Why China Can’t Grow Enough Food

I think one of the interesting things about how you talk about China and the environment is that the environment does tie into the economy and many other ways in a very real tangible way, so Tell us about that because I thought China was you know, it's a very green country. They're making all this solar panels They're gonna be carbon neutral by 2060 they say So China's doing great on the environment, right? No, no, that's just part of the the Chinese narrative that they're trying to sell to gullible outsiders to avoid Criticism avoid having to do anything really meaningful about addressing their environmental problems so I'll just sort of give you some background But to get us started and feel free to you know, interrupt me and dig in on certain things China's a big country has a lot of people and always has had a lot of people and Let's start with water water is is very important if you're gonna feed now a billion plus people It takes a lot of a lot of grain a lot of rice a lot of other things But this has always been the case in in in China going back thousands of years They've always had a robust population and they've always needed a lot of water for feeding that population so There are records going back to 3,000 years about building dikes building water transfer irrigation type projects The Great Canal the so-called Great Canal which connects the south to the north because the the major two major rivers and in China and in between are the Growing areas, especially up north. So this north to south canal was built 1,500 years ago. They were originally they keep trying to improve it But so let's let's fast forward to the the modern era the communist era Mao wanted to industrialize the country and he wanted to be self-sufficient in in grain, so they speeded up their efforts to Build irrigation Canals I speeded up their efforts To get water from the south to the to the north There were three reasons really for building lots of canals and in the modern area Dams, I mean they had a traditional problem of flooding. I mean on the Yangtze River There's a famous flood in the 1930s Killed four million people So there's that they needed to get water for Urban areas as it became industrialized and they needed water massive amounts of water in the central and northern parts of the country to Grow grain basically and Eventually as they became a little bit richer Grow enough grain to feed cattle so they could have meat So they they would do things like in in the 50s you all know about the the great famine In late 50s well Mao had decided that he wanted to Industrialize pretty quickly, so he's building trying to build steel forging and Mills all across the country, so they cut down all the trees in China to feed those and they In used Corvae labor basically slave labor to build a massive number of irrigation and dikes there's a interesting factoid That when they were trying to use manual labor Because they didn't have the machinery yet in the 1950s to build canals dikes roads dams They used basically manual labor and in one period in the mid 1950s They they enlisted you know hundreds of thousands of people they moved they claimed Enough rock and earth to build a highway Hundred feet wide and three feet deep from China to the moon. That's that's a lot of material They did with human human hands anyway So they they industrialized they urbanized they needed to get water to both Urban populations and to the agricultural sector They have this north to south water project which moves Last one of the statistics I saw 25 Million cubic 25 square kilometers of water from the south to the north which I Can't do the math. It's pretty it's a lot of water So there's that In the course of this they for instance use a lot of fertilizer To irrigate lands in the north they use too much they irrigated too much something like 20 percent 15 to 20 percent of their land that's available for growing crops is Been basically ruined by overuse of Irrigated water and Fertilizer so using like chemical fertilizers that are damaging or what? Yeah. Yeah their productivity of their agriculture is You know 30 40 percent below Western Agricultural output Why is that like that's that's way lower really different Well, the quality of their water is pretty bad Eighty percent to ninety percent of the groundwater in China is unsuitable for human consumption One there's a historian of the ecology of modern China who says a lot of the lakes and Some of the rivers look like green paint Because they're so polluted So you have these huge internal pollution problems What if water if the 80% of the water is not safe for human consumption ground of groundwater But that's a big problem if the groundwater is right But you also like you can't or shouldn't be using that for crops, right? Well, they think it's suitable for for crops And and are they right? Well, I know like even in in the u.s There are different standards for water safe for human consumption and water that you put on the field Right, but I it's it's sounding like because of how polluted the water is they might be stretching What they're not using the same standards the u.s. Is using right?