BIT High-Tech Ag Advantage

Affirmative

1AC — High-Tech Ag Advantage

Current Chinese Ag Causes Enviormental degradation- tipping point is near and sustainable ag tech is key Dearing ’15 John Dearing is Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Southampton. He was a recipient of the Murchison Award (2014), given by the Royal Geographical Society in recognition for publications contributing to the understanding of environmental change.(John Dearing, 2-26-2015, "China farming boom has left ecosystems in danger of total collapse," Conversation, find at: http://theconversation.com/china-farming-boom-has-left-ecosystems-in-danger-of-total-collapse-38058) ZVChina’s push for more intense farming has kept its city dwellers well-fed and helped lift millions of rural workers out of poverty. But it has come at a cos t. Ecosystems in what should be one of the country’s most fertile region have already been badly damaged – some beyond repair – and the consequences will be felt across the world . This is part of a long-running trade-off between rising levels of food production and a deteriorating environment, revealed in recent research I conducted with colleagues from China and the UK. Yields of crops and fish have risen over the past 60 years at several locations we studied in Anhui, Jiangsu and Shanghai Provinces in eastern China. But these are parallelled by long-term trends in poorer air and water quality, and reduced soil stability. You may ask if this a bad thing. After all, increasing agricultural productivity has been one of the factors responsible for lifting millions of rural Chinese out of poverty. Does it really matter that the natural environment has taken a bit of a hit? Well yes. For agriculture and aquaculture to be sustainable from one generation to the next, the natural processes that stabilise soils, purify water or store carbon have to be maintained in stable states. These natural processes represent benefits for society, known as ecosystem services.bThroughout the latter half of the last century, these services were being lost relatively slowly through the cumulative, everyday actions of individual farmers. But the problems accelerated in the 1980s when farmers began to use more intensive methods, especially artificial fertilisers – and again after 2004 when subsidies were introduced. Worryingly, in some localities, the slow deterioration has turned into a rapid downward spiral. Some aquatic ecosystems have dropped over tipping points into new, undesirable states where clear lakes suddenly become dominated by green algae with losses of high-value fish. These new states are not just detrimental to the continued high-level production of crops and fish but are very difficult and expensive to restore .These natural processes are degraded and destabilised to the point that they cannot be depended upon to support intensive agriculture in the near future . The whole region is losing its ability to withstand the impact of extreme events, from typhoons to global commodity prices.BIT is key for US-China ag cooperation Yongqi, 15Writer for China Daily (Hu, 9-23-15 "China and US to focus on agriculture and service," China Daily, Hu Yongqi is a writer for China Daily News, find at: http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/2015xivixitus/2015-09/23/content_21959003.htm) ZVThe b ilateral i nvestment t reaty between China and US have made substantial progress and the bilateral trade will focus on ag ricultural and service sectors , said a senior American official on Tuesday. Michael Froman, the US trade representative and principal advisor and negotiator on international trade and investment of US President Obama, revealed the progress of BIT negotiations and the forthcoming focus of China-US trade at the Asian Architecture Conference hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Froman said the US and China had important progress in the negotiations of bilateral investment treaty over the past 20 months and saw China's efforts to offer a

revised negative list by senior Chinese officials. "However we still have substantial distance from making an agreement during President Xi's visit," he said, Froman said a peaceful rise of China is not only beneficial to China itself but the globe as China is changing dramatically. He said the focus of trade will change in near future as the demand of China for bulk commodities has declined. On the trading flows, Froman saw real opportunities to expand US exports to China across the border by removing tariffs on manufactured products. He had strategic dialogues with Chinese counterparts in agricultural goods that will help boost agricultural trade between the two biggest economies on the planet. The US has a good reputation in global service industry and will have more cooperation and service trade with China in the future, Froman said. "We will use every opportunity to address these issues through dialogues, greater interactions between our leaders. Later this week, President Xi Jinping will visit Washington and we'll have an opportunity to discuss many positions. This is an important moment for China-US relations , but even more important moment for China's economic transition," said Froman. Froman said overinvestment in property and heavy industry created overcapacity and market volatility , making China's current model unsustainable for next three decades before China accelerates transitions from investment-led to consumer-let growth. The US has encouraging China to accelerate market-based reforms and greater openness to trade and investments, he added. Actually the bilateral trade has increased steadily as a small and medium-sized enterprises made their contributions. Bernard Bailey, Chairman and CEO of Authentix that only has 200 employees, said his company has operations and business in Shanghai by transferring more of their work to China. "My company has grown rapidly in China and is tremendously welcomed by the Chinese government to boost bilateral trade," Bailey said. "And I hope the bilateral trade and investment agreement, if signed shortly, will boost the business of our company."

China wants sustainable High tech Ag- BIT gets it done Yap ’12 Reporter for The Wall Street Journal, with a focus on China's banking, finance and economy(Chuin-Wei Yap, 2-14-2012, "On the Farm: Where China Runs a Trade deficit with the U.S.”, WSJ, find at: http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2012/02/14/on-the-farm-where-china-runs-a-trade-deficit-with-the-u-s/)ZVAgricultural policy has lately proved a tough row to hoe for the U.S. and China — the world’s largest agriculture exporter and the world’s largest producer, respectively. There was an unexpected spat over animal feed last June, and lately top Chinese officials have been downplayingthe country’s need for U.S. corn. But at least for Vice President Xi Jinping’s visit to the U.S. this week, China is pursuing a detente in the farm fight. China is keen to cooperate with the U.S. in food security, sustainable agriculture , agricultural trade, and agricultural science and technology, China’s agriculture minister Han Changfu said in an extensive interview with the official Xinhua news agency publishedon his ministry’s website Monday, the same day Mr. Xi flew to Washington for the start of his five-day trip. Mr. Han, who is accompanying Xi on the trip, did not mention the trade spat over distillers’ dried grains, or China’s resistance to U.S. corn, but he did share some data that might explain China’s resistance to more agricultural imports from the U.S.: In 2010, China imported $18.6 billion worth of agricultural products, becoming the U.S.’s largest destination for crop exports. Meanwhile, Chinese agricultural exports to the U.S. totaled just $5.8 billion. The U.S. is China’s third-largest agricultural export market. In other words, unlike in most other economic sectors, China runs a large deficit in agricultural trade with the U.S. That imbalance rankles Chinese agriculture officials, who often bring it up during bilateral discussions on further liberalizing the trade, according to a person familiar with the matter. The fact that Mr. Xi is planning to visit Iowa this week is an acknowledgment of the importance of the farming sector in the bilateral relationship. Several signs point to agriculture’s rapid ascent as policy priority as Xi prepares to take China’s top job. The bilateral corn trade isgrowing at a steady clip. The U.S. Grains Council has commissioned a study showing the animal feed trade growing despite the antidumping contretemps. And U.S. pork exports are expected to be another big market. Twenty-seven years ago, Mr. Xi led a delegation to Muscatine, Iowa, to deepen his understanding of pig farming. On Thursday, Xi’s visit will coincide with the first U.S.-China Agricultural Symposium in Des Moines. Iowa is the U.S.’s largest corn producing state, and China needs corn. By the time this week is over, the world’s

most important bilateral relationship may see agricultural trade turn ing from a nettlesome bog to fertile ground.

US-Sino cooperation solves Ag collapse and warming- both risk extinction Hongzhou 15 – (Zhang Hongzhou is an Associate Research Fellow with the China Programme at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; 10/13/15, “China-US Climate Change Cooperation: Beyond Energy,” The Diplomat, http://thediplomat.com/2015/10/china-us-climate-change-cooperation-beyond-energy/, Accessed 7/11/16, HWilson)

In seeking potential areas to expand Sino-U.S. climate change cooperation, agriculture offers great potential. For starters, agriculture is both a major contributor to and victim of climate change. On the one hand, while the exact contribution of the agricultural and related sectors to total greenhouse gas emission remains debatable, studies show that emissions generated by agricultural and related sector activities could be much higher than the public perceives : The overall food system could contribute 25-50 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, reducing agriculture’s GHG emission should be central to limiting climate change. On the other hand, agricultural production and the food system are highly vulnerable to climate change. Certainly, global warming is not uniformly problematic – it could lead to improved productivity in certain tropical regions and extend the cropping period or allow multiple harvests in temperate zones. For the world as whole, however, climate change poses a dire threat to agricultural production and global food security , an assertion widely supported by findings from numerous studie s. Climate change will trigger or exacerbate global food insecurity, which might eventually lead to hunger, famine, social unrest, the rise of terrorism, and refugees. Next, as the biggest agricultural producers and traders, the U.S. and China are also among the world’s top agricultural emitters. This highlights the critical role the two countries have in reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the farm sector. Moreover, unlike Canada and Russia, where agriculture may well benefit from global warming, the impacts of climate change on the agricultural sectors of both China and the United States are negative. Extreme weather brings uncertainty to future food production and threatens food security. China and United States are already deeply locked in the food-climate nexus, given their strong agricultural ties. Those close ties bring both opportunities and challenges to the efforts of the two countries to deal with climate change. On the one hand, given that China’s farm sector is heavily reliant on fertilizers, pesticides, and other chemical inputs and is dominated small household farming, importing soybeans, corn, and other agricultural products from the United States, apart from contributing to China’s food security, allows China to implement its afforestation and land restoration plans, which are important steps in reducing greenhouse emissions in China. On the other hand, close agricultural ties also mean that the climate impacts in one country will have repercussions for the other. To take a somewhat more obscure agricultural product, alfalfa, as an example, the United States, the largest alfalfa producer in the world, accounted for nearly 95 percent of China’s total alfalfa imports in 2012. As alfalfa requires substantial volumes of water, the Sino-U.S. alfalfa trade has come in for criticism amid a historic drought in Californian the largest alfalfa producing region in the United States. The potential climate impact of the evolving Sino-U.S. agricultural ties would not be limited to those two countries alone; rather, the whole word could be affected. The United States has long been the biggest supplier of agricultural products to China. Increasingly, however, there are concerns in China that an over reliance on U.S. for food will jeopardize China’s food security and even its national security. Thus, China has been pursuing a diversification strategy. This is especially the case with soybeans. In the late 1990s, China imported more than 80 percent of its soybeans from the United States; now, it is importing

more soybeans from Latin American countries, particularly Brazil and Argentina. In 2014, the U.S. share of China’s total soybean imports declined to about 40 percent. While diversifying imports away from the U.S. is beneficial to China’s food security, it has negative repercussions for global climate change mitigation because China’s soaring soybean imports from Latin America are contributing to deforestation in the Amazon, considered to be the biggest carbon sink in the world. As deforestation progresses, it releases carbon, with a direct impact on the entire world, helping to drive climate change. The U.S. and China should prioritize agricultural and food security in their bilateral efforts to combat climate change. The two countries could play a major role in shifting agriculture from being part of the problem to being part of the solution to climate change , by expanding bilateral agricultural trade and investment cooperation , stepping up efforts in agricultural research and technology, and strengthening global food systems.

China is key to the global ecology – the impact’s massive death tolls. Li, ‘16(Minqi, Professor of Economics @ the University of Utah, China and the 21st Century Crisis, Pluto Press, Pg. 11-12)

The pursuit of infinite economic growth is the defining feature of modern capitalism. But the exponential growth of material production and consumption has depleted natural resources and degraded the environment. Much of the global environmental space was used up by the global capitalist expansion during the second half of the twentieth century. In the early twenty-first century, various global ecological systems are on the verge of collapse . In particular, impending climate catastrophes threaten to undermine the foundation of human civilization . These developments suggest that the various conditions, which historically have underpinned the normal operation of the capitalist world system, are being fundamentally transformed and the basic laws of motion of capitalism can no longer be sustained. China is set to overtake the United States to become the world's largest economy. The Chinese working class is the worlds largest. In a few years, a militant working class movement is likely to emerge in China. China is also t he world's largest energy consumer and greenhouse gas emitter. Therefore, China is at the center of the contemporary global economic , social, and ecological contradictions .

