The Frontiers of Management. Peter F. Drucker

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ and even more successfully. The greatest increases, both in absolute and in relative terms, have, however, been in developing countries: in India, in post-Mao China, and in the rice-growing countries of Southeast Asia.

      And then there is also the tremendous cut in waste. Twenty-five years ago, up to 80 percent of the grain harvest of India fed rats and insects rather than human beings. Today in most parts of India the wastage is down to 20 percent, the result of such unspectacular but effective infrastructure innovations as small concrete storage bins, insecticides, or three-wheeled motorized carts that take the harvest straight to a processing plant instead of letting it sit in the open for weeks on end.

      And it is not too fanciful to expect that the true revolution on the farm is still ahead. Vast tracts of land that hitherto were practically barren are being made fertile, either through new methods of cultivation or through adding trace minerals to the soil: the sour clays in the Brazilian highlands, for instance, or aluminum-contaminated soils in neighboring Peru, which never produced anything before and which now produce substantial quantities of high-quality rice. Even greater advances are registered in biotechnology, both in preventing diseases of plants and animals and in increasing yields.

      In other words, just as the population growth of the world is slowing down, and in many parts quite dramatically, food production is likely to increase sharply.

      But import markets for food have all but disappeared. As a result of its agricultural drive, Western Europe has become a substantial food exporter plagued increasingly by unsalable surpluses of all kinds of foods, from dairy products to wine and from wheat to beef. China, some observers now predict, will have become a food exporter by the year 2000. India has already reached that stage, especially in respect to wheat and coarse grains. Of all major noncommunist countries only Japan is still a substantial food importer, buying abroad about one-third of her food needs. Today most of this comes from the United States. Within five or ten years, however, South Korea, Thailand, and Indonesia—low-cost producers that are increasing food output fast—will compete with the United States to become Japan's major suppliers. The only remaining major world-market food buyer may then be the Soviet Union, and Russia's food needs are likely to grow. However, the food surpluses in the world are so large, maybe five to eight times what Russia would ever need to buy, that the Russian food needs are not by themselves enough to put upward pressure on world prices. On the contrary, the competition for access to the Russian market among the surplus producers—the United States, Europe, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand (and, probably within a few years, India as well)—is already so intense as to knock down world food prices.

      For practically all nonfarm commodities, whether forest products, minerals, or metals, world demand itself—in sharp contrast to what the Club of Rome so confidently predicted—is shrinking. Indeed, the amount of raw materials needed for a given unit of economic output has been dropping for the entire century, except in wartime. A recent study by the International Monetary Fund* calculates the decline as being at the rate of one and a quarter percent a year (compound) ever since 1900. That would mean that the amount of industrial raw materials needed for one unit of industrial production is now no more than two-fifths of what it was in 1900, and the decline is accelerating. Even more startling are recent Japanese developments. In 1984, Japan, for every unit of industrial production, consumed only 60 percent of the raw materials she had consumed for the same amount of industrial production in 1973, only eleven years earlier.

      Why this decline? It is not that industrial production is becoming less important, a common myth for which, as we shall see shortly, there is not the slightest evidence. What is happening is much more important. Industrial production is steadily switching from heavily material-intensive to far less material-intensive products and processes. One reason for this is the emergence of the new and especially the high-tech industries. The raw materials in a semiconductor microchip account for 1 to 3 percent; in an automobile their share is 40 percent; and in pots and pans, 60 percent. But the same scaling down of raw-material needs goes on in old industries, and with respect to old products as well as new ones. Fifty to one hundred pounds of fiberglass cable transmits as many telephone messages as does one ton of copper wire, if not more.

      This steady drop in the raw-material intensity of manufacturing processes and manufacturing products extends to energy as well, and especially to petroleum. To produce one hundred pounds of fiberglass cable requires no more than one-twentieth of the energy needed to mine and smelt enough copper ore to produce one ton of copper and then to draw it out into copper wire. Similarly plastics, which are increasingly replacing steel in automobile bodies, represent a raw-materials cost, including energy, of less than half that of steel.

      And if copper prices were to double—and that would still mean a fairly low price by historical standards—we would soon start to “mine” the world's largest copper deposits, which are not the mines of Chile or of Utah, but the millions of tons of telephone cable under the streets of our large cities. It would then pay us to replace the underground copper cables with fiberglass.

      Thus it is quite unlikely that raw-materials prices will rise substantially compared to the prices of manufactured goods (or of high-knowledge services such as information, education, or health care) except in the event of a major prolonged war.

      One implication of this sharp shift in the terms of trade of primary products concerns the developed countries, whether major raw-materials exporters like the United States or major raw-materials importers such as Japan. The United States for two centuries has seen maintenance of open markets for its farm products and raw materials as central to its international trade policy. This is in effect what is meant in the United States by an “open world economy” and by “free trade.” Does this still make sense? Or does the United States instead have to accept that foreign markets for its foodstuffs and raw materials are in long-term and irreversible decline? But also, does it still make sense for Japan to base its international economic policy on the need to earn enough foreign exchange to pay for imports of raw materials and foodstuffs? Since Japan opened herself to the outside world 120 years ago, preoccupation, amounting almost to a national obsession, with this dependence on raw-materials and food imports has been the driving force of Japan's policy, and not in economics alone. But now Japan might well start out with the assumption, a far more realistic one in today's world, that foodstuffs and raw materials are in permanent oversupply.

      Taken to their logical conclusion, these developments might mean that some variant of the traditional Japanese policy—highly “mercantilist” with strong deemphasis of domestic consumption and equally strong emphasis on capital formation, and with protection of “infant” industries—might suit the United States better than its own traditions. Conversely the Japanese might be better served by some variant of America's traditional policies, and especially by shifting from favoring savings and capital formation to favoring consumption. But is such a radical break with a hundred years and more of political convictions and commitments likely? Still, from now on the fundamentals of economic policy are certain to come under increasing criticism in these two countries, and in all other developed countries as well.

      They will also, however, come under increasing scrutiny in major Third World nations. For if primary products are becoming of marginal importance to the economics of the developed world, traditional development theories and traditional development policies are losing their foundations. All of them are based on the assumption, historically a perfectly valid one, that developing countries pay for imports of capital goods by exporting primary materials—farm and forest products, minerals, metals. All development theories, however much they differ otherwise, further assume that raw-materials purchases on the part of the industrially developed countries must rise at least as fast as industrial production in these countries. This then implies that, over any extended period of time, any raw-materials producer becomes a better credit risk and shows a more favorable balance of trade. But this has become highly doubtful. On what foundation, then, can economic development be based, especially in countries that do not have a large СКАЧАТЬ