This story today in the Washington Post. "Booming China Devouring Raw Materials: Producers and Suppliers Struggle to Feed a Voracious Appetite," illustrates the econimic shifts of the 21st century as well as anything I've read recently. Some quotes from a lengthy story:
NEWCASTLE, Australia -- Four miles off Nobbys Head, a spit of land jutting into the Pacific like a beckoning finger, 34 bulk freight ships sit anchored in involuntary vigil, pounded by ceaseless wind. They are waiting their turn to proceed to the wharf and load coal for power plants in northeast Asia. Waiting for at least two weeks.Posted by Marcia Oddi at May 21, 2004 07:40 AMAt its worst in March, the queue stretched to 56 ships. People on land took to driving to a lookout point for amusement, counting the hulks marooned off their shores by the vagaries of global trade.
The immediate reason for the seagoing traffic jam is that the rail system cannot handle the demand at the world's largest coal port. The more meaningful explanation goes far beyond Newcastle: What is happening is a ripple effect from the ascendant economic force of China, whose seemingly insatiable demand for raw materials is reshaping commodities markets worldwide and straining the systems that move goods on land and sea.
The China Syndrome, as it known, explains why as many as one-fifth of the bulk freighters in the world are effectively unavailable on any given day and why the cost of moving bulk freight has more than doubled in just over a year. The same ships that sit stranded outside Newcastle, or at iron ore ports in Brazil, India and western Australia, must line up again for as long as three weeks to unload at congested Chinese ports such as Qingdao and Ningbo.
The construction frenzy that is crowning China's cities with skyscrapers and laying the works for modern industry has transformed it from a minor consumer of raw materials into a country that -- according to its official statistics -- absorbed roughly half the world's cement production last year, one-third of its steel, one-fifth of its aluminum and nearly one-fourth of its copper. Last year China eclipsed Japan to become the world's second-largest importer of oil after the United States.