Mood Hacking at The World Economic Forum

(Update: see "Revisiting Mood Hacking with Scents", 3 December 2009.)

We are all familiar with the aromas used by stores in the hopes of motivating consumer frenzy.  Walk into some establishments and you may feel as if you have been smacked with a fragrant bunch of flowers.  Or possibly a fragrant leather shoe.  Maybe this actually encourages people to spend money.  It usually just makes me sneeze.

But what if the general strategy of behavior modification via perfumes of one kind or another really does work?  At the 2008 World Economic Forum in Davos, there was an explicit attempt to influence discussions through the use of custom scents designed for the occassion.

Here is a short excerpt from "Davos Aromas Deodorize Subprime Stench, Charm Dimon, Kissinger", by A. Craig Copetas (Bloomberg News):

"I know a lot of people think this is foolish,'' says Toshiko Mori, chairwoman of Harvard University's architecture department and one of the WEF delegates who initiated the perfume project. ``But the global economy is in dire straits and we must improve the quality of human spirits. Perfuming is a powerful tool in a much broader discourse. The fragrances will help us reach economic and political solutions at Davos.''

Here is CNN's take: "Smelly Davos unveils new world odor."  Ha.

The reader might imagine a room full of national security professionals debating the merits and ethics of this "technology".  We see two camps emerge.  The first group is shocked -- shocked! -- that biochemical warfare is being brought indoors to induce in captains of industry and policy makers a mood of compromise.  The second group notes that all it took to hack the mood of Boris Yeltsin was an open bottle of vodka.  The latter strategy has, of course, been used for millennia.

Hacking a the mood of an entire room full of people at once is an interesting twist, though.  What happens when someone modifies airborne rhinoviruses to express neuroactive peptides?  (See my post on iGEM 2008: "Surprise -- the Future is Here Already".)  Science fiction gave us the answer long ago.  Isaac Asimov had his characters wearing anti-viral filters in their nostrils even in his early stories.  Seems like filters with sufficiently small pores might make it hard to breathe.  And what happens if you sneeze?  "Ouch!" or "Ewww", I imagine.

Anyway, how would we even know that mood hacking was occurring?  Aside from simply noting changes in behavior, or getting, um, wind of the threat via human intelligence, we would have to measure any chemical or biological weapon directly.  But before pulling out the Tricorder and identifying a threat, we would first have to be constantly monitoring our environment in order to get a baseline of environmental signals.  So, we have already struck out.  No such monitoring is really happening.  We are just cherry picking a few things that are easy to see.  Oh, and still no Tricorder.

If the mood altering mechanism was delivered via a virus, we would have to not just monitor the number of viruses of any given species in the air, but also be sequencing all of them, all the time.  Again, we are striking out.

I have a hard time imagining that viral mood hacking threats are going to show up any time soon, but then we have no means of knowing either way.  Perhaps such things are already about.  How can you be sure you aren't part of "The Giving Plague"?

Garage Biology Project: Melamine-detection Bugs

Worried about whether your yogurt is safe?  Drop in some of  Meredith Patterson's home-brew bugs and see if they turn green.  The AP has a short story about Patterson and DIYBio: "Amateurs are trying genetic engineering at home".  No surprise that it is a bit short on details.

This story made it as far (temporarily) as the front page of The Huffington Post, which I find interesting.  I wonder whether the editors put it there out of genuine interest or to scare the crap out of their readers.

It's only been eight years since I first speculated about garage biology (PDF), and only three since the topic appeared in Wired (Splice it yourself).  iGEM has only been around since 2004.  Biology, for the most part, remains Open (See, "Thoughts on Open Biology"):

As in 2000, I remain today most interested in maintaining, andenhancing, the ability to innovate.  In particular, I feel that safe and secure innovation is likely to be best achieved through distributed research and through distributed biological manufacturing.  By "Open Biology" I mean access to the tools and skills necessary to participate in that innovation and distributed economy.

I find myself a bit surprised to feel a bit surprised that this is this is all going just as I expected (PDF).  (Aside: if there isn't a name for that, there should be; I predicted X, and not only am I surprised that it is coming true, I am surprised to feel surprised that it is coming true...because I really believed it was going to come true.  I think.)  From the AP story:

[Patterson]  learned about genetic engineering by reading scientific papers and getting tips from online forums. She ordered jellyfish DNA for a green fluorescent protein from a biological supply company for less than $100. And she built her own lab equipment, including a gel electrophoresis chamber, or DNA analyzer, which she constructed for less than $25, versus more than $200 for a low-end off-the-shelf model.