Water Wars ImpactRampant Chinese pollution forces China to divert water from Indian rivers- escalation is high and likelyNavarro ’15 Peter Navarro is the author of various books on economics and public policy, including The Dimming of America (Ballinger, 1984), The Policy Game (Wiley, 1984) and the If It’s Raining in Brazil, Buy Starbucks: The Investor’s Guide to Profiting From News (McGraw Hill, 2001). Peter Navarro has written frequently on economic, energy and environmental issues and are published ranging from the Harvard Business Review, Journal of Business, and Wall Street Journal to the Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and Washington Post. After working for a year in Washington, D.C. as an energy and environmental policy analyst, Peter Navarro received a Master’s in Public Administration from the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard University in 1979 and completed his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard in 1986. Peter Navarro graduated from Tufts University in 1972 with a B.A. and served in the Peace Corps in Southeast Asia from 1973 to 1976.(Peter Navarro, 11-4-2015, "How China and India May Come to Blows," Globalist, find at: http://www.theglobalist.com/china-india-south-asia-war-politics/)ZVChina and India account for almost 40% of the world’s population , but have access to only about 10% of global water supplies. China’s water scarcity is further compounded by a high degree of pollution – many of its lakes and rivers are dead zones and as much as 40% of the water in China’s rivers is unfit for human consumption. For India, the situation is hardly any better. In a land heavily dependent on agriculture, it is projected by the World Bank to be “water stressed” as early as 2025 and “water scarce” by 2050. China , via its control of Tibet, also has control over much of India’s water supplies. In fact, the Tibetan Plateau is the “world’s largest freshwater repository after the polar icecaps” and a key watershed for fully ten of the largest rivers in Asia, including the Mekong running through Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia on its way to Vietnam, and the Salween that winds it way through Burma. And just how may China’s control of this Tibetan “water tower of the world” actually trigger war? Just consider the real-world ramifications of Beijing’s audacious proposal to divert as much as 60% of the waters of India’s Brahmaputra River into China’s increasingly parched Yellow River. To understand how catastrophic such a diversion would be for India – and how the importance of Arunachal Pradesh as a war trigger jumps right back into the strategic picture – a little geography is in order. At present, the waters of India’s Brahmaputra River begin in the Kailas range of the Himalayas and head directly east for some 1,800 miles through Tibet before reaching a “Great Bend” just north of the border between Tibet and Arunachal Pradesh. At this point, in one of the most remarkable feats of nature, the river makes an abrupt U-turn and then winds its way through Arunachal Pradesh on its way first to become a main tributary of India’s sacred Ganges River and eventually to find the river’s end in Bangladesh and the Bay of Bengal. If China did indeed divert as much as 200 billion cubic meters of this water annually to the Yellow River , this would not just represent an obvious casus belli. It would be an environmental and economic disaster for India as well as a cataclysmic event for India’s downriver neighbor Bangladesh. Put both the territorial and the water dimensions together and you discover the most important reason for China’s increasing insistence that Arunachal Pradesh is Chinese, not Indian, territory. If China can impose its “Southern Tibet” claim on India (either through coercion or force), then India would have much less standing when it came to protesting the diversion of water from the Brahmaputra.US-China BIT solves water pollution- advanced tech, collaboration, investments Lu ’15 Shuping Lu is the president of Xylem China. Xylem is a global water technology leader dedicated to solving the world’s most complex water challenges. In 2014, Xylem conducted a survey Value of Water Index survey in partnership with China Water Net to gauge awareness, level of concern and understanding of issues pertaining to water and water infrastructure in China.(Shuping Lu, 5-18-2015, "Addressing Water Challenges in China · Environmental Leader · Environmental Management News," No Publication,

http://www.environmentalleader.com/2015/05/18/addressing-water-challenges-in-china/ find at: http://www.environmentalleader.com/2015/05/18/addressing-water-challenges-in-china/#ixzz4DC1muXZn)ZVThe government has demonstrated a keen interest in tackling the challenges that come with rapid growth. For more than 20 years, the country has led the world in investing in infrastructure at an annual average rate of 8.5 percent of its overall GDP. The International Monetary Fund predicts that China will continue to spend a remarkable 9 percent of its GDP on infrastructure in the coming years. Local media reports that the Chinese government has earmarked 1.7 trillion yuan (US $330 billion) to address water challenges in China with 172 water conservation programs. These funds will be directed toward technologies such as wastewater treatment , recycling and membrane technology, as well as upgrading existing water infrastructure . Furthermore, the Ministry of Water Resources confirmed that it will increase investments in water conservation projects, surpassing the 488 billion yuan (US $75 billion) invested in 2014. Exchanges such as the US China trade mission will help to identify the best technologies and solutions for these new investments. Chinese water industry experts agree that the use of advanced technologies will help solve the current water issues. The cooperation between the public and private sectors demonstrated during this mission is a critical component to ensuring the successful implementation of new solutions and initiatives . A survey of water industry experts indicates that they believe the government should enact policies and broadly manage and support the development of the industry. The private sector, including international companies, should provide advanced technology, funding and expertise. China is focusing more attention on solving water issues, and hands-on exchange of expertise and innovative ideas through last month’s trade missions has positive effects on solving those problems. Global water security will depend on collaboration, innovation and investment . We must recognize these challenges as opportunities to lead and establish best practices to ensure clean and plentiful water in the decades to come.

Chinese Water crisis causes laundry list of impacts- Regional conflict- Civil unrest- Resource Wars- Disease- Ag collase - High food prices

Brooks ’07 Researched water scarcity, alternative energy, climate change, and international economic affairs for CEO John Peterson’s book Out of the Blue: How to Anticipate Wild Cards and Big Future Surprises and wrote corresponding blog postings, PH.D from Stanford University (Nina Brooks, August 2007, “Impending Water Crisis in China” The Arlington Institute, find at: http://www.arlingtoninstitute.org/wbp/global-water-crisis/457) ZVIf China continues to overexploit its scarce water resources a serious water crisis looms in its future, which could even set off consequences for the rest of the world. As the North continues to rely more heavily on water that comes from the South, regionally conflicts over water could erupt. In addition, competition between sectors for water supply could develo p into something more violent and cause serious civil unrest. The Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau is the source of rivers that reach India, Bangladesh, Burma, Bhutan, Nepal, Cambodia, Pakistan, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. When China begins to run out of water , it may try to hoard the remaining water supply for its own people, thereby diverting water that would have reached these countries in South and Southeast Asia. Many of these countries, specifically India , are already facing their own severe water crises , which will only be exacerbated if China diverts rivers that would have delivered much needed water . Having extensively contaminated its own major rivers through unbridled industrialization, China now threatens the

ecological viability of river systems tied to South and Southeast Asia in its bid to meet its thirst for water and energy.Both diverting water that would have flowed to other countries and allowing increasingly polluted water to run through other countries has already angered neighboring countries and will continue to do so. Political relations could be further strained by massive migration of people from regions facing severe water shortages that could spill over into other countries. In fact, many analysts argue that the oil wars of the 20th century will be replaced by water wars in the 21st century. Polluted water has been linked to the spread of numerous diseases, including cancers. Increasing levels of pollution could lead to more serious and widespread health problems, dehydration, and the increased prevalence of cancer in Chinese people. Because China’s rivers run through so many different countries in the region, disease could rapidly spread to large numbers of people . China’s food supply is incredibly vulnerable to water shortages. Rapid industrialization inevitably leads to a heavy loss of cropland, which can override any increase in land productivity and lead to an absolute decline in food production. China’s grain harvests have already fallen short of demand for the past several years, causing China to import their grain. According to Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute, consumption outstrips production by over 45 million tons a year. It is very possible that in the near future China will become the largest importer of agricultural goods, which could shock the world’s grain markets and trigger higher food prices around the world.

China Econ ImpactChinese Ag investments solves China economic lagPatton ’15 Dominique Patton is an Agriculture and Soft commodities correspondent at Thomson Reuters, has a Masters from The University of Edinburgh( Dominique Patton, 2-16-2015, "Modernizing China's agriculture key to tackling slower economy: Premier," Reuters, find at: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-agriculture-idUSKBN0LK0AF20150216) ZVBEIJING (Reuters) - Modernising Chinese ag riculture will help in countering slower economic growth by driving investment in rural infrastructure and boosting consumption, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said. The Chinese economy grew 7.4 percent last year, its slowest pace in 24 years, as property prices cooled, hitting demand for a range of commodities. Investing in infrastructure in rural areas could help digest some of the excess capacity in China's steel and cement industries, as well as create new jobs, wrote Li in the latest issue of the Chinese Communist Party journal Qiushi.Overhauling farming models and improving efficiency in distribution systems could also boost rural incomes, Li said in the article published late on Sunday. "Farmers are the country's largest consumer group...by increasing farmers' incomes through accelerating agricultural modernisation, we can activate farmers' huge potential consumption demand." About 45 percent of China's population, or 630 million people, still make a living from agriculture , estimate analysts, but their productivity lags far behind that of developed countries. Although the country is self-sufficient in its most important food crops, it has paid a huge price for its intensive farming practices with excessive use of fertilizers, pesticides and plastic sheeting causing serious environmental damage and threatening food safety, said Li. Farmers need to focus on consumer demand rather than on production volumes, said the Premier, and urged them to produce safe food and speciality products including organic ones. "Currently, the quality and safety of agricultural products is generally stable, but hidden risks linger and people still frequently break the law," Li wrote. The agricultural sector also needs to integrate processing so that farmers get added value from their output, and more efficient distribution would help reduce farmers' costs, he said. "There are many steps in the distribution of farm products so costs are high. There is much wastage and efficiency is low , leading to farmers having trouble selling their products while consumers pay too much. This has long been a chronic problem." Li reiterated the need to promote new types of farming models such as larger family farms and encourage transfer of land rights to allow people who remain in the countryside to expand their farms. All Chinese farmland is owned by the state and the right to farm the land is leased to rural residents. Beijing has recently allowed rural residents to transfer farming rights to others but critics say larger farms struggle to get financing to increase their output.

US Econ ImpactUS can gain billions of dollars through ag coopertation but increased trade is key ACC ’11 The American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, 2011 press release, The American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai (AmCham Shanghai), known as the “Voice of American Business in China,” is the largest and fastest growing American Chamber in the Asia Pacific region. Founded in 1915, AmCham Shanghai was the third American Chamber established outside the United States. As a non-profit, non-partisan business organization, AmCham Shanghai is committed to the principles of free trade, open markets, private enterprise and the unrestricted flow of information, (“Agriculture in China Boosting American Opportunities in the World’s Largest Market”, find at http://www.amcham-shanghai.org/ftpuploadfiles/Publications/Viewpoint/Viewpoint_Agriculture.pdf) ZVAs the world’s largest agricultural market, China should be the focus of U.S. efforts to grow tens of billions of dollars worth of ag ricultural and food exports. China’s rapidly developing agriculture industry is also an opportunity for U.S.-China cooperation as China strives to address challenges in improving the safety of its domestically produced food for consumption at home and for export. Agricultural exports to China can be a driving force for achieving the objectives of the National Export Initiative (NEI), which calls for doubling U.S. exports by 2015 in support of two million American jobs. Already, the $17.8 billion that China buys in U.S. agricultural and food products is more than any other country. Agricultural exports to China create and support American jobs – an estimated 150,000 in 2010. Going forward, China’s demand for U.S. goods to feed a population of 1.3 billion people will only increase. It is no easy feat for China’s farmers to satisfy the government’s policy objective to grow 95 percent of the country’s own staple crops. China has 20 percent of the world’s population yet only seven percent of the world’s arable land and seven percent of freshwater resources. Natural resource challenges likely will intensify going forward as rural plots of farmland are replaced with industrial zones, while cities swell to include new housing developments and roads needed to support millions of new urban households. Another reason is China’s growing consumer market for foreign products. China’s increas- ingly wealthy – and consumer savvy – middle class is demanding more brand name foreign produced food, whether in supermarkets or at popular eateries like Yum! Brand’s KFC. Though foreign products account for a rather meager percentage of total food products sold, a willingness to pay a premium for foreign products not only helps fulfill changing dietary choices among many Chinese but also addresses worries of contracting food-borne illness from contaminated domestically-produced products. In addition to exports, China’s drive to improve food safety provides an opportunity for relevant U.S. government agencies and U.S. companies to assist China. As the Chi- nese government clamps down on food safety violations, the U.S. can lend valuable expertise,technical assistance and know-how to help China build capacity to enforce its developing food safety standards. This not only paves the way for U.S. food exports to China and the adoption of U.S. standards in China, but U.S. consumers have a direct interest in the safety of Chinese food as China exports more and more food products to the U.S. each year. U.S. agricultural companies are competing at a high level thanks in part to U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) support programs. But they are confronted with numerous challenges in China, including limitations on accessing the Chinese market through exports, concerns over intellectual property rights (IPR) and contending with Chinese government interventions in the market.

Structural Violence I/LChina’s agricultural practices are structurally unequal- Foreign investment can transition to sustainable agriculture and technology for ALL farmers in China  Vernooy ’12 Ronnie Vernooy is a rural development sociologist with a particular interest in agricultural biodiversity and natural resource management. He has more than 20 years of experience in managing and conducting participatory research in a number of countries, including Nicaragua, Cuba, Honduras, China and Mongolia. He has coauthored and coedited several books and articles on biodiversity management and conservation; most recently, with Manuel Ruiz, The Custodians of Biodiversity: Sharing Access and Benefits of Genetic Resources.( Ronnie Vernooy, 7/20/12, "China Tries Alternative to Industrial Agriculture,"Our World by United Nations University, Find at: http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/china-tries-alternative-to-industrial-agriculture) ZVChina’s economic growth in recent years has been extraordinary but uneven . Vulnerable groups, such as smallholder farmers and their communities, are most affected. This unbalanced development has seen widening income gaps between urban and rural regions, unequal government support to industry and agriculture , a focus on the East Coast and neglect of remote western rural areas , and the prioritization of economic growth over protection of the environment. This is leading to enormous challenges, such as enduring extreme rural poverty and increasing socioeconomic inequality, feminization and ageing of the agricultural workforce, severe environmental degradation and serious erosion of biodiversity. Ensuring China’s food security has recently been added to these concerns. Food insecurity persists in a number of provinces , mostly in western and central China: 130 million people are believed to be food insecure or undernourished. Most of these people live in the mountainous regions of the northwest and southwest that are characterized by fragile ecological conditions and underdeveloped infrastructure and services. According to a recent study, about 150 million people continue to live under the poverty line of US$1.25 per day. That number goes up to 474 million if the line is set at US$2 per day. Uneven and unequal change At the heart of food insecurity are several problems. Due to the process of rapid modernization, China has lost about 8.3 million hectares of arable land, 6.5 percent of the country’s total arable area, largely in the most fertile coastal regions where urbanization and industrialization have flourished. Access to water — and its quality, use, and distribution — are all mounting problems that, over time, may become even more serious than issues related to land. Supply-side-related problems are not the only challenges facing Chinese agriculture. Since the 1990s, rising incomes, especially in cities, have led to significant increases in the consumption of non-staple foods, such as meat, fish, fruits, eggs, and dairy products. Given that the number of higher-income earners is expected to increase rapidly, demand for non-staples will also expand, increasing pressure on the national food supply. Production of non-staple foods has been rising in response. For example, between 1996 and 2007, meat production went up by 50 percent, egg production by 30 percent, and milk production by 200 percent. This increased demand and production have been accompanied by various problems, including environmental pollution and unsafe foods, for example, tainted milk, which caused the death of babies and children, a global outcry, as well as a huge setback to development of the domestic dairy industry. Since it initiated reforms in 1978, China has been widely recognized for its major achievements in reducing extreme poverty. However, severe poverty remains high in absolute numbers. Small farmers in the remote upland areas of southwest and northwest China, with an average of less than 0.2 hectares of land , are among the poorest of the poor and the most affected by food insecurity . Although they hold land-use rights, in most cases the land is of such low quality that it is not possible to achieve subsistence levels of production. Many poor farmers have to purchase additional food, but they have been hit hard by increased food prices since the reforms. Though they hold land-use rights, small farmers in the remote upland areas of southwest and northwest mostly occupy land of such low quality

that they can’t achieve even subsistence levels of production. A major consequence of the reforms has been an overall increase in out-migration from rural to urban areas, especially from poorer areas. Men are the majority of the migrants. This is resulting in the increasing feminization of agriculture in the last decade, most notably in the poor western and southwestern areas, with women constituting 70–80 percent of the agricultural labor force in most rural provinces. They are mainly middle-aged women with limited education. However, women’s increasing role in rural life is seldom noted by the key decision makers, who mostly live in towns and cities and are responsible for rural development issues, including the areas of health, education, service provision, market regulation (prices and subsidies), and wages. Women’s specific needs, interests and expertise are also largely neglected in technology design, development and diffusion processes, for example, in the development of new crop varieties and alternative agronomic practices. The result has been an agricultural policy that often fails to address the needs of farmers in some of the most deprived areas . Neglected by conventional crop research Conventional crop research in China is well organized and has produced very good results, leading to a major decrease in food insecurity and poverty. The past 15 years have seen spectacular results in China’s agricultural heartland from the use of improved crop varieties and agricultural inputs — such as inorganic fertilizers, machinery, and tools — that have been supported by lower agricultural taxes, input and output subsidies, price supports, and market and infrastructure development . However, less arable regions — including the mountainous areas of Guangxi, Yunnan, and Guizhou in the southwest — have not been served well . This is partly because the prevailing assumptions of plant breeders, in turn supported by decision makers in agricultural development circles, are that farmers are less knowledgeable than breeders, that selection must be done under optimum conditions, that cultivars must be genetically uniform and widely adaptable over large geographic areas, and that landraces (local varieties of domesticated plant species that have developed largely by natural processes, by adaptation to the natural environment in which they live) and open-pollinated varieties (such as those still found in the southwest) must be replaced by high-yielding varieties under all circumstances to ensure national food security. Agricultural biodiversity, farmers’ diverse livelihoods, and farmers’ contributions to crop conservation and improvement have been largely ignored. Privatization of seed production has led to a focus on hybrids and other modern varieties, with almost total neglect of traditional varieties and underutilized crops.

Generic UQ China Ag collapse is coming but only US investment in Chinese companies can solve Keller 2-2 Rebecca Keller focuses on areas where geopolitics intersects with science and technology. Her areas of interest include biotechnology, water scarcity, energy storage and renewable energy technologies, agricultural trends and epidemiology, among other things. Dr. Keller holds a doctorate in organic chemistry from Colorado State University and a bachelor's in biochemistry from Washington University in St. Louis. Before joining Stratfor, she conducted a year of postdoctoral research in chemical biology at the University of Colorado Boulder. (Rebecca Keller, 2- 2-16, "How Technology Might Reshape China's Future," Stratfor, find at: https://www.stratfor.com/weekly/how-technology-might-reshape-chinas-future) ZVConsider China. It is in the midst of undertaking the immense challenge of trying to restructure its economy after 30 years of uninhibited, unsynchronized growth. At the same time, the country is faced with growing resource scarcity in terms of both land and water, on top of a looming demographic crisis during which China's elderly population (those over 65 years old) will balloon to nearly 240 million by 2030. As Beijing moves incrementally away from its export-oriented economic model — the very backbone of Chinese growth — it will have to find a way to both sustain itself and move up the economic value chain . The linchpin of its strategy will be technological advancement. There are two main drivers behind China's emphasis on technology: national security and future export potential. Beijing does not want to be completely beholden to foreign suppliers to meet internal consumption, especially for vital goods like food and energy. While it cannot realistically afford to forgo partnerships with foreign firms to develop the technology it seeks, China has designed its partnerships in a way that will enable it to gain the knowledge and experience needed to eventually push its economy higher up the value chain. Rapid expansion of Chinese technology sectors, whether in rail, aviation, nuclear power or telecommunications, would push Beijing closer to becoming the global leader it desires to be. China wants to move beyond supplying the world with low-end goods and instead export expertise and high-end products, still at lower costs than its competitors, while relying more on internal consumption to drive economic growth. Throughout its economic restructuring process, food security will remain a priority for Beijing. Agriculture has been the primary focus of the first policy document released each year by China for the past 13 years — a fact that isn't all that surprising when you take into account the geographic obstacles to Chinese production. Though China's land and water resources may be ample compared to those of other countries, they are nowhere near sufficient to support the world's biggest population. And as this massive group of people increasingly shifts toward the consumption patterns consistent with a rising middle class, the pressure on China's limited resources will only grow. If it hopes to keep its imports of agricultural goods under control, both now and in the future, China will have to help its farmers become more efficient and productive. In food security, as in other policy areas, Beijing has relied on multiple strategies to achieve its goals, including investing abroad in land and agricultural industries, joining free trade agreements, andconsolidating and mechanizing farming operations. All of these strategies will help ensure the stability of food imports or increase the efficiency of domestic production , but nature can be pushed only so far. Advancing and expanding the capabilities of China's agricultural biotechnology sector will remain an important objective for improving the country's food security and for potentially exporting its newfound expertise to others in the future.

China Ag tech fails- US cooperation is key to solve China Briefing ’14 China Briefing, 5-27-2014, ("China's 2014 State Policy on Rural Development and the Agriculture Industry: Investment Implications,China Briefing hosts a wealth of business intelligence on legal, tax, and operational issues in China from a practical perspective. China Briefing News, find at: http://www.china-briefing.com/news/2014/05/27/chinas-state-policy-rural-development-agriculture-industry.html) ZVThe policy implications of the No.1 Central Document is positive news for foreign firms able to provide the machinery and technology needed to modernize farming methods in China. According to an official at the Ministry of Agriculture, China still relies heavily on foreign imports for high-tech farming machinery. Although China is the second largest manufacturer of farming equipment in the world, with over 1,800 medium-sized enterprises dedicated to farming machinery production, the country’s combined annual productivity is only equivalent to that of Deere & Company, an American producer of agricultural hardware. Domestic firms have complained that foreign manufacturers limit industry growth , but China currently lacks the human capital , funding and infrastructure necessary to develop sophisticated farming machines able to compete with foreign products. Therefore, until domestic companies are able to manufacture high-tech farming equipment to replace foreign products, there are still plenty of opportunities for foreign businesses and investors. China’s goal of increasing production efficiency and environmental protection simultaneously will require improved farming techniques that countries with highly mechanized agriculture industries are able to provide. In other words, the Chinese gov ernment’s plan to industrialize and modernize the agriculture sector is likely to generate higher demand for foreign machinery and technology in the short-run while creating numerous opportunities for industry investment in the long-run.

Water Wars UQWater Wars are coming Chellaney ’09 Brahma Chellaney is a professor of strategic studies at CPR. A specialist in international security and arms control issues, Professor Chellaney has held appointments at Harvard, the Brookings Institution, the School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University, and the Australian National University. He is the author of nine books, and has served as a member of the Policy Advisory Group headed by the foreign minister of India. Until January 2000, he was an advisor to India’s National Security Council, serving as convener of the External Security Group of the National Security Advisory Board(Brahma Chellaney FALL 2009 “Coming Water Wars” THE MAGAZINE OF INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC POLICY find at: http://www.international-economy.com/TIE_F09_Chellaney.pdf) ZVAs China and India gain economic heft, they are drawing ever more international attention at the time of an ongoing global shift of power to Asia. Their underlying strategic dissonance and rivalry, however, usually attracts less notice. As its power grows, China seems determined to choke off Asian competitors, a tendency reflected in its hardening stance toward India. This includes aggressive patrolling of the disputed Himalayan frontier by the People’s Liberation Army, many violations of the line of control separating the two giants, new assertiveness concerning India’s northeastern Arunachal Pradesh state— which China claims as its own—and vituperative attacks on India in the state- controlled Chinese media. The issues that divide India and China, however, extend beyond territorial disputes. Water is becoming a key security issue in Sino-Indian relations and a potential source of enduring discord. China and India already are water-stressed economies. The spread of irrigated farming and waterintensive industries, together with the demands of a rising middle class, have led to a severe struggle for more water . Indeed, both countries have entered an era of perennial water scarcity, which before long is likely to equal, in terms of per capita availability, the water shortages found in the Middle East. Rapid economic growth could slow in the face of acute scarcity if demand for water continues to grow at its current frantic pace, turning China and India— both food-exporting countries—into major importers , a development that would accentuate the global food crisis. Even though India has more arable land than China— 160.5 million hectares compared to 137.1 million hectares—Tibet is the source of most major Indian rivers. The Tibetan plateau’s vast glaciers, huge underground springs, and high altitude make Tibet the world’s largest freshwater repository after the polar icecaps. Indeed, all of Asia’s major rivers, except the Ganges, originate in the Ganges’ two main tributaries flow in from Tibet . But China is now pursuing major inter-basin and inter-river water transfer projects on the Tibetan plateau, which threatens to diminish international river flows into Indi a and other co-riparian states. Before such hydro-engineering projects sow the seeds of water conflict, China ought to build institutionalized cooperative river-basin arrangements with downstream states

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BIT boost US Ag exports to ChinaSchwartz ‘14Mark Schwartz is The Chair of Goldman Sachs Asia Pacific. Mark earned an MBA, an MPP and a BA from Harvard University and is on the Boards of Dean’s Advisors at Harvard College, Harvard Business School and the Harvard School of Public Health. - “A BIT of Help for the U.S. and China” – Wall Street Journal - April 2, 2014 - http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303532704579476720853893300

The BIT also would increase the global reach of American businesses, allowing them to invest in Chinese markets in industries that are largely restricted today, such as financial services, transportation and telecommunications. This treaty would allow American manufacturing and agricultural exporters to establish critical distribution platforms in China to facilitate their sales of American products into that market. As a condition of restarting the talks, Beijing has agreed to put almost all industries on the table, dropping its earlier desire to shelter a large number from American investment.BIT opens up markets for US to invest in Chinese companies scenario Frisbie ‘14John Frisbie is the president of the US-China Business Council (USCBC) and has more than 25 years of experience in business and government relations with China, including nearly 10 years living and working in Beijing. Frisbie received his BA and MBA degrees from the University of Texas at Austin. “Why an Investment Treaty with China Matters”- China Business Review – March 31, 2014 - http://www.chinabusinessreview.com/why-an-investment-treaty-with-china-matters/However a BIT with China would change the rules for US companies in China . China maintains ownership restrictions on American and other foreign + manufacturing, services, energy, and agriculture. American ownership in auto plants is limited to 50 percent. Life insurance 50 percent. Cloud computing 50 percent. Soybean oil (used in kitchens in every Chinese home) 49 percent. The list goes on. These ownership barriers keep American companies from reaching more customers in China. USCBC’s annual surveys show that 90 percent of US companies invest in China to sell more in China. US government statistics show the same thing. Seventy-five percent of the sales made by American companies with operations in China stay in China. Another 17 percent is sold in other markets. Only 7 percent of the products made by American companies in China is sent back to the United States. To put it simply, investment barriers in China are market access barriers. A BIT would significantly open markets for American companies. Investment openings are particularly important because not every company can make something in the United States and successfully export to China. Transportation costs and long lead times can make a product uncompetitive. Sometimes you need to be closer to your customer to get the business.

BIT is key for ag sectorsSchott and Ciminothe ’15 Jeffrey Schott and Cathleen Ciminothe, Jeffrey Schott is senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. CATHLEEN CIMINO is research associate at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. (Peterson Institute for International Economics, February 2015 “CHINA-JAPAN-KOREA TRILATERAL INVESTMENT AGREEMENT: IMPLICATIONS FOR US POLICY AND THE US-CHINA BILATERAL INVESTMENT TREATY”, Page 8, find at: https://piie.com/publications/briefings/piieb15-1.pdf)ZV

US businesses cite “foreign investment restrictions” as one of the primary challenges to investing in China (USCBC 2014). China’s Foreign Investment Catalogue includes foreign ownership restrictions in nearly 100 manufacturing and services sectors, including fi nancial services, health insurance, agriculture, and audiovisual services. On the Chinese side, limited market access in certain US sectors like transportation, radio communications, and natural resources has created discretionary barriers, primarily in the form of “political objections” to mergers and acquisitions of US fi rms or from national security objections raised by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) (Bergsten, Hufbauer, and Miner 2014). The US-China BIT would seek to redress some of these grievances. The CJK investment agreement attempts to address similar concerns of Japanese and Korean investors and thus may facilitate new opportunities in the Chinese market

Environment I/LHigh Tech Ag investment is key to agricultural sustainabilityDearing ’15 John Dearing is Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Southampton. He was a recipient of the Murchison Award (2014), given by the Royal Geographical Society in recognition for publications contributing to the understanding of environmental change.(John Dearing, 2-26-2015, "China farming boom has left ecosystems in danger of total collapse," Conversation, find at: http://theconversation.com/china-farming-boom-has-left-ecosystems-in-danger-of-total-collapse-38058) ZVNational policy must prioritise sustainable agriculture. This will mean big changes on the farm: fertiliser and pesticides must be applied in the correct quantities at the right time of the year, cattle slurry and human sewage must be disposed of properly, chemicals getting into streams and rivers must be reduced, and fish feed has to be controlled. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. Farmers are still generally poor, badly educated and ageing . Good agricultural advice is lacking and big cities still tempt the younger farmers away from their fields. All these factors mean that rapid action is unlikely. The recent introduction of the Land Circulation reform policy, allows farmers to rent their land to larger combines. The policy is designed to overcome the inefficiencies of small farm holdings but it may not be taken up widely in the more marginal landscapes where potential profits are low. All the evidence points to a need for a significantly improved system of information and technology transfer to individual smallholders, probably involving a more efficient coordination between agencies

Sustainable Ag key to the environmentCook 3-23 Seth Cook is a senior researcher in IIED's China and agroecology teams, Seth Cook's current work focuses on sustainable agriculture and food systems, as well as China-related projects. His areas of expert knowledge include natural resource management, agriculture, energy and ethnographic research methods. He has worked in China on programmes that promoted sustainable development and environmental good practice., PhD Environmental Studies, Yale University MA Environmental Studies, Yale University MA International Relations, Yale University BA Asian Studies, Amherst College (Seth Cook, 3-23-2016, "Nurturing the shoots of China's sustainable agriculture," International Institute for Environment and Development, find at: http://www.iied.org/nurturing-shoots-chinas-sustainable-agriculture) ZVChinese agriculture currently faces major environmental challenges, including overuse of fertilisers and pesticides, soil erosion, soil pollution, water scarcity and the loss of agricultural biodiversity. Food safety is also a source of great public anxiety – driven by a series of well-publicised incidents such as the 2008 milk-melamine scandal. However, there is a growing interest in sustainable food production in China . We have been working with Chinese researchers to explore this and have identified valuable lessons for China and the rest of the world. China's agricultural practices have important global ramification s. China is among the world's top importers and exporters of agricultural goods. Imports of commodities such as soy and corn have become an increasingly important driver of global agricultural production and trade. A shift towards more sustainable production methods would benefit China's environment and public health within China and beyond , as well as agricultural productivity in the long term . It could also have positive ramifications for the global environment – particularly if it reduced greenhouse gas emissions from the food system. The growth of sustainable farming There is a small but growing trend towards sustainable food production and consumption in China, as shown by the rise in farms using environmentally friendly practices, organic farmers' markets in major cities, and an increasing emphasis on sustainability in Chinese policies related to agriculture. For instance, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) – a relatively recent arrival in China – is growing rapidly, with over 300 CSA farms scattered throughout the country. Agribusinesses focused on organic and green foods are increasingly common. This trend is being driven by burgeoning demand for 'safe' and healthy food, which is reflected in the rising market share of organic and 'green' products, both from domestic and imported sources. This emergence of sustainable agriculture is captured in 'Multiple pathways: case studies of sustainable agriculture in China'. A collaboration between researchers from the China Agricultural University, the Chinese Centre for Agricultural Policy, and IIED, it draws out some key lessons and recommendations of wider relevance both for China and other developing countries through a series of case studies

from seven provinces. The report was launched at a recent workshop in Beijing, which brought together 50 practitioners, researchers, academics, government officials, donors and NGO personnel to discuss issues arising in the development of sustainable agriculture and how to address them. Panel discussions covered key topics from the report such as the role of cooperatives, the efficacy of sustainability certification and who will till the land in the future. A desk-based study also explores the historical evolution of agriculture in China with a focus on sustainability – economic, environmental and social. It asks how China's modern development is affecting the sustainability of farming and the rural environment, and looks in detail at the influence of policies and measures to transform agricultural production systems in more sustainable ways. Lessons from China's experience China can be seen as a laboratory for development in many respects. Its agricultural experience, which includes different scales of production, different technologies and different types of agricultural model is relevant for other countries and contexts. The lessons emerging from IIED's research with Chinese scholars provide insights for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers into how sustainable agricultural practices can be better supported, both in China and elsewhere: There are multiple pathways towards sustainable agriculture , shaped by the tremendous variety and complexity of local conditions which demand context-specific approaches. Policy needs to preserve and foster a range of farming models , including CSAs, family farming, cooperatives and agribusinesses . A diverse food system will be more resilient, and there is no blueprint model that works everywhere. Sustainable agriculture can be practised at a small, medium or large scale, and there are advantages and disadvantages to each. The scale should match the circumstances of the individuals and the landscape where they farm. Policies should foster a range of farm scales, rather than prioritising large-scale farms and one-size-fits-all approaches. There is a vital role for the state – particularly local government – in promoting sustainable agriculture initiatives. This can take a variety of forms, such as providing financial support for certification and organic inputs, attracting investment, mediating between farmers and enterprises, and providing training in marketing and ecological methods. Collective organisation is key to the viability of sustainable agriculture and the livelihoods of smallholders. Collective organisation – e.g. through cooperatives or through CSA – opens up a whole range of resources and services to farmers. Policy on cooperatives needs to be flexible, particularly by allowing for multi-product cooperatives. Certification can be an important marketing tool, but this depends partly on geographic location, the nature of local markets, and the extent to which farmers are integrated into wider commodity chains. In some cases, certification may not be necessary. In light of the ageing rural population in China and in many other countries, it is crucial to attract young people back to rural areas, or to prevent them from leaving in the first place. Enabling farmers to earn higher incomes in rural areas is the key. Our research found evidence that sustainable farming can boost incomes. More resources should be devoted to 'participatory research' (ie integrally involving farmers) on sustainable agriculture, particularly those approaches that are viable in the context of labour shortages and difficulties in accessing markets. Modern approaches and local knowledge should be integrated into research on specific technologies. Awareness needs to be raised of the multiple benefits of sustainable agriculture. These benefits include not only food security and food safety, but also higher incomes, reduced rural-urban migration, increased biodiversity and environmental health.

Warming ImpactCurrent China pollution will end humanity Smith ’12 Richard Smith is an acclaimed other and historian. His book “To Save the Planet, Turn the World Upside Down” was published in 2015. He wrote his UCLA history Ph.D. thesis on the transition to capitalism in China and held post-docs at the East-West Center in Honolulu and Rutgers University. He has written on China, capitalism and the global environment and on related issues for Monthly Review, The Ecologist, the Journal of Ecological Economics, Real-World Economics Review, Adbusters magazine and other publications (Richard Smith, 1-17-2012, "China's Communist-Capitalist Ecological Apocalypse," Truthout, find at: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/31478-china-s-communist-capitalist-ecological-apocalypse) ZVThe UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calculates that if we're to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius, humanity cannot add more than 880 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere before 2050. Collectively, we've already used up more than half of that "carbon budget" leaving us a remaining budget of just 349 billion gigatons. If China produces just 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, its current rate, with no growth whatsoever, it will still consume the entire carbon budget for the whole of humanity by itself by 2050.

AT: Zhang/ US-China Co-op key Zhang concludes Aff- US and China have a lot to learn from each otherZhang ’15 Dr. Zhang is the leading researcher of the Iowa Land Value Survey, the Iowa Farmland Ownership and Tenure Survey, as well as the ISU Soil Management and Land Valuation Conference. He also led the development of the new, interactive Iowa Land Value Portal. Dr. Zhang received his Ph.D. in Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics from the Ohio State University in July 2015, and he also hold a BSc in Environmental Science from Fudan University in China. (Wendong Zhang, November 2015, Iowa State University Decision and Outreach Extension, Find at: https://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/articles/others/ZhaNov15.html)ZVAs one Chinese saying goes, ‘bread always comes first,’ and the well-being of farm households and the farm sector are of perennial significance in China and the United States. Despite significant differences and even disputes, Chinese and United States agricultural industries have a lot in common and most importantly have a lot to learn from each other . And perhaps more importantly, almost every Iowa farmer knows that what happens in China, just one Pacific Ocean away, could have profound effects on his or her pocket.

