The emerging Asian giants India and China, with their appetite for raw materials, could pose the “gravest threats” to the world’s ecological health if they fail to follow a conservation-based development model, warn two studies. According to the latest edition of the Worldwatch Institute’s annual “State of the World” report, published last Wednesday in Washington, the two Asian giants are fast joining the United States and Europe as

superpowers whose voracious demands on the world’s resources will eventually exceed those of developed nations.

Though their per capita resource consumption is still low, the two countries, especially China, are bringing heavy pressure on resources because of their commodity-intensive manufacturing activities. Both nations need to be watched closely as they make their economic and political choices in the future, the Institute’s 2006 report says.

“Rising demand for energy, food and raw materials by 2.5 billion Chinese and Indians is already having ripple effects,” said Worldwatch President Christopher Flavin.

The report says that the past two years offered a worrisome preview of a future in which China and India follow the economic model of Western nations, notorious for their unchecked consumption patterns. The report notes that China’s economy has averaged a 9.5 per cent growth rate. India has rising car ownership levels and expanding highways, and is spending heavily on airports, roads and ports. Its use of oil has doubled since 1992.

The report’s authors also point a finger at the two nations for increasing demands on Africa’s forests and fisheries, flourishing export markets in soybeans and mineral ores from South America and Southeast Asia, and the loss of semi-skilled manufacturing jobs in Central America and Southeast Asia. As Chinese and Indian incomes rise, the use of foodstuffs, energy and raw materials will also continue to climb, the report forecasts.

Last week, the Earth Policy Institute (EPI), another Washington-based research group that has recently focused on increasing consumption patterns in Asia, said that if China’s economy continues to expand at its typical eight per cent a year, its income per person will reach the current US level in 2031.

To provide the roads, highways, and parking lots to house its growing vast fleet, China would have to pave an area equal to the land it now plants in rice, noted Lester Brown, an environmental researcher who also chairs the EPI. “The Western economic model — the fossil-fuel-based, auto-centred, throwaway economy — is not going to work for China. If it does not work for China, it will not work for India, which by 2031 is projected to have a population even larger than China’s,” Brown said.

In a book published last week, the veteran researcher said that the economic model of the United States and Europe, if repeated in China and India, will not work for the three billion other people in developing countries either. However, the Worldwatch Institute report acknowledges that European nations and the US are still by far the largest consumers of global resources.

The carbon dioxide emissions rate for the United States per person is still six times that of China and 20 times that of India. — IPS