Competition for strategic natural resources — including water, mineral ores and fossil fuels — has always played a significant role in shaping the terms of the international economic and political order. However, now that competition has intensified and it encompasses virtually all of Asia, where growing populations and rapid economic development over the past three decades have generated an insatiable appetite for severely limited supplies of key commodities.
Asia is the world’s most resource-poor continent, and overexploitation of the natural resources that it does possess has created an environmental crisis that is contributing to regional climate change. For example, the Tibetan Plateau, which contains the world’s third-largest store of ice, is warming at almost twice the average global rate, owing to the rare convergence of high altitudes and low latitudes — with potentially serious consequences for Asia’s freshwater supply.
In other words, three interconnected crises — a resource crisis, an environmental crisis and a climate crisis — are threatening Asia’s economic, social and ecological future. Population growth, urbanization and industrialization are exacerbating resource-related stresses, with some cities experiencing severe water shortages and degrading of the environment — as anyone who has experienced Beijing’s smog can attest. Fossil fuel and water subsidies have contributed to both problems.
Faced with severe supply constraints, Asian economies are increasingly tapping other continents’ fossil fuels, mineral ores and timber. However, water is extremely difficult — and prohibitively expensive — to import. And Asia has less fresh water per person than any continent other than Antarctica, and some of the world’s worst water pollution.
Likewise, food scarcity is a growing problem for Asian countries, with crop yields and overall food production growing more slowly than demand. At the same time, rising incomes are altering people’s diets, which now include more animal-based proteins, further compounding Asia’s food challenges.
The intensifying competition over natural resources among Asian countries is shaping resource geopolitics, including the construction of oil and gas pipelines. China has managed to secure new hydrocarbon supplies through pipelines from Kazakhstan and Russia. This option is not available to Asia’s other leading economies — Japan, India and South Korea — which are not contiguous with suppliers in Central Asia, Iran or Russia. These countries will remain dependent on oil imports from an increasingly unstable Persian Gulf.
Furthermore, China’s fears that hostile naval forces could hold its economy hostage by interdicting its oil imports have prompted it to build a massive oil reserve and to plan two strategic energy corridors in southern Asia. The corridors will provide a more direct transport route for oil and liquefied gas from Africa and the Persian Gulf, while minimizing exposure to sea lanes policed by the US Navy.
One such corridor extends 800km from the Bay of Bengal across Myanmar to southern China. In addition to gas pipelines — the first is scheduled to be completed this year — it will include a high-speed railroad and a highway from the Burmese coast to China’s Yunnan Province, offering China’s remote interior provinces an outlet to the sea for the first time.
The other corridor — work on which has been delayed, owing to an insurrection in Pakistan’s Baluchistan Province — is to stretch from the Chinese-operated port at Gwadar, near Pakistan’s border with Iran, through the Karakoram mountains to the landlocked, energy-producing Xinjiang Province. Notably, in giving China control of its strategic Gwadar port in February, Pakistan has permitted the Chinese government to build a naval base there.
Given the significant role that natural resources have historically played in global strategic relations — including driving armed interventions and full-scale wars — increasingly murky resource geopolitics threaten to exacerbate existing tensions among Asian countries. Rising dependence on energy imports has already been used to rationalize an increased emphasis on maritime power, raising new concerns about sea-lane safety and vulnerability to supply disruptions.
This partly explains the current tensions between China and Japan over their conflicting territorial claims to islands in the East China Sea, which occupy an area of only 7km2, but are surrounded by rich hydrocarbon reserves. Disputes in the South China Sea involving China and five of its neighbors — including Taiwan — and in southern Asia, are equally resource-driven.
While strategic competition for resources will continue to shape Asia’s security dynamics, the associated risks can be moderated if Asia’s leaders establish norms and institutions aimed at building rule-based cooperation. Unfortunately, little progress has been made in this area. For example, 53 of Asia’s 57 transnational river basins lack any water-sharing or cooperative arrangement.
Indeed, Asia is one of only two continents, along with Africa, where regional integration has yet to take hold, largely because political and cultural diversity, and historical animosities, have hindered institution-building. Strained political relations among most of Asia’s sub-regions make a region-wide security structure or more effective resource cooperation difficult to achieve.
This could have significant implications for Asia’s ostensibly unstoppable rise — and thus for the West’s supposedly inevitable decline. After all, Asian economies cannot sustain their impressive economic growth without addressing their resource, environmental and security challenges — and no single country can do it alone.
Brahma Chellaney is a professor of strategic studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs