Dim Sums: Agricultural Markets in China

Everyone thinks that China is taking advantage of us by exporting so much stuff to us, but it’s actually the other way around. The United States has taken a mountain of iPods, cameras, computers, and keychains and gave China nothing but pieces of paper in exchange. Americans get lots of stuff cheap and the Chinese are left with nothing but pieces of paper for their hard work. Here’s how it works. China paves over thousands of acres of its best farmland to make industrial parks, builds factories, hires millions of workers, buys oil, aluminum, copper, etc., and makes tennis shoes, TVs, power tools, Christmas ornaments, you name it, and sends them over to fill the shelves of our Wal-marts, Toys R Us, Bed Bath n Beyond, etc. We buy physical objects that make our lives more enjoyable at extremely low prices and send the Chinese pieces of paper that say they’re entitled to cash the paper in to get a wheelbarrow-full of dollar bills. Now what does a Chinese factory owner do with a wheelbar...

They are out there. We know they are. Lurking in rice paddies and shoe factories eager for their first taste of flesh. They are the Chinese meat-eaters who are taking a bite out of our precious food supply, leaving less for the rest of us and driving food prices sky-high. One of the alleged reasons for high food prices rehashed in nearly every article, speech, and Congressional testimony on the matter is "increasing consumption by the middle class in China and India." The logic works perfectly: people in poor countries are getting richer; they are eating more meat; it takes a lot of grain to produce each pound of meat; therefore more of our grain is going to China and India, so prices are being driven up. Nice logic, but no one ever checked to see whether this is actually happening--it's not. No one really knows how much grain (or meat for that matter) is consumed in China, but we do know that China imports essentially zero corn--the main grain used to feed animals and pr...