Economist, Jan 18, 2014

choi

(1) The South China Sea |  Hai-Handed; China creates an ADIZ for fish.
(Taiwan also bases its claim on the nine-dash line")

My comment:
(a)  I was startled by the quotation. Come to think about it, there might be a grain of truth, back in the administrations of the Chiangs, when textbooks then boasted the broad expanse of Republic of China: south to James Shoal 曾母暗沙.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Shoal

Even then, in Taiwan there was no mention of eleven-dash line or explicit talk that South China Sea was ROC's, which was identified in Chinese as 南中國海, rather than 南海. The textbook might have been revised, following independent-minded Presidents Lee Tenghui and Chen Shui-bian.
(b) The second sentence makes it clear what the title means: "On January 1st new regulation from the government of Hainan, China's southernmost province, came into effect, requiring all vessels planning to fish in waters under Hainan's jurisdiction to get permission from the Chinese authorities.
(c) The "Hai" in the title is a wordplay on "Hainan."
(d) There is no need to read the rest.

choi

(2) Livestock farming |  Meat and Greens; A lot can be done to make meat-eating less bad for the planet.
www.economist.com/news/internati ... net-meat-and-greens

three consecutive paragraphs:

"Among the lessons of the research is that white meat wins out over red for environmental reasons as well as health ones. It takes 2kg of feed to produce 1kg of chicken; 3kg for 1kg of pork. The ratio for lamb is between four and six to one; for beef, between five and 20 to one. And cows need five times as much feed to produce 1kg of protein as meat than to produce it as milk.

"A cow in America or Europe [both favoring industrial scale of livestock farming] eats 75-300kg of hay and other dry matter per kilo of protein; in Africa, which has the largest number of traditional pastoralists [AND smallholders], she needs 500kg or more. On the dry rangelands of Ethiopia and South Sudan, the figure is up to 2,000kg.

"Switching from pastoralism to feeding cattle with grain [which environmentalists hate, contending grass or hay is the only 'natural' food for cattle] would dramatically improve efficiency. Just how much can be seen from milk yields. Between 1950 and 2000, they doubled in the Netherlands, from 3,560 litres per cow per year to 7,180. In Africa the improvement was zero.

Note:
(a) The title Meat and Greens is a wordplay on "meet and greet."
(b) Skip the first half and start reading from the paragraph that begins with "So what sort of livestock farming can satisfy growing demand while using land, water and crops more rationally? Recent papers by Mario Herrero of Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation and colleagues argue that the answer is intensive livestock farming [or 'factory farming' as environmentalists deride."

Herrero m ET AL, Biomass Use, Production, Feed Efficiencies, and Greenhouse Gas Emissions From Global Livestock Systems. Proceedings of National Academic Sciences, _: _ (online release before publication).
www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/12/12/1308149110.abstract

(c) Just yesterday, there is a report about ranch pigs (not just chickens now). Looking at the vastness of the ranch for a few pigs (as shown in photos accompanying the report), I considered it a bad joke.

Stephanie Strom, A pasture for the Pigs; Demand grows for hogs that are raised humanely outdoors. New York Times, Jan 21, 2013,
whose excerpt in the window of print is: Shunning pork from pigs kept in small crates or pens.




  

choi

(3) Picking the world champion of trade |  Trading Up; Which country gets the most out of international commerce?
www.economist.com/news/finance-a ... commerce-trading-up

Excerpt:

"'CHINA is now No 1 in trade [goods only; excluding services],' proclaimed the front-page headline of China Daily USA * * * Its [2013] combined imports and exports amounted to almost $4.2 trillion, exceeding America’s for the first time

"China’s exports and imports are voluminous partly because its economy is so big. Relative to the size of its GDP, China’s trade is below the world average. Its exports and imports were equivalent to almost 53% of GDP in 2012, whereas the ratio of global trade to world GDP was over 63%.

"Relative to the size of its population, China’s trade is also modest. It amounted to just $3,200 per inhabitant in 2012, ranking only 99th in the world. But China has over 1.34 billion people. * * *Populous, spacious economies are often quite closed: America’s ratio of trade to GDP is, for example, only a little above 30%. Brazil’s is about 26%. Indeed, Arvind Subramanian of the Peterson Institute reckons that China’s trade is almost 70% greater than one would expect given the modesty of its income and the vastness of its territory and population.

"By the same token, measures of trade per person flatter small countries, like Luxembourg or Singapore. Some of the countries that rank highest by this measure are tiny emirates blessed with oil or gas. Their exports are lucrative, but not terribly sophisticated.