the chances of viruses jumping between species. But the farmers who engage in the dangerous livestock raising practices are poor and do not have a lot of alternatives. As China industrializes one can expect conditions to improve as agriculture industrializes, becomes more capital intensive and less labor intensive. With fewer people down on the farm fewer people will come into contact with pigs, ducks, chickens, and other farm animals.

Duck & pig feces may have something to do with it

Some virologists implicate the farming practices common there. In southern provinces of China, farmers raise hens, ducks, pigs and fish in one integrated system. They use the droppings and leftover food from the pigs to feed the fowl. The fowl droppings, in turn, help fertilize the fish ponds.

While it sounds like a perfect system, raising three different species with no waste, the species may be exchanging viruses among themselves through the feces.

The birds can pass avian flu viruses to swine, where the two viruses co-mingle and form a new strain that is passed back to the farmers, whose immune system cannot fight the new virus, as the theory goes. The pigs, which have a genetic make-up more like humans, act as the mixing vessel.

Flu Pandemic (Robin Henig, New York Times Magazine Nov. 29, 1992)

OF ALL THE RESHUFFLING OF gene segments that goes on in the guts of pigs or ducks, only once in every 10 to 40 years does a new virus emerge that can rage through a human population. Most reassortants are not viable, but a hybrid virus that is viable (and is capable of infecting a human cell) is so radically different from any previous influenza virus that it can infect large populations quickly and cause serious complications.

Pandemic influenza has historically originated in China_even the misnamed Spanish flu of 1918 had Asian origins_primarily because the country has so many ducks. Wild ducks are the predominant reservoir for influenza. Waterfowl are welcome in China; they prey on many of the pests that would otherwise plague rice crops. Indeed, by some estimates, China has more ducks than it has people. On Chinese farms, ducks live close to people and close to many of the other farm animals that are also influenza reservoirs; the ducks are as likely to be infected with human influenza as with avian. These co-infections provide the ideal medium for genetic reassortment. More trouble erupts on farms where ducks and chickens are raised in proximity to pigs, another common practice in China. A pig that is coinfected with influenza from different species can serve as a mixing vessel for the creation of entirely new strains.

"This is startling information," says Stephen S. Morse, an assistant professor of virology at the Rockefeller University in New York. Morse helped popularize the notion that integrated pigduck farming is responsible for the reassortment of new pandemic influenza strains by inviting one of the theory's leading proponents Robert G. Webster of the St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, to speak at a 1989 conference he organized on the subject of emerging viruses. "Influenza has always been described as the classic example of viral evolution at work, and scientists have long believed that new epidemics are caused by mutations in the virus," Morse says. "Although this may be true of the smaller annual or biennial epidemics we frequently experience, it is apparently not true of the influenza viruses that cause pandemics." What makes it so startling, in other words, is that it postulates that influenza, long thought to be the most dramatic example of random mutation in all of virology, is as subject to the actions of human beings as any other virus.

Ducks have other habits, besides a tendency toward co-infection, that also make them the primary source of pandemic influenza strains. They are perfectly suited to spreading the reassortants around. During their seasonal migrations, ducks can fly enormous distances, spreading their contaminated feces across large expanses of countryside. And they take in water not only by mouth but also through the cloaca, so that as they swim they are simultaneously drinking and ingesting pond water tainted with their own or other ducks' virus-filled excrement and excreting more virus into the water. "If you could eliminate all the horses, swine and ducks in the world, you could eliminate pandemic influenza," says Edwin D. Kilbourne, professor of microbiology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and a national authority on influenza.

The adoption of certain new farming techniques in the developing world increases the odds that another such strain will soon emerge. Pigs, ducks and chickens live side by side on many Asian farms, especially those engaged in fish farming. Widely promoted as an energy-efficient way to generate high yields of protein foods, fish farming involves feeding hen feces to pigs and fertilizing fish ponds_where ducks also swim and drink _ with fresh pig manure. Some virologists, especially in Europe, worry about the prime opportunities for genetic reassortment that this agricultural method provides. As scientists from Wales and Germany recently wrote about fish farming, the result may well be the creation of "a considerable potential human health hazard" by bringing together the two reservoirs of influenza viruses. (Eating the fish is not thought to be a flu hazard, since fish are not reservoirs for human influenza virus.)

Carp Polyculture System in China: Challenges and Future Trends (Jinyun Yi)

Chicken: see my H5N1 log to see why this is relevant... and consider the following:

Asia wings it when it comes to bird flu By Bruce Klingner (Asia Times 23 October)

The WHO assessed earlier this year that the H5N1 virus has a high propensity for mutating rapidly and acquiring genes from viruses infecting other animals, providing it the ability to jump to other species. US and Chinese researchers studying H5N1 strains taken from ducks in China between 1999 and 2002 determined that the virus has become more virulent and deadly during the past several years, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Domestic poultry are particularly susceptible to epidemics of rapidly fatal influenza, and migratory waterfowl have been identified as "reservoirs" for H5N1. The virus can also mutate within pigs, which are susceptible to infection from both bird and human viruses.

