Asia's Resource Scramble by Brahma C 3/4/2013
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. But now that competition has intensified, as it
encompasses virtually all of Asia, where growing populations and rapid economic
development over the last 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 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. But 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.
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. But 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 United
States Navy.
One such corridor
extends 800 kilometers from the Bay of Bengal across Burma 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 – will 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 threatens 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 seven square kilometers, but are surrounded by rich hydrocarbon reserves.
Disputes in the South China Sea involving China and five of its neighbors, 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, together with
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,
Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy
Research, is the author of Asian Juggernaut, Water: Asia’s New
Battleground, and the forthcoming Water, Peace, and War: Confronting the
Global Water Crisis.
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