AT: US doesn’t have innovationUS has and invests in high tech ag Scott ’14 Rob Scott joined the Economic Policy Institute in 1996. His areas of research include international economics, trade and manufacturing policies and their impacts on working people in the United States and other countries, the economic impacts of foreign investment, and the macroeconomic effects of trade and capital flows. He has published widely in academic journals and the popular press, including The Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, The International Review of Applied Economics, and The Stanford Law and Policy Review, as well as The Los Angeles Times, Newsday, USA Today, The Baltimore Sun, The Washington Times, and other newspapers. (Robert E., 2-21-2014, "Hearing on U.S.–China Economic Challenges: The impact of U.S.–China trade," Economic Policy Institute, find at: http://www.epi.org/publication/hearing-us-china-economic-challenges-trade/)ZVThe major elements of a more effective national trade and industrial policy were outlined in the previous section. A few examples will illustrate the scale of resources and commitments required to raise manufacturing support in the United States to a level on par with other countries. In the debates about the future of manufacturing, comparisons are frequently drawn between the decline of employment in agriculture and that in manufacturing. However, agriculture has continued to be a major U.S. exporter , and its contribution to the economy has been relatively constant in recent years despite the sharp decline in employment. Agricultural output has continued to grow (in real terms) despite falling employment. One of the primary reasons for rising output in agriculture is the steady growth of productivity (output per acre). Among the foremost reasons for the large and steady rise in agricultural productivity has been the key role played by the federal government in supporting research and its dissemination and diffusion . Resources dedicated to this task include the U.S. Department of Agriculture and its Agricultural Research Service, the system of land-grant colleges that support a vast base of primary research into agricultural sciences, economics and technology diffusion, and the USDA’s farm extension service, which has disseminated the latest research findings to farmers at the county and farm level. There is simply no counterpart in manufacturing to the USDA/land-grant college system of agricultural research, development, innovation, and diffusion of new technologies. The entity that comes closest to performing a similar role in manufacturing may be the relatively obscure National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The president’s budget requested $857 million for NIST in fiscal 2013 (NIST 2012). In comparison, the USDA’s overal l 2013 budget request, including mandatory crop subsidy programs and all other research programs, was $155 billion (USDA 2012). Some 72 percent of USDA expenditures are for nutrition assistance (the Women, Infants and Children program), which only indirectly benefits agriculture. Considering only non–nutrition assistance programs, which include farm and commodity programs, conservation and forestry, rural development, research, and other programs, the USDA’s fiscal 2013 request is still $43.4 billion, more than 50 times total spending on NIST programs. However, manufacturing generated 10 times as much output as did agriculture in 2011: $1,731.5 billion of value added in manufacturing versus $173.5 billion in agriculture (Bureau of Economic Analysis 2012). Thus, per dollar of economic output generated, the USDA spends more than 500 times as much to support agriculture and related activities as NIST spends on manufacturing research and related activities.

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Squo solvesN/U Trading nowHarris ’14 Dan Harris is internationally regarded as a leading authority on legal matters related to doing business in China and in other emerging economies in Asia. Forbes Magazine, Business Week, Fortune Magazine, BBC News, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Economist, CNBC, The New York Times, and many other major media players, have looked to him for his perspective on international law issues. (Dan Harris, 8-9-2014, "Hit Us Where It Hurts: China’s Ban on U.S. Agricultural Products Grows," No Publication, http://www.chinalawblog.com/2014/08/ http://www.chinalawblog.com/2014/08/hit-us-where-it-hurts-chinas-ban-on-u-s-agricultural-products-grows.html)ZV U.S. agricultural exports to China have increased by 120% since 2008, to nearly 28.9 billion dollars in 2013 . Agriculture now accounts for nearly 24% of US-China trade . Since China’s admttance to the World Trade Organization (WTO), China and the United States have increasingly traded their comparative advantage s . Daily, Chinese made iPads, Lenovo computers, Nike sneakers, and other material trappings of American consumerism arrive in U.S. ports, where they are unloaded and then returned filled with U.S. grain products like soybeans and corn. But in November 2013 the system began to break down, as corn exports to China came to a halt. What caused this halt was the discovery by China’s Inspection and Quarantine Services (CIQS) of an unapproved genetically modified corn varietal called MIR-162 in imported shipments. Import permits began to be denied, and US corn exports to China gradually decreased to nothing. Grain merchandisers and U.S. farmers were horrified, as the fastest growing market for U.S. corn closed its doors. Agribusiness companies and Chinese importers were quick to react, replacing corn grain as the number one U.S. export to China with a corn based ethanol byproduct called distiller dried grain with solubles (DDGs). For a time it seemed that American grain merchandisers had found a solution to China’s ban on U.S. corn with DDGs, but this “solution” was short-lived. In the spring of this year China stopped returning import permits for DDGs. After months of confusion, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing on July 24 received a short message stating that “U.S. DDGs imports must now be tested at origination for the unapproved gene MIR-162.” In the space of a day, traded corn prices dropped by more than half. Shortly thereafter the USDA issued a statement asserting that there is no reliable, affordable method of testing for MIR-162 in DDGs, nor is there even a regulatory body in the United States with the manpower or funding to conduct such a test, even if one existed. In other words, what China did on July 24 was to ban importation of all U.S. corn based products. Why did China do this? Sino-U.S. relations are at one of their lowest points since before China’s period of great opening up. In light of recent events involving Apple, Microsoft, GSK, Cisco, KFC, Starbucks and many other American businesses in China, it would not be out of bounds to view China’s ban on U.S. corn imports as punishment for worsening relations. The National Grain and Feed Association (NGFA) estimates that China’s ban has cost U.S. farmers and agribusiness firms nearly three billion dollars. U.S. farmers could be hit especially hard during the upcoming year, with larger than average corn yields anticipated, and more new unapproved GMO varietals in the ground. But what is often lost from the punitive argument is the Chinese side of this story. In 2,500 years of historical records, famines were observed in at least one Chinese province every year up until the mid-20th century. While in modern times greetings like, “你吃饭了吗”？, or “have you eaten?” have become a signal of a person’s rural upbringing, they are still indicative of the powerful impact of food insecurity on Chinese psychology. It is this history that leads China continue to emphasize food security in its annual No. 1 Document, which this year made clear that “China should take good control of its own bowl,” by “intensifying support and protection for [domestic] agriculture.” There are three parts to China’s food security policy: 1) invest in modern agricultural practices and grain storage capacity; 2) develop local GMO varietals to increase crop yields; and 3) protect local grain farmers. Through investments in modern agricultural practices, total corn production in China has risen rapidly from 165 to 205 million metric tons, a near a 25% increase from 2008 to 2012. China has also built an enormous network of modern computerized grain storage facilities, with nearly 300 million metric tons of storage available. China was a net corn exporter from 2002 to 2006. China knows GMO technology is critical to increasing crop yields, so investment in GMO technology has surged , despite public fears over negative health effects . Chinese officials are wary of becoming overly reliant on genetically modified seeds from the Western world. Within the last six months eight Chinese Americans and nationals have been arrested on accusations of corporate espionage and theft of American seeds. MIR-162 grain imports may not be allowed into China, but China desperately wants access to the technology that produced the MIR-162 strain. With lower input costs and better technology, world corn prices have been lower than China’s domestic corn prices for years. For this reason, Chinese companies have imported significant amounts of corn. The easiest way for China to protect local farmers is to force the purchasing of Chinese corn by limiting the amount of foreign corn that enters the Chinese market. Protection for local farmers, fear of reliance on foreign GMOs, and investments in

agriculture are all part of China’s broader food security strategy . Banning U.S. corn for food security reasons is probably as strong an argument for why China banned U.S. corn as punishment for worsening relations. With Sino-U.S. relations still very poor, another record corn crop this year in China, as well as Ukrainian, Brazilian, and Argentinian corn imports approved, no matter which reason you favor for the ban on American corn products, there is little reason to believe China will lift that import ban any time soon Every day it becomesmore likely that only a significant and public response from the United States government, or litigation in the World Trade Organization, will open China back up to US corn product imports.

China already investing in High tech ag- US not key Winglee ’14 Contributor to Food Tank, Food Tank is focused on building a global community for safe, healthy, nourished eaters. We spotlight environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable ways of alleviating hunger, obesity, and poverty and create networks of people, organizations, and content to push for food system change. (Michelle Winglee, 2-1-2014, "A Push for Sustainable Agriculture in China from the Top Down and Bottom Up," Food Tank, http://foodtank.com/news/2014/02/a-push-for-sustainable-agriculture-in-china-from-the-top-down-and-bottom-up) ZVIn a country where one word can carry several different meanings, the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee’s Number-One Document, carries special weight. The Number-One Document, which outlines policy priorities for the year and is published annually every January, has highlighted rural issues since 2003. However, this year’s 2014 report took emphasis on food security and the environment to a new level. For the first time in eleven years, the Number-One Document espoused the need for “reform” in rural agriculture rather using the word for “development,” as it had in the previous eleven years. According to Xinhua News Agency this represents a new urgency at which the Chinese Communist Party plans to implement new policies on food safety and sustainable agriculture . So what are some rural reforms we can expect to see around China from the top down? What is going on from the bottom up? Li Hong Bin, who works with the Chinese government’s Development and Reform Commission in Sichuan Province, known as one of China’s major agricultural bases for grain and pork production, weighed in on what he saw as the top concern facing sustainable agriculture in China: polluted soils. Mr. Li attributes the intense usage of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to China’s rural land policies that still reflect communal ownership. Land in China belongs to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) though farmers can rent the land for an up to 70 year lease. Li believes that new policies that would assign farmers with individual ownership over a plot of land and allow them to buy and sell property would encourage farmers to show greater environmental stewardship. Trickling down to the business level, Shi Yan, who started China’s first Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program in Beijing after working for six-months at a small CSA in western Minnesota, has noted a shift as well. “Before, the government’s focus was to produce more food , now the focus is on protecting the environment,” said Ms. Shi, referring to government agricultural subsidies. She noted that one of the major challenges to encouraging sustainable agriculture was the lack of regulation in the market for organic products which can sell at three to eight times the normal market price, a fee consumers are reluctant to pay when they cannot trust its authenticity. Ms. Shi cited a recent Beijing TV report that uncovered conventionally grown tomatoes being re-bagged as “organic.” While Shi Yan places little trust in the 23 different organic certification companies, 21 of which are privately owned, a young farmer in the rural outskirts of Beijing believes there is hope in consumer education. Chun Jing works for Emerald Bay, an organic farm which sells their produce in China’s growing online grocery shopping market. Through the online platform, customers can order groceries delivered right to their door, access farm updates and information, ask questions directly to the farm staff, and most importantly, see consumer reviews. She believes that as customers become more engaged in the food buying process and have access to greater information about the farm, their purchasing preferences will be the largest instigator for greater sustainable agriculture in China.

US companies already investing in China Forbes 5-30 (Richard Brubaker, 5-30-2016, "Can Sustainable Technology Save China?," Forbes, find at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ceibs/2016/05/30/can-sustainable-technology-save-china/#5603092d74c3)

Over the past 30 years, China has experienced rapid levels of urbanization and its citizens have become richer. But the trade-off has been depletion in arable land while structural inefficiencies in the food value chain have made it difficult to provide safe, accessible and affordable food to the market. With available arable land diminishing and what little there is of it increasingly over utilized, one solution that can boost production in order to meet demand is aquaculture and hydroponic systems . Alesca Life Technology is an example of a firm taking the next step forward , t hrough the adaptive re-use of shipping containers where food can be grown within the proximity of urban centers. Another example is Oceanethix, whose urban aquaculture process can turn any warehouse or retail center into a highly productive, environmentally clean, and transparent fish farm. As China lurches from one food safety scandal to another, it is clear that consumer confidence has deteriorated and changes are being demanded to improve and introduce sustainable practice. Using smartphone applications and online solutions, consumers can now easily scan and receive information regarding products’ life cycles. Shenzhen Vanch and IBM group are among those who have invested in traceability systems in China, a lucrative business opportunity that also gives consumers peace of mind.There is also tech progress being made at other steps along the supply chain . For example, the introduction of drones that leverage advanced sensors , low-cost aerial camera platforms and autopilot capabilities can give farmers the ability to view their crops from above , detect and assess irrigation issues , pest infestations, plant health and provide soil analysis. Tech products provided by companies such as DJI innovations and Ehang are now being used by hundreds of farms across China .

