Come on China! you are doing a great job..lifting millions out of poverty in such short time. It's a incredible achievement which no country in history have accomplished so much. Millions of lives have improved and overal population life expectancy jumped. Keep up the good work! Hunger Scorecard: China Improves, India Deteriorates Posted by: Frederik Balfour on October 16 In a report released to mark World Food Day on Oct. 16 by anti-poverty NGO ActionAid, China gets high marks for hunger alleviation while India is singled out for its deteriorating situation. China has reduced the number of people who go hungry by 58 million in the past 10 years while the number of undernourished people in India has increased by 30 million since the mid 1990s. The report attributes Chinas success in reducing the problem of undernourishment to land reforms that led to greater productivity. The helped the China reduce undernourishment levels to 9% of the population. [It did not give a comparable figure for 10 years ago.] In absolute numbers however, Chinas problem remains enormous. Some 117 million people go hungry every day, and in most cases, their level of deprivation is extreme. Also, the agricultural improvements have come with a cost. The rise in agricultural productivity has come about thanks to extremely intensive use of chemical fertilizers and insecticides that are the biggest source of water pollution in the country. In contrast, Indias percentage of hungry was 21% which amounts to a staggering number of 240 million people. The increase in the number of hungry was due in part to the large number of rural people displaced by industrialization [for an in-depth discussion of land issues in India, check out this excellent piece in BusinessWeek magazine by Mehul Srivistava,] and poor infrastructure that prevented available food from being properly distributed. Hunger exists not because there is not enough food in India, but because people cannot access it, the report notes. Much has been written about the contrast between Indias tattered infrastructure and Chinas shiny new airports, modern highways and logistics facilities. For a discussion on the check out this blog on relative merits of the two countries. However the Sino-Indian rivalry usually focuses on each countrys economic potential and attractiveness as a foreign investment destination. What the ActionAid report does is remind us of the extraordinary human cost of underinvestment in agriculture and infrastructure to ensure it is distributed properly. When children go hungrya staggering 47% of children under six in India suffer from malnourishmentthey are unable to concentrate in school, making it more likely they will remain caught in the poverty trap of poor education and low income. And the country as a whole suffers from all that potential human capital which never gets realized. This also tends to worsen income distribution. For more on comparisons between rich and poor see this BusinessWeek slide show. http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/blog/eyeonasia/archives/2009/10/_hunger_scoreca.html
It's true, it's like how I said in the other thread... While China and India had a similar start (They both focus with the raw material, manufacture sector) But China moving slowly toward tertiary sector also therefore giving them the economy of both manufacture and tertiary (allow them to be some sort of self sufficient state) While India focus on import and export from USA, therefore when there is no export, the economy could no longer function
Being self-sufficient will be one of the most valuable asset China will owned. India is a prime good example, getting raped from left to right by the Russians and the West. The Chinese are very smart and they know this right from the very beginning. Until then, all those China-haters can scream all they want...it won't make dent. lol
I guess China finally learned that you can't starve people and keep them happy at the same time. For those that don't remember the Great Leap Forward, the PRC starved an estimated 16 to 30 million Chinese (some say only five million, others say over fifty million; suffice to say it was a lot) because of its failed internal policies. During that time, the PRC exported record high amounts of grain in order to put on a good political face with the knowledge within that millions of its own people were starving to death. The GLF has continues to be studied because it was sadly hidden from historians for nearly two decades. The truth was only discovered upon review of reasons for an unexplained population loss in the Chinese census figures. To the PRC's credit, the government does recognize the fact now, that starving masses will only foster revolution. That was exactly the reason why the Chinese masses rose up to drive out the Nationalists, and it could well be the same for the Communists. After all, an empty belly owes allegiance to no one. That said, China is nonetheless faced with a huge problem. Its supply of arable land is finite, but the consumption variable (population) continues to increase (and this, despite generations of birth rate controls). It recently acknowledged worries about its food chain that supplies the People's Liberation Army and moved to safeguard food production for its military as a matter of national defense. From poisoned baby formula to chemically laced fish, the PRC is hopefully waking up to the fact that to safeguard its nation and the CCP, it needs to keep its people healthy and properly fed.