To prevent further outbreaks, as well reduce the opportunity for the virus to mutate, the WHO has urged governments to make "rapid elimination of the H5N1 virus in bird populations [a] high priority as a matter of international public health importance". Although culling operations reduce human exposure, the large number of humans living in close proximity to poultry throughout Asia, and the ability of the virus to survive for lengthy periods in cold weather, require long-term measures to be implemented. Previous epidemics involving the less dangerous strains lasted for several years.

(very worth reading further...)

Peoples Republic of China, Poultry and Products Annual 2003 (USDA report, pdf file, Sept 25 2003)

According to industry contacts, local breed broilers comprise about 90 percent along the Pearl River Valley, 60 percent along the Yangtze River Valley and 40 percent along the Yellow River Valley... Due to fierce competition and stricter production requirements, increasing scale is being encouraged and moving faster than last year... contracts with family household [sic!] have been reduced from 60 to 40 percent this year. Contracted household farms are now required to raise 5,000 birds at one hatching instead of 1,000-2,000 as in the past. Broiler production is also being concentrated to grain production areas for easy access to feed... (pp 4-5)

(Of course, it would be nice to have a post-H5N1 update...)

Ron Nigh's take on the Situation

During the past couple of decades some countries, particularly Thailand and Vietnam, among others, have seen a tremendous growth in chicken confinements, "chicken factories" of many thousands of birds in the deplorable conditions we are all familiar with. All the ills, antibiotics, hormones, tremendous disease problems, unhealthy products etc., are present in these factories. These countries have also entered into international commerce of poultry products, including supplying chicks for yet more huge confinement operations. Thailand for example has become a major supplier of frozen chicken parts to England, etc,etc. Of course, biodiversity has been drastically reduced, with millions of chickens in these farms originating in very few breeding populations.

These huge confinement operations, for all their talk of being "hygienic" are fertile sources for new diseases or for amplifying and modifying old ones, including H5N1 strain of avian flu. It is in these 'industrial' developments of chicken raising in Asia that we should search for the origins of the current threat of avian flu. If you look at where this particularly dangerous strain of avian flu has been causing the most problems you will find that it corresponds to those countries that, during the last decade or two have entered bigtime into the poultry "industry" and international commerce of poultry products. One major country that has not entered this international market is India (not that some wouldn't like to). In India poultry production is still in the hands of small growers with their diverse chicken flocks. India has not been affected by H5N1

It is laughable to see the WHO and FAO scambling to blame the small chicken growers for the problem. First they attacked the "wet markets", where, for thousands of years local people have been buying and selling live chickens and fresh poultry products. Now FAO has convinced the Thai government to attack backyard poultry growers, a majority of rural people, forcing them to adopt confinement and other "modern" poultry methods. Farmers who put up the costs of implementing these changes are still just as susceptible to avian flu as before. But most small growers will simply be driven out of business. The implications for the future of poultry diversity are grave, not to mention the social and economic impact of deliberately destroying traditional poultry farmers.

Factoid: China is the world's largest soybean importer

CHINA: OILSEEDS SITUATION AND OUTLOOK from Agriculture Canada, Jan 2004

The demand for protein meal and vegetable oil in China continues to rise due to the growth in personal income, a strong economy and a growing population. Increased demand for poultry, beef and pork is driving the consumption of meal, which in turn is increasing the demand for soybean imports.

...China is the third largest oilseeds producer in the world, following the United States (US) and Brazil. It is the world's largest producer of rapeseed, cottonseed and peanuts, while it is the fourth-largest producer of soybeans.

...Remarkable oil meal consumption growth has been achieved through a combination of a change in diets, to include more meat, and a gradual industrialization of feed and livestock production. While the majority of pork and poultry continues to be raised on small-scale farms, there are a growing number of larger operations that rely on commercial feeds with a much higher protein inclusion rate. Meal consumption has increased 135% over the last ten years, to reach 37.4 Mt in 2003-2004. During this same time period, soybean meal consumption has grown 296% and now accounts for 61% of consumption.

Beancurd: History of an Anciet Protein Source ( Jacqueline M. Newman)

More than you could ever want to know: Characterization and Product Innovation of Sufu A Chinese Fermented Soybean Food (Bei-Zhong Han, a dissertation...)

TOFU, TEMPEH, SOYSAUCE AND MISO from TECHNOLOGY OF PRODUCTION OF EDIBLE FLOURS AND PROTEIN PRODUCTS FROM SOYBEANS (FAO 1992, by Zeki Berk)

Fermentation of stinky brine and production of Chaw-Tofu, a Chinese traditional fermented soybean curd in Taiwan (cached)