N/U New Zealand and Australia Status Quo solves - New Zealand Ag co-op with China Penn 5-4 Staff writer for the New Zealand Herald (New Zealand Herald, 5-4-2016, "China Business: Growing co-operation on agriculture, the Country, http://m.nzherald.co.nz/the-country/news/article.cfm?c_id=16&objectid=11633369) ZVNew Zealand's agricultural industries are set for a boost under the Agricultural Growth Programme (AGP) formed last month between New Zealand and China. The AGP will provide a basis for co-operation that will "improve the economic wellbeing of our respective agricultural sectors, enhance participation in the global value chain, and address common challenges," says Chris Carson, Director of International Policy at the Ministry for Primary Industries. The programme is expected to further enhance ties between the New Zealand and Chinese ag ricultural sectors , with a view to improving the exchange of agricultural policy initiatives, livestock technologies , animal health and disease control, and the training of dairy farmers . A particular focus will be placed on the expertise New Zealand firms and individuals can offer in these areas, leading to improved productivity for both nations' agricultural sectors, and an expansion of export opportunities for Kiwi producers. The arrangement to establish the AGP, a public-private partnership, was signed by New Zealand's Minister for Primary Industries, Nathan Guy, and China's Minister of Agriculture, Han Changfu, during the Prime Minister's latest visit to China. A joint advisory panel between the respective ministries will work to identify new opportunities for agricultural co-operation, and monitor initiatives as they are implemented. These initiatives will take the form of joint research projects, expert exchanges, and professional development programmes. For example, Crown Research Institutes and education providers can be expected to explore new opportunities in joint research and exchange of expertise through research fellowships and targeted scholarships. "Agriculture is a modern, fast-moving industry," says Carson. " New Zealand is keen to share expertise and find opportunities to help Chinese and New Zealand farmers work together to improve productivity and face an increasingly competitive and challenging world." Such co-operation has been piloted already, in the form of an Equine Veterinary Professional Development Programme. Supported by the Ministry for Primary Industries, alongside various equine businesses and organisations, the programme involved a seven week mix of vet practice mentoring and university block course learning for three equine practitioners from Inner Mongolian Rider Horse, a major player in the growing Inner Mongolia market for New Zealand-bred horses. "The industry participation in the programme reflects the value they place on the relationship with China says Dr Trish Pearce, executive advisor to the New Zealand Equine Health Association. "The programme provided an opportunity to exchange views and understand the needs of China's vet profession." The training covered areas from basic equine anatomy to musculoskeletal ailments affecting performance racehorses and treatment of common equine reproductive conditions.

China-Australia BIT solves Daniel Stacey is a Senior Writer with the Wall Street Journal covering South Asia from Delhi, India. (Daniel Stacey, 9-3-14, WSJ, “China Plows Big Money Into Australian Agriculture”, find at: http://www.wsj.com/articles/china-plows-big-money-into-australian-agriculture-1441308600)SYDNEY—Australian deal makers are swapping hard hats for cowboy hats as Chinese investors increasingly explore a new natural-resource boom: agriculture. China became the largest investor in Australia’s agricultural sector during the financial year ended June 2014, according to a report from the country’s Foreign Investment Review Board, pouring in 632 million Australian dollars ($450 million), almost twice as much as the year before. Chinese investment in Australian mining projects fell by a third to A$5.85 billion during the same period, the latest figures available. Australia’s Seafarms Group is seeking offshore investors to help develop a A$1.45 billion prawn farm in the country’s remote northwest. Nearby, Chinese company Shanghai Zhongfu last year spent A$700 million to launch a sugar and sorghum farm. Integrated Food and Energy Development, a private Australian company, is pitching a project to offshore investors that would convert five cattle stations in Queensland state into a A$2 billion enterprise producing sugar, guar beans and cattle. China’s push into Australian agriculture has been more cautious than its rush into mining, in which companies spent big on projects at high prices only to lose out as metals prices fell and costs soared. The agriculture

investors are mostly limiting their ambitions to joint ventures and stakes in exchange for a share of output. They’re tapping local expertise and retaining existing managers, rather than trying to gain full ownership of farms or launch major greenfield projects, local deal makers say.Australia is still just a small part of China’s global agricultural portfolio: Of China’s US$43 billion in investments and contracts in overseas agribusiness over the past 10 years, Australia accounts for only $1.5 billion, according the China Global Investment Tracker database. But Australia’s agriculture deals all happened in the past five years, and its share of Chinese foreign investment is set to grow now that the two nations have a free-trade deal, reached last November , that lifts restrictions on livestock exports and eases scrutiny of foreign investment. Consumers perceive food grown in Australia’ s relatively pristine natural environment to be three times as safe as food grown in China, and 50% healthier than food grown in the U.S., Brazil or France, according to a 2013 Reputation Institute survey. This makes Australian food more attractive to consumers who can afford quality products, such as China’s growing middle class. “Australia can’t feed all of China, clearly, but we do have the high-quality premium output to meet middle-, upper-income demands and tastes,” said Aaron Hood, chief investment officer of Minderoo Group, owned by iron-ore billionaire Andrew Forrest. Mr. Forrest and other mining magnates like Gina Rinehart have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on cattle stations, dairy processors and slaughterhouses in recent months.

Solves their Internal LinkHutchens ’16 Gareth has reported on economics, federal politics, courts, and business. He joined the Guardian’s Canberra bureau in 2016 as their politics and economics correspondent. He has previously worked for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age (Gareth Hutchens, 7-6-2016, "FTA will boost jobs and exports, say economists," Sydney Morning Herald, find at: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/fta-will-boost-jobs-and-exports-say-economists-20141117-11oi2f.html)Economists say the Chinese-Australia free trade agreement will be a boost for local employment and lead to a massive increase in exports for Australian companies. The Abbott government has also promised that local workers have been protected in the deal by so-called labour market 'testing' provisions requiring Chinese employers to try to use Australian workers to fill any vacancies on future China-led projects in Australia before looking to import labour from overseas. Tim Harcourt, from UNSW's Australian School of Business, says if the China-Australia free trade deal "takes off" it will likely have positive implications for Australian workers. The former Austrade chief economist says agriculture and agriculture technology companies are big winners from the deal, as are architectural and construction companies, service companies, and businesses that already export to China.

Different Tech – Can’t TranslateChina already inacting Ag policies and tech from US can’t translateZhang ’15 Dr. Zhang is the leading researcher of the Iowa Land Value Survey, the Iowa Farmland Ownership and Tenure Survey, as well as the ISU Soil Management and Land Valuation Conference. He also led the development of the new, interactive Iowa Land Value Portal. Dr. Zhang received his Ph.D. in Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics from the Ohio State University in July 2015, and he also hold a BSc in Environmental Science from Fudan University in China. (Wendong Zhang, November 2015, Iowa State University Decision and Outreach Extension, Find at: https://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/articles/others/ZhaNov15.html) ZVDue to historical and political reasons, you could easily find many sharp contrasts for the industries in the U nited S tates and China , four major ones are: Natural conditions for agriculture are better in the United States. As shown in Table 3, the population of agricultural producers in China is 75 times larger than the United States, but China has less than half the arable land available for farming. A typical Iowa farm of 300-400 acres is equivalent to the total farmland for a 200-household village in China. There are key differences in the paramount objectives of agricultural policies in the United States and China. Supporting and maintaining net farm income for a rural household is arguably the most important goal of United States farm policy, however, the Chinese government views the national food security as a much more important goal in making agricultural policy decisions. In other words, China pays much more attention to the total acreage of cropland, as opposed to the well-being of the farmers. The support system for Chinese agricultural producers is not nearly as well-structured or effective as the American system. Since the start of communist rule in 1949, farmers have been marginalized in China’s economic and political system. Before China opened up to a market economy in the late 1970s, a sizeable portion of agricultural proceeds were taken from farmers to support the development of heavy industries. Despite the rapid growth in agricultural subsidies recently, China abolished its agricultural tax system in 2003. The average government payment per farm Chinese farmers receive is only $113, compared to $11,262 for an Iowa farm, as shown in Table 4. Chinese farmers are far behind their American counterparts in terms of both educational achievements and access to resources, such as machinery and the Internet, as shown in Table 5. In addition, China lacks a strong extension program that helps farmers, especially those in poorer areas, to improve yields, mitigate environmental impacts and master modern agricultural technologies. The best agricultural universities in China are often located in mega-cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Nanjing, as opposed to Ames, Iowa; College Station, Texas; Ithaca, New York, and Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. Agriculture is far more volatile in China than it is in the United States. In the foreseeable future - within 10 years - China expects to see another 100 million agricultural producers move to cities in the largest urbanization movement in the history of the world. China recently enacted several policies and pilot trials for rural land reform aimed at encouraging consolidation of small plots and improving agricultural productivity. China is learning from the United States and Europe about setting up agricultural subsidy , crop insurance, and agri-environmental conservation programs . With the development of the Internet and Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce company that has a sales portal larger than Amazon and eBay combined, more and more rural youth are opening online shops to sell agricultural and non-agricultural products. While the United States agricultural industry is much more mature and stable, things could change very quickly for Chinese agriculture, as is true in almost every industry in China.

Link Turn – US EconTrade makes China more self- sufficient- decreases importsGale ’13 Fred Gale has been a research economist with the Market and Trade Economics Division of the Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture since 1988. His work focuses on China’s international trade, agricultural policy, and new developments in China’s food sector.(Gale, Fred, Growth and Evolution in China’s Agricultural Support Policies, ERR-153. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, August 2013.) As discussed above, authorities in China have signaled their intent to experiment with subsidy payments that are more directly coupled to production decisions and deficiency payments that allow prices to be determined by market forces. Another proposed measure is a subsidy to processors for each unit of domestic commodities processed. It is uncertain whether such policies can be widely adopted, since they would be costly, difficult to implement, and may exceed WTO-imposed limits on support. If such policies succeed in prompting Chinese farmers to expand production of a particular crop, such an expansion would mean displacing production of another crop . Improvements in crop yields , feed conversion, pest control, animal disease prevention, efficient water use, and other factors that raise productivity and efficiency can reduce unit costs of Chinese commodities and slow China’s demand for imports . China has numerous programs aimed at addressing these issues, and these programs account for much of its agricultural support expenditure. However, China has been engaged in such efforts for many years with uneven results, and large expenditure does not guarantee large impacts. The impact of these programs is likely to be incremental and have little immediate impact on production or demand for imported products. China is also experimenting with programs that encourage restructuring of agriculture and consolidation of farms. Larger scale farms may have a higher cost structure than small household-based farms, since they are more likely to pay high land rents, invest in fixed assets, use hired laborers and machinery. Larger scale farms may use more efficient management techniques and high-quality inputs, but they also may apply less labor and fertilizer per acre than household farms. The demand for highquality inputs may spur U.S. exports of feed ingredients, farm equipment, breeding stock, and seeds. China’s domestic-support policies will continue their evolution in coming years . Pressure from imports and perceived threats to food security are among the chief factors spurring policy adjustments. Changes in policies can occur rapidly in response to decrees of Central Government leaders, but implementation and impacts of policies is uneven and difficult to assess. Domestic policies are unlikely to prevent China from becoming a larger importer of agricultural products. Nevertheless, it will be important for U.S. industry leaders and policy officials to carefully monitor China’s evolving approach to agricultural policies as that country becomes an important source of demand in global commodity markets

High Chinese self sufficiency hurts US ag sector - tanks economyLee ’15 Don Lee covers the U.S. and global economy out of Washington, D.C. Since joining the Los Angeles Times in 1992, he has served as the Shanghai bureau chief and in various editing and reporting roles in California (Don Lee 3-5-2015, "Slackening demand from China hurting a variety of U.S. industries" ,Los Angeles Times,, http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-exports-china-20150306-story.html) ZVBetween the work stoppages at West Coast ports and the strong dollar, export businesses in California and across the country have had a tough few months . But for some, the biggest sucker punch has come from China. With its economy slowing amid a global glut of commodities, China is ordering less and driving steep price cuts for many goods — hurting a range of American industries such as scrap-metal dealers in Los Angeles, manufacturers in the Midwest and cotton farmers in the Mississippi Delta. U.S. exports of merchandise to China, America's third-biggest overseas market, rose just 1.6% last year after a 10% increase in 2013. Meanwhile, imports from China grew 5.7%

