THE world faces the real threat of a new conflict over oil as China competes with existing world powers for scarce resources to feed its growing economy, according to a report published today.

The State of the World 2006, released by the Worldwatch Institute, says that last year China became the second- largest importer of oil, after the US, while consuming 26 per cent of the world’s steel, 32 per cent of rice production,

37 per cent of cotton and 47 per cent of cement. China is set to become the world’s largest carmaker in the coming decade.

While environmentalists are concerned about the impact on the world’s climate and the drain on its resources, strategists fear that the competition for energy, particularly oil, could destabilise the planet. According to the report, China was nearly self-sufficient in oil in the mid-1990s. But over the past decade its consumption has doubled and it has now overtaken Japan as the second-largest importer of oil, with 3.2 million barrels a day in 2004.

It predicts that if the economies of China and India continue to grow at their current rate, the world will not be able to produce enough oil to meet demand by 2050, when consumption will have grown from the current 85 million barrels a day to 200 million barrels. “Few geologists believe that output will reach even half those levels before beginning to decline,” the report says.

As a result China is already looking for new oil suppliers from Siberia to Sudan, often dealing with notorious regimes, such as the junta in Burma. Of even greater concern is the possibility that open conflict could break out between nations competing for resources or trying to protect their supply lines, such as key trade routes, currently patrolled by the US Navy.

The report draws the parallel between Japan in the 1930s and China today. It recalls that it was Japan’s inability to secure its oil supplies from South-East Asia that prompted its entry into the Second World War. Today Beijing is strengthening its Navy to protect its energy supplies, shipped at great distances from the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.

“The prospect of countries ranging from the United States and China to Japan and Saudi Arabia — together with the world’s terrorists — vying for physical control of the world’s oil does not sound like a prescription for global security,” the Worldwatch report says.

The group argues that the rise of China and India as economic powers means that the “resource-intensive economic model” is not capable of meeting the needs of more than eight billion people in the coming century.

“Our analysis shows that if the two countries [China and India] were to use as much oil per person as Japan does today, their demand alone would exceed current global oil demands. And if their per capita claims on the biosphere were to match those of today’s Europe, we would need a full planet Earth to sustain these two countries,” Christopher Flavin, the Worldwatch president, says in a preface to the report.

“Unless we find a couple of spare planets in the next few decades, neither of these projections will come to pass . . . We therefore face a choice: rethink almost everything, or risk a downward spiral of political competition and economic collapse,” he says.

HUNGRY NATION

In 1996 China had 7 million mobile phones. This rose to 269 million by 2003

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