FEATURE: Asia: The Big Questions - Food and Fuel

Asia struggles with the reality that it has only four per cent of the world's oil, but it uses more than one third of the global oil supplies.

In a series of reports, Radio Australia's associate editor for the Asia Pacific, Graeme Dobell, looks at the big questions facing Asia.

The second question: Can Asia get the food and fuel to feed its people and build its future?

Graeme Dobell

Last Updated: Fri, 26 Jun 2009 10:45:00 +1000

They are the basic human questions: Is there enough food? And is their enough fuel for life and work?

For Asia, the context for these eternal issues is changing. Global recession now sits beside issues of climate change and global warming and new doubts about the capability or even reliability of markets.

The linked issues of food and fuel are asking Asia some big questions about its future, says Strategic analyst Professor Alan Dupont.

"I think it's to do with the growing perception, that the world is going to be facing a series of resource crises," he said.

"We've talked about energy and food but it's also water. These are the key elements that have sustained our civilisations and societies for hundreds and thousands of years. Suddenly for the first time in human history we are starting to be concerned about running out of some of these key commodities or having to pay much higher prices which some countries can't afford. And that means that market mechanisms are not going to deliver the solutions to these problems.

"Getting from this era of reliance on fossil fuels to cleaner energy resources means there's going to be lots of trade-offs, there's going to be a lot of costs and many developing countries don't feel they can afford that. Hence they're going out and doing something we haven't seen for hundreds of years, which is a form of energy colonialism, of food colonialism for want of a better word, where countries are buying up resources, in poorer countries usually, exclusively for their own use."

Asian governments, and their societies, are still grappling with the claim that business-as-usual will no longer work - that the old ways can't provide all the new answers. Climate change questions are driving fears about food and fuel, but individual countries are having a hard time deciding how they'll be hit.

That lack of national answers points to the importance of a study just released by the Asian Development Bank, which says South-East Asia is highly vulnerable to climate change and is already suffering its effects. The Development Bank even offers an estimate of the price of a failing to act. The price of not acting for the four largest Southeast Asian countries - Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam - is put at nearly seven percent of their GDP over this century.

The former head of Singapore's National Environment Agency, Simon Tay, who is chairman of Singapore's Institute of International Affairs, says that sort of work goes beyond moral arguments and calls for action on economic grounds.

"That kind of study says to ASEAN countries, this is not a moral issue for you to help the world as a whole or bail the west out," he said.

"This is really about your own fundamental survival. I can tell you, Bangkok is low lying, Jakarta is low lying parts of Malaysia are low lying, so is Singapore low lying. People don't realise what's at stake, a true disruption of the way we've lived, a true disruption of business as usual."

That fear of a great disruption is feeding into a new focus on food security. For the moment, the immediate reality of global recession has taken away the headline focus on rising food prices and fears about the reliability of international food markets.

But Asian policy makers are thinking deeply about the food dilemma, as expressed by Professor Alan Dupont.

"The food issue for Asia is that the region is simply not going to be able to produce enough food to feed its burgeoning populations, unless they change their approach to agriculture and they way they do business in providing food," he said.

"The huge increases in food prices we saw last year, which really had a major impact on Asia - we're talking about rice doubling and tripling in price and so on - in my view is a harbinger of the food future the region is likely to face.

"It's very interesting that a number of countries in the region, countries like China and South Korea, are buying land in Africa for example, to grow food to be exported back to China and Korea. Now that has enormous implications not only for the supply and demand of food globally and in the market but it's also bringing political tensions."

And just as with food, questions about reliability of energy supplies must have political implications. Competition for energy is already one of the looming issues that will define the relationship between Asia's two giants - China and India.

China and India already suffer because both countries don't have enough usable water in the right places. Climate change adds to the constant existing pressures from industry and urbanisation. And while India and China may be facing off over oil and gas, they may also compete for the same renewable resource - water.

Is all this a recipe for water wars or conflict over food and fuel? Initially, perhaps, the real pressures will be inside states rather than between nations. Weak states will be even weaker if they lose out in the resources race, says Singapore's Simon Tay.

"I think that before wars, we'll see tensions, and tension signs are already there," he said.

"I think that one of the first barriers will be refugees. Some people already argue that we are seeing the first, you can call them climate refugees, whether it's Bangladesh or the Rohingya in Myanmar, these kind of problems are starting to surface.

"It depends how you classify it. Army or military conflict? I don't know. I think it will come.

"By the time it happens though, it's kind of a lag indicator, we will actually see economic tensions, territorial contestation first, and then refugees and other human beings bearing the brunt before state security will be imperilled."

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