Frankly, I don't know whether to feel relieved or uneasy.  That ambivalence will probably characterize my response to this technology from here on out.  Whether we like it or not, we are about to find out what role garage biology will play in our physical and economic security (Journal article, PDF).

Data: Definitive(?) Evidence of Amplification and Accelerated Warming at the Poles

The ongoing American Geophysical Union meeting is full of cheery news.  According to a report in the IHT, more than 2 trillion tons of landlocked ice have melted since 2003 in Greenland, Antarctica, and Alaska.  Of that, more than half occurred in Greenland, and satellite measurements confirm that the melting is accelerating.

The new results follow on James Hansen's earlier work based on data, rather than models, suggesting that both warming and sea level rise are likely happen faster than the IPCC consensus estimates (see "It's time to Invest in Water Wings"), because the IPCC models explicitly exclude the effect of ice sheet movement and landlocked ice melting.

It gets even better.  Reduced sea ice coverage is also now strongly affecting the thermal balance of the poles:

As sea ice melts, the Arctic waters absorb more heat in the summer, having lost the reflective powers of vast packs of ice. That absorbed heat is released into the air in the autumn. That has led to autumn temperatures in the last several years that are 6 degrees Fahrenheit to 10 degrees (3.5 degrees to 6 degrees) warmer than they were in the 1980s.

Warming of the land and sea are coupled: "The loss of sea ice warms the water, which warms the permafrost on nearby land in Alaska, thus producing methane," itself a potent greenhouse gas, according to Julienne Stroeve, a research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.  (See my previous posts: "Methane Time Bomb" and "Update".)

With respect to the anomolously high Arctic temperatures, The Independent's Steve Connor wonders "Has the Arctic melt passed the point of no return?":

The phenomenon, known as Arctic amplification, was not expected to be seen for at least another 10 or 15 years and the findings will further raise concerns that the Arctic has already passed the climatic tipping-point towards ice-free summers, beyond which it may not recover.

The coupling of land and sea warming constitute a feedback mechanism that threatens to create runaway warming and increased methane emissions, which will only make things worse.  Only more data will help resolve any remaining uncertainty.  While we gather that data, our time to fiddle is running out.

Cheery Reading: "WORLD AT RISK The Report of the Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism"

In case you haven't seen the headlines the lase couple of days, Bob Graham and Jim Talent say we are doomed.  Mostly.  Sort of.  Maybe?

Here is the page to download the report.  In summary, the commission predicts an attack using a weapon of mass destruction with in the next five years.  They are more worried about biological weapons than nuclear ones.

Despite the grim tone of most of the text, here is something useful to squawk back at Chicken Little:

...One should not oversimplify or exaggerate the threat of bioterrorism. Developing a biological weapon that can inflict mass casualties is an intricate undertaking, both technically and operationally complex. 

That is among the more optimistic statements in the entire document.

I caught Bob Graham on the Colbert Report last night, and the interview helped me figure out what has been bugging me about the language used by the report and its authors as they talk to the press.  No, not the part where Graham and Colbert -- two grown men in suit and tie -- used copies of the report like GI Joe figures in desktop combat (see 2:30 -- that brief interlude was enlightening in a different way):

The lightbulb went off when Graham said "The most important thing we can do is make sure that we, and the rest of the world, are locking down all the nuclear and biological material so that it is not capable of leaking into the hands of terrorists."

That sounds great, and the report goes on at length about securing BSL-3 and -4 facilities here in the US so that nasty bugs are kept behind locked doors, doors that are guarded by guys with visible guns.  That constitutes a particular kind of deterrence, which is fine.  As I have spent far too much of my life working in clean rooms trussed up in bunny suits, I can only feel sympathy for the folks who will have to deal with that security and suit up to work in the lab every day.  But those bugs are dangerous, and biosafety in those facilities is no joke.  The near-term threat is undoubtedly from bugs that already exist in labs.

But this is where things start to go off the rails for me.  Graham didn't have a lot of time with Colbert, but his language was disturbingly absolute.  I am concerned the Commission's views on biological technologies aredysfunctionally bipolar.  Here is what I mean: Even though the text of report reassures me that the people who actually put words on the page have a sense of how far and how fast biological technologies are proliferating (which I get to below), the language used by the official spokesman involves "locking down all the biological materials".  I worry that "locking down" anything might be construed in Washington DC, or by the populace, as constituting sufficient security measures.  See my article from last year "Laying the foundations for a bio-economy" for an update on what has happened as a result trying to "lock down" methamphetamine production in the US.  Short summary: There is more meth available on the streets, and the DEA acknowledges that its efforts have created an environment in which it actually has worse intelligence about who is making the drug and how it gets distributed.

Frankly, I haven't quite sorted out all of the things that bother me about the report, the way we talk about security in this country, and the inevitable spread of powerful biological technologies.  What follows are some additional notes and ruminations on the matter.   

Here is what the text of the report has to say about the threat from DNA synthesis technologies:

The only way to rule out the harmful use of advances in biotechnology would be to stifle their beneficial applications as well--and that is not a realistic option. Instead, the dual-use dilemma associated with the revolution in biology must be managed on an ongoing basis. As long as rapid innovations in biological science and the malevolent intentions of terrorists and proliferators continue on trajectories that are likely to intersect sooner or later, the risk that biological weapons pose to humanity must not be minimized or ignored.

Hmm...well, yes.  I'm glad they acknowledge the fact that in order to benefit from the technology it must be developed further, and that security through proscription will retard that innovation.  I am relieved that this part of the report's recommendations do not include measures I believe would be immediately counterproductive.  The authors later write:

The more that sophisticated capabilities, including genetic engineering and gene synthesis, spread around the globe, the greater the potential that terrorists will use them to develop biological weapons. The challenge for U.S. policymakers is to prevent that potential from becoming a reality by keeping dangerous pathogens--and the equipment, technology, and know-how needed to weaponize them--out of the hands of criminals, terrorists, and proliferant states. 

The charge in the last sentence sounds rather infeasible to me.  Anyway, the Commission then puts responsibility for security on the heads of scientists and engineers working in the life sciences: 

The choice is stark. The life sciences community can wait until a catastrophic biological attack occurs before it steps up to its security responsibilities. Or it can act proactively in its own enlightened self-interest, aware that the reaction of the political system to a major bioterrorist event would likely be extreme and even draconian, resulting in significant harm to the scientific enterprise.

...ACTION: The Department of Health and Human Services and Congress should promote a culture of security awareness in the life sciences community.

Members of the life sciences community--universities, medical and veterinary schools, nongovernmental biomedical research institutes, trade associations, and biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies--must foster a bottom-up effort to sensitize researchers to biosecurity issues and concerns. Scientists should understand the ethical imperative to "do no harm," strive to anticipate the potential consequences of their research, and design and conduct experiments in a way that minimizes safety and security risks.

(This bit sounds like the Commission heard from Drew Endy.)

...The currently separate concepts of biosafety and biosecurity should be combined into a unified conceptual framework of laboratory risk management. This framework should be integrated into a program of mandatory education and training for scientists and technicians in the life sciences field, whether they are working in the academy or in industry. Such training should begin with advanced college and graduate students andextend to career scientists. The U.S. government should also fund the development of educational materials and reference manuals on biosafety and biosecurity issues. At the same time, the responsibilities of laboratory biosafety officers should be expanded to include laboratory security and oversight of select agents, and all biosafety officers should be tested and certified by a competent government authority.

The phrase "culture of security awareness" appears frequently.  This creeps me out more than a bit, particularly given our government's recent exhortations to keep an eye on our neighbors.  You never know who might be a sleeper.  Or a sleep-walking bioterrorist.  I make this point not entirely in jest.  Who wants to live in such a paranoid culture?  Particularly when it is not at all clear that such paranoia makes us safer.

To be fair, I called for something not too dissimilar in 2003 in The Pace and Proliferation of Biological Technologies.  It only makes sense to keep an eye out for potential bioterror and bioerror, and we should have some sort of educational framework to make sure that people are aware of the potential hazards as they hack DNA.  But seeing that language in a report from a legislatively-established body makes me start imagining Orwellian propaganda posters on the walls of labs around the country.  Ick.  That is no way to foster communication and innovation.