last year, resulting in the largest-ever U.S. trade deficit with the Asian nation. Yingying Xu, an economist at the Manufacturers Alliance for Productivity and Innovation in Virginia, said some of her trade group members, especially heavy manufacturers, had depended on China for as much as 50% of their sales growth. Now they're considering Plan Bs. "China's economic re-balance is going to take some time, not one or two years but four, five years," she said. "They're not going to do one big shock treatment to transition the economy," Xu said of leaders in Beijing. "It will be a gradual change. They will tolerate slower growth for a long time." China's economic momentum is expected to slow further. Chinese leaders Thursday lowered the country's economic growth forecast to 7% for this year. That's after the world's second-largest economy expanded 7.4% last year, the lowest rate since 1990. After decades of near double-digit growth, Beijing is trying to steer its economy toward a more sustainable path, away from property investments and exports to more personal consumption and services.So far, the economic hit from China has been cushioned by strong U.S. domestic demand and a pick-up in exports to a few other countries , including the top two export destinations, Canada and Mexico. The Obama administration, which is pushing an Asia-Pacific free-trade pact, has been highlighting the record U.S. exports to the world last year. But trade, which had accounted for a third of the U.S. recovery since the recession, is now a drag on American economic growt h . With the dollar up sharply against other major currencies, U.S. goods have become more expensive in foreign markets. Factory managers reported this week that new export orders fell in January and February, the first back-to-back monthly decline since 2012, when the euro area's debt crisis darkened the world economy. At 7%, China would still be growing quite fast. Among major economies, only India may surpass that rate this year, while the U.S., the fastest of the advanced economies, will do well to notch 3% growth. And over the long haul, experts said, a slower-growing but more stable Chinese economy will be good for the world and for America in particular. "If there was ever easy money to be made in China, those days are gone," said David Loevinger, a former China specialist at the Treasury Department and now a top Asia strategist for the Los Angeles investment firm TCW. Even as most American companies are making profits in China, they are finding the country an increasingly difficult place to do business. And they also face stronger competition from private Chinese companies. Still, Loevinger said American firms are well positioned as China shifts from a manufacturing-led economy to one driven more by services. "The U.S. is a global leader in services — financial services, healthcare, accounting, entertainment," he said. That's cold comfort for companies like Letvin Scrap Metal in Los Angeles, which has been doing business since 1947. Mark Steckler, Letvin's vice president, said it was frustrating enough that his containers of titanium scrap sat for weeks because of the labor strife at the ports. But then he has had to watch helplessly as prices of steel waste plunged by almost half since August. "There's a big glut of scrap iron. And the dollar being strong doesn't help," Steckler said, though he predicted that business from China will bounce back. "Absolutely, it's just a down cycle." Letvin is one of scores of scrap metal dealers in Southern California, the hub of the multibillion-dollar industry. Trade data show U.S. shipments of copper, aluminum and iron scrap sank 26% last year to $4.6 billion. Many farmers also have taken a beating in recent months. California exports of agricultural products to the world fell 9% in the fourth quarter last year compared with a year earlier, and China was a leading factor. The state's farm shipments to China alone plummeted 30% i n the fourth quarter, with nuts, grapes and some other fruits down sharply. American exporters of fancy nuts, as well as wine and premium fruits, have been hit with a double whammy in China. Besides the economic slowdown there, demand for such goods has plunged because of the Chinese president's anti-corruption campaign, which has officials cutting back on parties and gifts. "There's nothing really much I can do," said Ben Zhang of Bellevue, Wash., who spent the last four years developing a wine distribution business in China. With orders down dramatically, he said, he has 50 cases of premium wine stacked up in a warehouse in Shanghai. Zhang also runs a contract manufacturing operation in China, a 20-year-old business that is doing just fine, he said. Mainly for U.S. companies, he makes products such as golf towels and backpacks with company logos on them. "The U.S. economy is steady," he said, noting that he just opened a sales office in Philadelphia. Bowen Flowers, a fourth-generation cotton farmer in Clarksdale, Miss., blames the plunge in cotton markets on Chinese stockpiling and government subsidies for its farmers. He's dealing with it by shifting production to other crops. Only problem, he said, is that prices of most other commodities have fallen too. "We got the same problems with soybeans, corn and rice," he said. "We'll just have to cut our costs back as much as we can and wait it out."

Alt Cause to Ecosystem collapse Laundry List of Alt Causes to Warming- coal burning, irreversible water pollution, population growth Lallanilla ’13 Marc Lallanilla is a science, health and environmental journalist. A member of the Society of Environmental Journalists, Marc has decades of experience as an environmental consultant, a writer and an editor, His work has appeared in print and online publications like the Los Angeles Times, ABCNews.com and elsewhere, Marc received his bachelor's degree from the University of Texas at Austin, where he majored in environmental geography and architecture. He completed his master's degree in the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, where his thesis was in ecological restoration(Marc Lallanilla, 3-15-2013, "China's Top 6 Environmental Concerns," Live Science, find at: http://www.livescience.com/27862-china-environmental-problems.html)Air pollution According to the Environmental Protection Agency's air quality scale, any pollution rating above 300 means the air is unsafe to breathe. Under these conditions, people should stay indoors with an air purifier running and remain as motionless as possible, according to U.S. Embassy Beijing guidelines. In January alone, there were 19 days when the index in Beijing surpassed that 300 threshold, according to the Washington Post, and readings above 500 are no longer unusual. On Jan. 12, the reading reached an eye-bleeding 886, comparable to living inside a smoking lounge. Manufacturing industries and Beijing's 5 million-plus cars all contribute to the city's crippling air pollution , but most experts primarily blame the coal - burning electrical plants that power China's breakneck economic growth. China now burns 47 percent of the world's coal, roughly equal to the amount used by all other countries of the world combined, the New York Times reports. And Beijing is surrounded by a vast network of coal-burning power plants. But as foul as it is, Beijing's air isn't even China's worst: That dubious honor goes to Ürümqi in the country's far west, which frequently joins other Chinese cities like Lanzhou and Linfen on lists of the world's most polluted places. [Top 10 Ways to Destroy Earth] Water pollution Thousands of dead pigs floating past Shanghai, dramatic though they are, may be the least of China's water pollution worries. In January, a chemical accident leaked benzene , a known cancer-causing agent, into a tributar y of the Huangpu River (where the dead pigs were discovered). More than 20 people were hospitalized as a result, according to the Wall Street Journal, and area residents were forced to rely on fire trucks to deliver safe drinking water. More than half of China's surface water is so polluted it cannot be treated to make it drinkable, the Economist reports, and one-quarter of it is so dangerous it can't even be used for industrial purposes. Groundwater isn't any safer: About 40 percent of China's farmland relies on underground water for irrigation, and an estimated 90 percent is polluted, Reuters reports. About 60 percent of the groundwater beneath Chinese cities is described as "severely polluted" by the Economist. Last December — shortly after his sister died of lung cancer at age 35 — businessman Jin Zengmin from Zhejiang province offered a 200,000-yuan ($32,000) reward to any local environmental official who would swim in a nearby river, where Jin once swam as a boy, Time.com reports. The river is now black with sludge from an upstream shoe factory. His reward remains uncollected. Desertification China has a history of intensive agriculture going back millennia, so it's perhaps unsurprising that much of the nation's 3.7 million square-mile (9.6 million square kilometers) territory has been subject to deforestation. Population pressure, the conversion of forests to farmland, and hydroelectric and other infrastructure projects have placed China's remaining forests at risk . This prompted the United Nations Environment Programme to list the country's forests as threatened and in need of protection. Following closely on the heels of deforestation and agricultural development is desertification, the destruction of vegetative land cover that results in a landscape defined by bare soil and rock. About 1 million square miles (2.6 million sq km) of China is now under desertification — that's about one-quarter of the country’s total land surface, spread across 18 provinces, according to IPS News Agency. Blinding dust storms, mud-choked rivers and eroded topsoil are often the result of desertification. Despite recent gains in reforestation and grasslands restoration, the desert continues to expand each year by about 950 square miles (2,460 sq km), according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). [Dry and Drying: Stark Images of Drought] The resulting loss of arable land has created a generation of "eco-migrants," the Guardian reports, who are forced to leave their homelands, because their traditional agricultural lifestyle is no longer an option. "We've made progress, but we face a daunting challenge," Liu Tuo, Chinese desertification control officer, told the Guardian. " It may take

China 300 years." Biodiversity Closely related to deforestation and desertification is the issue of habitat loss and the resulting drop in biodiversity. As vast areas of forest are cleared for farmland, bamboo plantations, timber and fuel wood, endangered animals like pandas struggle to survive. China's issues with species loss extend far beyond its borders: The slaughter of elephants for ivory, the killing of rhinos for their horns, and the culling of tigers for their bones (as medicine) and penises (as aphrodisiacs) have one primary source: the Chinese market. Sharks are endangered worldwide, largely because of shark finning — the removal of dorsal fins from still-living sharks — for the Chinese delicacy known as shark fin soup. Cancer villages Perhaps no other issue underscores China's reckless disregard for environmental and public health more than the existence of "cancer villages," entire towns that have been written off as so polluted that simply living there is a cancer risk. For years, individuals and groups have waged a desperate campaign to force the government to address — or even acknowledge — the high rates of stomach, liver, kidney and colon cancer in certain areas, usually adjacent to heavy industrial complexes, the BBC reports. In Shangba, a city in southern Guangdong province, the river that flows through town changes from white to a startling shade of orange because of varying types of industrial effluent, Reuters reports. Many of the river's contaminants, like cadmium and zinc, are known to cause cancer. "All the fish died, even chickens and ducks that drank from the river died. If you put your leg in the water, you'll get rashes and a terrible itch," He Shuncai, a 34-year-old farmer from Shangba, told Reuters. "Last year alone, six people in our village died from cancer and they were in their 30s and 40s." In February of this year, a report from China's environment ministry noted that chemicals and heavy metals banned in other countries are found throughout China. The report went on to state that there are "some serious cases of health and social problems like the emergence of cancer villages in individual regions," marking the first official admission of the problem that has plagued the country for decades. Population growth China's "one-child" policy is universally acknowledged as having effectively kept the country's population in check. Nonetheless, China is home to about 1.3 billion people — over one-seventh of the planet's people live in the nation. What's more of a concern to environmental advocates is the growing affluence of China's middle class, who are now adopting Western-style consumer pattern s . While items like red meat, liquor and automobiles were once considered forbidden luxuries, more and more families are driving their car to a market to buy tenderloin beef, 120-proof baijiu liquor and other consumer goods. The health risks associated with these kinds of purchases have not gone unnoticed: Binge drinking and alcohol-related hospitalizations have now reached "epidemic proportions," the Guardian reports, and the Chinese — who once enjoyed a relatively healthy diet and low rates of cancer — now dine on twice as much meat as Americans, consuming one-quarter of the world's supply, according to the Telegraph. These consumer trends, multiplied across a large and heavily populated country, have a global reach that affects everything from sugar prices in Europe to climate change in Greenland: Most climate experts agree that China's industrial growth, and its dependence on coal-burning, are significant drivers of climate change , Scientific American reports. Alt Cause- Climate Change overwhelms High Tech AgLiu ’12 Coco is an award-winning journalist writing primarily about China’s energy and climate change. Her stories have appeared in ClimateWire, InsideClimate News, Scientific American and on the New York Times.com among many others.(Coco Liu, Climatewire, 4-2-2012, "As Climate Becomes Less Certain, So Does China's Ability to Grow Enough Food," Scientific American, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/as-climate-becomes-less-certain-so-does-chinas-ability-to-grow-enough-food/)Worse yet, China is losing its ability to produce more . During the past decades, farmers here have enjoyed an explosion of productivity, thanks partly to genetically manipulated crops that are higher-yielding and resistant to pests and diseases. But today, that help is starting to fade away , as it is falling victim to climate change. "In the 1970s, when we used genetic engineering technology to breed regionally adopted crops, we could enjoy its high yield for years; now that period is much shorter ," said Pan Genxing, director of Agriculture and Climate Change Center at Nanjing Agriculture University. What is defeating the technology, according to Pan, is that the environment in which the crops grow keeps changing due to climate change, making regionally adopted crops no longer a fit for the region they were designed to.To be sure, not all the effects of climate change are an agricultural curse. For instance, the higher temperatures allow crops to grow in areas which were previously too cold, and lengthen the growing season and, for some crops, the number of times per year they can be harvested. But whether China can take advantage of those changes is another troubling question. Along north China's Haihe

River Basin, where crops can now grow twice a year thanks to warmer climate, local farmers still plant only once, for lack of water, says Mo Xingguo. He researches climate change and agricultural water use at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Experts say that other parts of northern China, which were to enjoy greater numbers of harvests per year as the climate gets warmer, confront the same obstacle. Irrigation there largely relies on groundwater, and to grow more crops would require pumping more water out of wells, an unlikely prospect in a land whose groundwater level in recent years has already dropped dangerously. "The region's water resources simply can't afford more crop plantings," Mo said.

