Paul Keating says Asian countries facing new crisis

Paul Keating says Asian countries facing new crisis

BRISBANE (Reuters): Asian countries emerging from an economic downturn face a funding crisis as more people move into cities and demand grows for urban infrastructure, former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating said on Tuesday.

"While we have had a crisis in Asia that we are living through right now, the deeper crisis is yet to come," Keating told the 1999 Asia Pacific Cities Summit.

"This recession has simply delayed for a couple of years another crisis which the recovery will bring on.

"And that is a crisis in funding for the building of the infrastructure and roads, power stations, communications, schools and hospitals required to support more than two billion people, to feed and educate them and then to bear the profound consequences of that growth," he said.

Keating said Asian cities had among the worst environmental problems in the world.

"The irritating reaction of many Asians to hearing lectures on environmental responsibility from Western countries which have already passed through their own phase of industrialization is understandable," he said.

"But no one can avoid the fact that the environmental challenge facing Asia is real and pressing and if not addressed, the people who would suffer will mainly be Asians."

Canadian environmentalist and television commentator David Suzuki told the conference that an unhealthy global obsession with consumerism and economic growth was suicidal.

"As long as we cling without analysis to this notion that the global economy must define everything we do, then we continue down a suicidal path," he said.

Suzuki described economics and the desire for unlimited economic growth as "a form of brain damage".

"The whole notion that is often advanced by economists that we need a growing economy so that the people at the low end of the world can benefit by all the wealth that will trickle down to them is absolutely deadly," Suzuki said.

"If we don't put the environment above everything else, we won't have economists or an economy."

Suzuki said governments should stop subsidizing polluting industries and put money into ecological economics. The West should set an example, he said.

"Why are we pouring all these billions of dollars into subsidizing these automobiles? Why are we subsidizing the oil industry, the forest industry?