On a different topic, here is something that opened my eyes. The report contains a story about a Russian -- someone in charge of weighing out uranium for his coworkers -- who was able to continuously steal small amounts of fissile materiel because the scales were officially recognized to be calibrated only to within 3%.  By withholding a little each time, he amassed a stash of 1.6 kg of "90 percent enriched uranium", while the official books showed no missing materiel.  Fortunately the fellow was caught, because while he was a clever thief he was a not-so-clever salesman.  As part of subsequent non-proliferation efforts, the US government paid for more accurate scales in order to prevent another incident of stealing "a bomb's worth of uranium, bit by bit".  Holy shit.

It is nice to hear that this sort of leak has been plugged for the nuclear threat.  I hope our government clearly understands that such plugs are few and far between for biological threats.

Update on Plans for GM Crop Research in Britain

Last year I pointed out the complexities of arguments about GM food through the continuing debate in Europe and the U.K. about animal feed.  The diminishing availability of GM-free feed grain could lead to significant shortages, which in turn could drastically reduce the amount of meat in European markets.  (See "Re-Inventing The Food Chain (or "On Food Prices, In Vitro Meat, and GM Livestock Feed")."

Now the Independent reports that the U.K. is considering protecting GM crop research from domestic protest and attack.  The government may go so far as to bring that research onto defense installations in order to protect it better, as suggested by Andrew Grice in a story provocatively titled "Government to defy critics with secret GM crop trials".

Here is one 'graph from the article:

Professor Tim Benton, research dean at [the Leeds University] Faculty of Biological Science, said yesterday: "We need to find a way to do crop trials in a safe way and to minimise the environmental risk. We cannot carry on for the next 20 or 30 years saying it's too scary, the public is too frightened, it is politically too dangerous. There is absolutely no way we can move towards a world with food security without using GM technology. The amount of food we need could double because the population is growing, climate change will reduce yields and we will take land out of food production for biofuels."

Methane Time Bomb Update

Following on its coverage of an expedition to Russia's northern coast that found methane deposits leaking through melting permafrost into the water and atmosphere, The Independent has news that a British expedition to the seas off the coast of Norway has discovered "hundreds of methane plumes".  From the article:

Yesterday, researchers on board the British research ship the James Clark Rosssaid they had counted about 250 methane plumes bubbling from the seabed in an area of about 30 square miles in water less than 400 metres (1,300 feet) deep off the west coast of Svalbard. They have also discovered a set of deeper plumes at depths of about 1,200 metres at a second site near by.

The story notes that "It is likely that methane emissions off Svalbard have been continuous for about 15,000 years – since the last ice age."  I think it is fascinating that these plumes have only just been discovered.  This means the methane budget of the atmosphere is probably still quite poorly understood, even as it is clear new sources of methane are opening due to climate change.

Cleaning out some bookmarks

In no particular order of importance:

  • Metbolix has announced it has modified switchgrass to produce PHA.  The "Mirel history" page on the website suggests there are 7 enzymes in the pathway.  An independent Life Cycle Analysis of Mirel, "Conducted by Dr. Bruce Dale, professor of Chemical Engineering at Michigan State University, determined that production of Mirel reduces the use of nonrenewable energy by more than 95% and provides a 200% reduction in greenhouse gases (GHG) compared to production of conventional petroleum-based plastics. concluded."  (PDF Press release)
  • Here is an essay from Jeremy Haft (WSJ via Huffington Post) that opines the US has a permanent competitive edge over China.  Really?
  • A couple of posts from Wired on saving our economy with a cleantech/greentech bubble.  'Cuz bubbles really keep us afloat.  Until they pop.  And we write $700 billion dollar checks.  Right... 

"Methane time bomb"

The Independent carried a story on Tuesday that should alarm anyone interested in climate change (anthropogenic or otherwise).

"Exclusive: The methane time bomb", by Steve Connor, describes a just concluded methane sampling expedition along "the entire length of Russia's northern coast".  Interested readers should just follow the link to get the whole story.  To summarize: warming waters are releasing so much methane from previously trapped deposits that in some areas the seas are literally foaming as gas bubbles up from below.  Previous sampling cruises in the area have detected increasing concentrations of dissolved methane in water, but apparently methane deposits are escaping at an increasing rate.  Here is a good number from the article to keep in mind: the arctic region as a whole has warmed 4 degrees C in the last decade.