Alt Cause- Air Pollution Kaiman ’14 Jonathan Kaiman is an Asia correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, reporting from Beijing.(Jonathan Kaiman, 2-25-2014, "China's toxic air pollution resembles nuclear winter, say scientists," Guardian, find at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/25/china-toxic-air-pollution-nuclear-winter-scientists)Chinese scientists have warned that the country's toxic air pollution is now so bad that it resembles a nuclear winter, slowing photosynthesis in plants – and potentially wreaking havoc on the country's food supply. Beijing and broad swaths of six northern provinces have spent the past week blanketed in a dense pea-soup smog that is not expected to abate until Thursday. Beijing's concentration of PM 2.5 particles – those small enough to penetrate deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream – hit 505 micrograms per cubic metre on Tuesday night. The World Health Organisation recommends a safe level of 25. The worsening air pollution has already exacted a significant economic toll, grounding flights, closing highways and keeping tourists at home. On Monday 11,200 people visited Beijing's Forbidden City, about a quarter of the site's average daily draw. He Dongxian, an associate professor at China Agricultural University's College of Water Resources and Civil Engineering, said new research suggested that if the smog persists, Chinese agriculture will suffer conditions "somewhat similar to a nuclear winter".She has demonstrated that air pollutants adhere to greenhouse surfaces, cut ting the amount of light inside by about 50% and severely impeding photosynthesis, the process by which plants convert light into life-sustaining chemical energy. She tested the hypothesis by growing one group of chilli and tomato seeds under artificial lab light, and another under a suburban Beijing greenhouse. In the lab, the seeds sprouted in 20 days; in the greenhouse, they took more than two months. "They will be lucky to live at all," He told the South China Morning Post newspaper. She warned that if smoggy conditions persist, the country's agricultural production could be seriously affected . "Now almost every farm is caught in a smog panic," she said.

Water Wars Impact DNo Indo-Sino water wars alt cause- rainwater rechargeManu Moudgil is a writer and researcher on environment and governance issues. He previously worked with various mainstream publications before starting Gol Monitor, a web magazine that focuses on development news and features in India. In 2013, he joined India Water Portal, a knowledge repository on water. He holds a Master’s degree in Mass Communication and a certificate in environmental law.( Manu Mougdi 9-6-15"The Improbability of a Water War in South Asia," Fair Observer, find at: http://www.fairobserver.com/region/central_south_asia/the-improbability-of-a-water-war-in-south-asia-93201/) ZV

India and China are much too dependent on each othe r today, both economically and in the context of global politics — preventing such a conflict over water . China has become India’s largest trading partner, with bilateral trade having a potential of over $100 billion in 2015. The impact of damming too may not be as disastrous as is currently being predicted. Most of the dams planned by China are run-of-the-river, requiring smaller water storage to produce electricity . There will definitely be a fluctuation in water flows downstream, impacting the aquatic life more than the people. Thus far, nations have not gone to war for any living beings other than humans. Moreover, the Brahmaputra gets most of its water from various tributaries after entering India, thanks to heavy rainfall in the northeastern region. In an interview, Jabin T. Jacob, assistant director and fellow at the Institute of Chinese Studies, said about 70% of the water volume of the Brahmaputra is generated on the Indian side of the McMahon Line through various tributaries and rainfall. The 30% natural flow from Tibet is still a high volume that is expected to first increase and then decline in the long-term due to the melting of the Jima Yangzong glacier, the Brahmaputra’s main source. On the other hand, the plan to divert water from the Tibetan plateau toward North China faces technical challenges as it has to be hauled up several thousand meters, which does not seem feasible as of now. Thus, the river flow is not expected to change as drastically as predicted . In case of scarcity, India is more likely to strengthen its domestic rainwater recharge capacities than sabotage dams operating across its borders, potentially provoking China into war. India gets 4,000 billion m3 of sweet water through annual precipitation—of which only 18% is used effectively.

No Impact to Water Wars, Dam Alt cause, and your authors are biased Matteson ’14 Professor of English at Shanghai Jiaotong University and reciewed a Masters Degree from Shanghai Jiaotong University and a BA from Appalachian State University, (Adam W. Matteson, June 17, 2014, “Ebb and Flow: China’s Great Water Crisis” Shanghai Jiaotong University, find at: http://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/37289075/Ebb_and_Flow.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJ56TQJRTWSMTNPEA&Expires=1467924246&Signature=2Dh3r86oCBAvuGrgATuHaX3yanM%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DEbb_and_Flow_Chinas_Great_Water_Crisis.pdf) ZV

China’s water problems are not confined only to within China’s borders. They also have the potential to make its neighbors nervous. China, being the source of many rivers, gives it a unique ability to affect its neighbors. Water flowing between countries has been under closer scrutiny recentl y , as rumors of China’s diversion of the Brahmaputra River have emerged. The Brahmaputra is a 2,000-mile river which begins in Tibet as the Yarlung Tsangpo, merges with the Ganges in India and empties into the Bay of Bengal. Among other proposed sites, a colossal 38 gigawatt hydropower plant called the Mutuo Dam is being planned along a bend in the river. Though Chinese officials note that they are not planning to divert the river, only dam it to capture energy (and, as China boasts, to save 200 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year), the project is still giving many in India cause for trepidation, especially in light of the existing power struggle between the two nations. (Economy & Levi, 2014) Water politics between India and China come on top of already tense political relations. The two most populous Asian countries are both competing for resources to sustain developing economies. A border

dispute is complicating relations as both China and India claim some of the same territory in the Himalayas. The issue of Chinese dam construction was raised at the IndiaChina strategic dialogue in New Delhi in 2014 : “Indian politicians and activists alike have long railed against Chinese dam construction , with some saying water issues could outweigh the two countries’ longstanding territorial disputes as a reason for potential conflict.” (Wall, 2013) In fact, sites for three dams have been proposed by China along the river . Construction has already begun on some sites, and the Zangmu Hydropower Station is scheduled to come online in 2014. (Li, 2013) According to the Global Times, a noted nationalist paper, “China stresses a peaceful rise, and tries to build up a win-win situation,” while “India expects to put more pressure on China by exaggerating the facts and drawing attention from the international community, with the intention of preventing China from developing Tibetan water resources.” (Li, 2013) The Brahmaputra is not the only river to be potentially affected by Chinese hydropower construction. Development on the Mekong River, which runs south from China’s Tibetan plateau through five countries before emptying into the South China Sea, is especially controversial. Vietnam, like India, is downstream of China’s hydroelectric development and, like India, has had tenuous relations with its northern neighbor over the past several decades. In the past, China has assured downstream countries that the dam development would not affect their river systems. (BBC, 2010) Yet fish populations, an important source of food and revenue , stand to be compromised by upstream development , and droughts are often blamed on upstream activity (other analysts argue that Yunnan, one of China’s southern provinces, experiences droughts at the same time as downstream countries). (Economy & Levi, 2014) Water issues also have the potential to shake up relations with Central Asian neighbors as well. The most notable of approximately twenty rivers that China and Kazakhstan share are the Ili and the Irtysh rivers. China’s plan to develop the Xinjiang region includes diversion of these rivers, which would reduce the amount of water going into Kazakhstan and put several cities on the edge of drought. Environmental damage could also take place, as Lake Balkhash would lose a great source of input. No resolution has been made so far, and public sentiment in Kazakhstan towards Chinese has lowered. Kazakhstan is unable to stop Beijing from diverting the rivers, though it “may be able to leverage Chinese interests in investing in and developing Kazakh oil and copper resources, as well as exert political pressure through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Forum.” (Economy & Levi, 2014) Admittedly, these issues are subject to exaggeration. Rhetoric from the media often portrays a coming “water war ” which will pit one nation against the other in a struggle for potable water. Brahma Chellaney, a leading strategist and author on geopolitical trends, as well as a noted outspoken critic of China’s water policy, has called China a “hydro-hegemon,” and has strongly rebuked the country for re-engineering the trans-boundary water flows. (A Crisis to Come?: China, India and Water Rivalry, 2011) But the situation is only depicted with such gravity because the consequences are so high. Though an all out “water war” may be a remote possibility, the facts on the ground reveal that water in China is a natural resource that affects the very livelihood of people in other nations. If China plans to control its water supply by damming rivers that flow into neighboring countries, it should be sure that its actions will not compromise relationships in either the short- or long-term future. Greater transparency on behalf of China could go far in alleviating tensions. Water Wars don’t escalate Walsh ’13 Senior Editor of Foreign Affairs at TIME magazine(Bryan Walsh, 12-10-13, "Water Doesn't Start Wars," TIME, find at: http://science.time.com/2013/12/10/new-mideast-pipeline-deal-shows-why-water-doesnt-start-wars/)But even if the Dead Sea deal is less than historic, it’s still a deal, hammered out by entities that usually have a hard time even speaking to each other. And it’s a reminder that contrary to the much-repeated phrase that “ the next world war will be fought over water ,” similar deals tend to be the rule with international disputes over water , not the exception . Far from being a source of violent conflict—like religion or oil—water is something that even bitter rivals can usually sit down and discuss , however reluctantly. I don’t blame you if you don’t believe me. The idea that water is a limited resource that will inevitably be the source of conflict in arid regions of the world is considered a given in many security, foreign policy and environmental circles. Just see this

piece, or this one, or that one. Or this piece, or this one, or that one. (And those are just from 2013.) Water wars were even the subject of the 2008 James Bond film Quantum of Solace—the one with the eco-villain named Greene who was going to corner the Bolivian market on water, which I have to say, is pretty dull compared to irradiating the gold in Fort Knox (Goldfinger) or flooding all of Silicon Valley (A View to a Kill). Even Mark Twain, referring to disputes between Western U.S. states over the Colorado River, memorably said that “whiskey is for drinking. Water is for fightin’ over.” But when it comes to actual armed conflict—as opposed to wars of words—I’m sorry to say that Mr. Twain has it wrong. That’s what science journalist Helen Barnaby discovered when she began work a number of years ago on a proposed book about water wars. In the course of her research, Barnaby discovered that there hasn’t been an actual war between two nations over water for about 4,500 years , back when Lagash and Umma, two Mesopotamian city-states located in what is now southern Iraq, took up arms over boundary canals. Sandra Postel and Aaron Wolffound that between the years of 805 and 1984, countries signed more than 3,600 water-related treaties. Their analysis of 1,831 international water-related treaties over the second half of the 20th century found that two-thirds of the encounters were of a cooperative nature. India and Pakistan have abided by the World Bank-arbitrated Indus Waters Treaty since 1960, and none of the three wars the bitter rivals have fought were caused by water disputes. Even as Palestinians and Israelis kill each other, water professionals on both sides interact through the Joint Water Committee, established by the Oslo-II Accords in 1995.

No impact to water WarsWolf ’99 Aaron Wolf is a professor of geography in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University. He has an M.S. in water resources management (and a Ph.D. in environmental policy analysis) from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Dr. Wolf has acted as consultant to the US Department of State, the US Agency for International Development, and the World Bank, and several governments on various aspects of international water resources and dispute resolution.( Aaron T. Wolf, published in 1999“‘’Water Wars” and Water Reality: Conflict and Cooperation Along International Waterways”,Environmental Change, Adaptation, and Security Volume 65 of the series NATO ASI Series pp 251-265, abstract found at: http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-011-4219-9_18)There are 261 international rivers, covering almost one half of the total land surface of the globe, and untold numbers of shared aquifers. Water has been a cause of political tensions between Arabs and Israelis, Indians and Bangladeshis, Americans and Mexicans, and all 10 riparian states of the Nile River. Water is the only scarce resource for which there is no substitute, over which there is poorly developed international law, and the need for which is overwhelming, constant, and immediate. As a consequence, water and war are two topics being assessed together with increasing frequency. This chapter investigates the reality of historic water conflict and draws lessons for the plausibility of future water wars. The data sets of conflict are explored for those related to water—only seven minor skirmishes are found in this century ; no war has ever been fought over water . In contrast, 149 water-related treaties have been signed in the same period. These treaties, collected and catalogued in a computerized database along with relevant notes from negotiators, are assessed for patterns of conflict resolution. War over water seems neither strategically rational, hydrographically effective, nor economically viable. Shared interests along a waterway seem to overwhelm water’s conflict- inducing characteristics. Furthermore, once cooperative water regimes are established through treaty, they turn out to be tremendously resilien t over time , even between otherwise hostile riparian states, and even as conflict is waged over other issues . These patterns suggest that the more valuable lesson of international water is as a resource whose characteristics tend to induce cooperation , and incite violence only in the exception

Water Waters – Trade can’t SolveTrade doesn’t solve water warsYardley ‘07 Jim Yardley became the Rome Bureau Chief for The New York Times in September 2013, after spending the previous decade in China, India and Bangladesh, Mr. Yardley and his colleague, Joseph Kahn, won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for their series, Rule by Law, which documented the rough justice of the Chinese legal system. Jim Yardley, 9-28-2007, "Beneath Booming Cities, China’s Future is Drying Up" New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/28/world/asia/28water.htmlChina is scouring the world for oil, natural gas and minerals to keep its economic machine humming. But trade deals cannot solve water problems. Water usage in China has quintupled since 1949, and leaders will increasingly face tough political choices as cities, industry and farming compete for a finite and unbalanced water supply.