Since the release is caused by melting permafrost, there isn't much we can do to stop it.  So, given that methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, we might want to give some thought to attempting a fix.

Jamais Cascio has been following this threat for quite a while, and extends here his thoughts on dealing with atmospheric methane using geo-engineering using bio-engineered microbes.

Jamais writes:

The most conservative estimates I've seen start at around 70 billion metric tons of methane -- the equivalent in greenhouse terms to 1.6 trillion metric tons of CO2. As a point of comparison, the total annual greenhouse footprint in the US is about 7 billion tons; globally, the annual footprint is about 30 billion tons.

If this methane leak continues to increase, we may be facing a disastrous result that no amount of renewable energy, vegetarianism, and bicycling will help. This is one scenario in which the deployment of geoengineering is over-determined, probably needing to remain in place for quite a while as we try to remove the methane (or, at worst, wait for it to cycle out naturally over the course of a decade or so). It's also a scenario that might require large-scale use of bioengineering.

That would be, to put it lightly, an extremely hard project.  And we are nowhere near ready to start.  Happy Thursday.

More on China's Economy, Food Production, and Food Demand

Over the next two decades the Panda may begin to feel peckish. A hard look at China's food production and resource availability suggests more difficult times ahead. And this is just one potential problem. Throughout my travels and reading over the past 5 years, I have noticed that people with lots of experience on the ground in China question whether the current pace of development is sustainable.

The upshot of all this may be that the easy gains have been made. In the years to come, China will be faced with extremely hard choices about how to simultaneously maintain economic growth, clean up its environment, and feed its population, particularly when it appears that most of the expected increase in food demand due to rising incomes has yet to be realized. So, following up on last week's post about The Future of China's Economy, here are a few more thoughts that frame future potential stumbling blocks.

Running Out of Cheap Labor, and Coming Home for L.A.'s "Clean" Air

John Pomfret, formerly the Beijing Bureau Chief for the Washington Post, definitely has a lot of experience in country. In "A Long Wait at the Gate to Greatness", he asks, "Is China really going to be another superpower?"

His short answer is, "I doubt it." In more depth:

It's not that I'm a China-basher, like those who predict its collapse because they despise its system and assume that it will go the way of the Soviet Union. I first went to China in 1980 as a student, and I've followed its remarkable transformation over the past 28 years. I met my wife there and call it a second home. I'm hardly expecting China to implode. But its dream of dominating the century isn't going to become a reality anytime soon.

Too many constraints are built into the country's social, economic and political systems. For four big reasons -- dire demographics, an overrated economy, an environment under siege and an ideology that doesn't travel well -- China is more likely to remain the muscle-bound adolescent of the international system than to become the master of the world.

Pomfret goes through the same sort of list of potential stumbles that I compiled for last week's post, and adds a few more. He notes that that population control policy has produced an inverted population pyramid, which requires a smaller, young population cohort to support a larger, older cohort as the latter leave the workforce. This while life expectancy has more than doubled in the last fifty years. Thus the expectation is that the workforce will shrink over the coming decades, labor costs will rise, and more of that labor will be put toward supporting non-working elders.

Pomfret also observes that:

One important nuance we keep forgetting is the sheer size of China's population: about 1.3 billion, more than four times that of the United States. China should have a big economy. But on a per capita basis, the country isn't a dragon; it's a medium-size lizard, sitting in 109th place on the International Monetary Fund's World Economic Outlook Database, squarely between Swaziland and Morocco. China's economy is large, but its average living standard is low, and it will stay that way for a very long time, even assuming that the economy continues to grow at impressive rates.

Unlike many observers, he doesn't discount the potential drag on economic growth from pollution, leading off with a personal anecdote:

When my family and I left China in 2004, we moved to Los Angeles, the smog capital of the United States. No sooner had we set foot in southern California than my son's asthma attacks and chronic chest infections -- so worryingly frequent in Beijing -- stopped. When people asked me why we'd moved to L.A., I started joking, "For the air."

Pomfret is perplexed about why Westerners seem to be ignoring pollution's ~10% hit to the Chinese GDP: "Somehow, though, the effect this calamity is having on China's rise doesn't quite register in the West." As I discussed in the earlier post, this shortsightedness confuses me, too, particularly when you combine the effects of pollution with the demands on domestic water and land to provide food for a hungry population.

Missing Food Demand

In a report last year from the Economic Research Service of the USDA, Fred Gale and Kuo Huang suggest that China may face increasing difficulties in meeting domestic food demand. I find their argument quite compelling and will later state it even more firmly than they do.

Gale and Huang observe that growth in food demand has, unexpectedly, not kept pace with overall economic growth. Here is the conundrum: "Given the responsiveness of food demand to income growth, China's rapid growth of 9-10 percent per year suggests that its demand for food is growing faster than its production capacity. ...How is it that China's surging income growth has not pushed its demand for food beyond its domestic production capacity?"

The main factor the authors identify is that while a small, wealthy fractionof the population now evidently has enough to eat, and thus spends additional income on quality rather than quantity, a large majority of consumers have yet to fill their bellies.

The underlying cause for lagging food demand is not surprising once you think about it. Because economic benefits, in particular income gains, disproportionately go those with already high incomes, and because those with high incomes tend to spend on quality rather than quantity, the total volume of food consumed by the Chinese population has risen only slowly. The authors note that:

...Expenditures by the top tier of households--China's emerging class of professionals and entrepreneurs -- have grown at double-digit rates. Food expenditures were nearly stagnant for the bottom 20 percent of urban households. Food expenditures by rural households grew 2.6 percent annually.

...Income growth for low-income urban and rural households--the majority of China's households--was well below GDP growth. ...Average income for the lowest decile of urban households actually declined slightly between 2000 and 2003.

This suggests to Gale and Huang that, "Food consumption and income growth patterns may explain how China has been able to remain self-sufficient in most food items." The authors stop their argument here, but I think they could go further.

The Still-Hungry ~1 Billion

The lag between GDP growth and food consumption has important implications for future increases in food demand.

Based on the statistics compiled by Gale and Huang, it looks to me like more than 90% of the Chinese population has a per capita annual income below 10,000 Yuan. This is an interesting figure for considering future food demand because Gale and Huang also demonstrate that pork consumption in China continues to rise as a function of income until about 10,000 Yuan. Poultry and seafood consumption also rise strongly as a function of income, but notably don't saturate like pork at 10,000 Yuan. More meat consumption requires more grain and more water to raise the animals (see a previous post, "China and Future Resource Demands").

Here is where I think the argument could be made more forcefully.  As best I can make out, what all the above means is that most of the increase in food demand we might expect from rising incomes in China has yet to be realized; more than 80% of the population is, "Still at income levels where they demand increased quantities of many foods as their income rises."

So where is China going to get all this food? One answer is imports, another is to go offshore to buy or rent farmland (see the "China and Future Resource Demands" post), and yet another is to push domestic production. But the latter may be difficult.

"Who Will China Feed?"

This is the question asked by Fred Gale and Bryan Lohmar in an essay in Amber Waves, the USDA magazine. They elaborate their surprise at China's ability to feed its population: "While China has emerged as the world's leading importer of soybeans, vegetable oil, cotton, wool, rubber, and animal hides, it has been surprisingly successful at meeting the basic food needs of its population of more than 1.3 billion people, and it has stepped up as a major food exporter."  (They make no mention of the income inequality and consequent food spending gap explored above.)

Given the pace of growth and limited resources, they ask, "How long can China sustain this momentum?"

China imports only small amounts of premium-grade rice, minor amounts of wheat in most years, and no corn. China has maintained agricultural self-sufficiency in grains as it carries out the world's largest and fastest urbanization and industrialization. Economic development is increasing competition for scarce resources in China, but growing incomes are allowing most consumers to increase consumption of fruit, vegetables, and livestock products.

China has become a significant food exporter by ramping up production in many sectors and gaining world market share. Indeed, China has been a net food exporter for most of the last three decades. China dominates world markets in a variety of products areas, including garlic, apples, apple juice, mandarin oranges, farm-raised fish and shrimp, and vegetables. At times, it seems that China has suspended the law of scarcity by boosting production in many sectors and selling at low prices without having to sacrifice production in other sectors.

One way to look at this is that China is exporting high value "food products", not staples that the majority of Chinese themselves consume. This strategy contributes to the trade surplus, but the use of land to grow crops for export must clearly be balanced with domestic demand for staples. This balance also points to the fact there is some room for moving crop land now used for exports back into production to satisfy domestic demand.

Here are two key paragraphs on how China has increased its food production yields:

Investments in research and development raised the quality of inputs and the efficiency of their use over the past two decades. Research into improved varieties and quality of seeds surged after the late 1970s. By the turn of the century, China had more agricultural researchers than any other country, and a larger budget for public sector agricultural research than any developing country. Fertilizer quality in China also has improved over the past two decades, as farmers move away from applying pure nitrogen fertilizer to applying more nitrogen-phosphorous- potassium blends. China has been importing breeding animals--which are often crossed with domestic breeds--to improve efficiency of weight gain, improve disease resistance, and raise milk output. The government has offered subsidies to farmers for dairy herd improvement for several years.

China today is the world's largest agricultural producer and consumer. With an estimated 10 percent of world land resources and 6 percent of world water resources, China produces 30 percent of the world's rice, 20 percent of the world's corn, a fourth of the world's cotton, an estimated 37 percent of the world's fruit and vegetables, and half of the world's pork. For most products, China's world share of production is close to or exceeds its 20-percent share of world population. China, however, has exploited the means of coaxing food and fiber out of a limited natural resource base to the extent that additional gains will be more difficult than in the past.

Gale and Lohmar go on to discuss water and soil quality issues, fertilizer and pesticide use, and industrial pollution, while briefly addressing labor costs:

China has been able to maintain low-cost production in international agricultural markets largely because of low labor costs. Historically, Chinese farms have raised large amounts of output from small plots by using labor-intensive production strategies, such as growing multiple crops per year, intercropping, and growing vegetables in courtyards. But hundreds of millions of rural workers have found nonfarm employment over the last two decades. The flow of labor from rural areas enabled China's industry and cities to boom, while wage growth was relatively stagnant for much of the last two decades.

China's rapid economic expansion appears to have finally exhausted the pool of under-employed workers. Since 2003, wages have been rising at a double-digit pace. The dwindling pool of available rural workers is resulting in increased mechanization of harvesting and planting. Anecdotal evidence also suggests that intensive agricultural practices, like double-cropping, transplanting seedlings by hand, and small-scale hog production, have decreased due to labor shortages and high wages.

So, as John Pomfret suggested in his piece in the Washington Times Post (!), labor costs are already affecting food production. But the bigger issue is in trying to identify where, exactly, future gains in production are going to come from.  Rough estimates of the probable increase in demand give some context for the magnitude of the problem.

Returning to the correlation of meat consumption and income: It appears from FAO and USDA data that China is bound to eat more meat, especially pork, as incomes continue to rise.  Growing meat for human consumption creates a big lever in water and grain markets.  Producing a kilo of pork requires approximately three kilos of grain, and producing a kilo of beef requires about eight kilos of grain.  Based on the data in Gale and Huang, in appears that as income rises from 3000 to 10,000 Yuan, pork consumption increases by about 50%, to ~23 kg, which will require about 70 kg of grain.  This in addition to the ~30% increase in grain products (~6 kg) directly purchased by households as incomes rise over that range.  Fish and poultry demand about doubles, too, from ~8 to ~16 kg per capita, but estimating the additional grain consumption here is hard.  I'll hand wave and make a low-ball estimate that it will take only another 16 kg of grain to feed the the fish and poultry.

Adding this all together, that is an additional per capita  increase in grain demand of more than 90 kg.  Here is the kicker: that number appears to hold for at least 500 million people, perhaps as many as a billion.  That amounts to at least 45 million tonnes (metric!) of grain, perhaps as much as 90 million tonnes.  The Chinese population would then still be consuming only about 80% as much animal protein per capita as Europeans, and only a little over half as much as us gluttons in the U.S.

China produces about 500 million tonnes of grain per year (see the USDA ERS China Ag and Economic data page), so supplying increased meat demand with domestic grain supplies would require a (very rough) increase of between 10 and 20% in total yield.  That doesn't necessarily sound like much -- I actually expected the increase to be a larger percentage of current harvests -- and might be accomplished by breeding, genetic modification, and better farming practices.  But as detailed in my earlier posts, China is losing both arable land and usable water.  With only 7% of the globe's arable land to work with (ignoring losses to due climate change and prior poor farming practices), the country is going to have to work very hard indeed to squeeze more grain out of those limited resources.

That leaves imports, which means competing on the world commodity markets for food.  In combination with rising labor costs at home, all this points to rising domestic prices and rougher going for the Chinese economy.