More Blinken meetings: a diplomatic visit to China

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. Hi, I'm your host Ora Ogumbiyi. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Latin America has come a long way on its development journey, but the region has an abnormally high proportion of job seeking single mothers. Our correspondent explains the paradox and marine algae is incredibly versatile. It can be used in cosmetics to keep the skin plump and in food too. It could also help in the fight against climate change. We explore how Britain is diving into the multi billion dollar seaweed industry. But first, Today, America's Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with the Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing. The two men shook hands in the Great hall of the People on the edge of Tiananmen Square. The meeting caps a flurried weekend of talks for Mr. Blinken. His visit to China was supposed to happen months ago, but was canceled after a huge Chinese balloon was shot down over South Carolina. The Americans said it was being used for spying. As diplomatic incidents go, it was light relief compared with, say, the Cuban missile crisis of 1960. 2. But the strained relationship between the US and China is no joke. And with tensions seemingly escalating, not least because of China's claims over Taiwan, it was time for both sides to come to the table.

So this is the first visit by a cabinet level US official to China since 2019, and it's the first by a Secretary of state since 2018.

Jeremy Page is the Economist's Asia diplomatic editor.

The main aim is to try to re establish regular high level communication and to stabilize a relationship that many fear has been drifting towards conflict.

And Jeremy, talk us through this trip. Who did he meet and what was discussed?

Well, we know that he met yesterday with Qin Gang, who is China's Foreign Minister, and then he met today with Wang Yi, who is a State councillor and the head of the Communist Party's Foreign affairs office. So that makes him China's top diplomat. And the talks yesterday seemed to go reasonably well. They lasted for about seven and a half hours in total and included one bigger meeting and then a narrow one and a dinner in the evening as well. China issued a pretty detailed readout afterwards which started on a fairly sober note, saying that bilateral relations were at their worst point since they were established, and reiterating China's position on Taiwan, which it described as the most prominent risk in the relationship. But it also struck a positive note, saying that they had agreed to maintain high level exchanges. The readout from the American side I would say struck a similar kind of balance. It described the talks as direct and productive. But he also stressed the need to maintain open channels of communication and discussed areas of potential cooperation on transnational issues. And both sides confirmed that they'd reached an agreement for Mr. Chin, the foreign Minister, to visit America. We also know that Mr. Blinken met with Xi Jinping, China's President, and that is customary for a visiting Secretary of State. But the Chinese side hadn't confirmed in advance that it was going to happen, and if it didn't, that would have been seen as a significant snub. So I think the fact that that went ahead is also a positive sign that the visit went reasonably well.

So give us a bit of background. What's the current state of the relationship between both countries?

I don't think the Chinese side is far off the mark in suggesting that ties are at their worst point since 1979, when diplomatic ties were established. In fact, there's been a lot of talk on both sides and among other countries about the risk of a war breaking out. Tensions have been running high for a while, but they really spiked In August of last year, when Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, visited Taiwan. China then did some massive military exercises around, around Taiwan in response, and that included firing missiles over the island. And China also cut off high level dialogue with America. And then the week before last, on June 8th, the Wall Street Journal and some other American media outlets reported that China had made a secret agreement to establish a listening station in Cuba. So with that many irritants in the relationship, I think the fact that the Blinken visit went ahead is progress in itself.

So going into these talks, what was each side hoping to get out of them?

The Americans have made it clear that they're not expecting any breakthroughs from the visit because there's been no high level dialogue for so long. Blinken no doubt has a long list of issues to cover. Those include Taiwan, China's role in the fentanyl trade, and of course, the war in Ukraine. So it's probably unrealistic to expect substantial progress from this one visit. But, but their main aim is to re establish regular communication between top level officials which they hope will help to manage differences and deal with any unforeseen crises. And I think the Chinese side also wants that to an extent because it means that they can at least communicate their positions in private rather than through heated public exchanges, as they have since the Pelosi visit last August. Direct contacts could also facilitate progress on some technical and commercial issues. And that could help to smooth the way for Xi Jinping's expected attendance of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum in San Francisco in November.

And so, Jeremy, what next? How does this fraught relationship move forward from here?

I think we're likely to see a number of further high level meetings between the two sides in China and the US over the next few weeks. Months. I'd expect visits to China by senior American officials, potentially including Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, also John Kerry, the climate envoy. And I'd expect both sides to continue trying to stabilize ties in the next few months as they prepare for that summit in San Francisco in November. That will be almost exactly a year after Presidents Biden and Xi met on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Bali, where the two agreed on Blinken's visit. President Biden said on Saturday he was looking forward to meeting Xi Jinping again soon. And so I'm hoping that over the next several months I'll be meeting with Xi again and talking about legitimate differences we have, but also how there's areas we can get along now the two leaders are both likely to attend the next G20 summit, which is in September in New Delhi. So they could meet there or it could happen at the APEC meeting in San Francisco, or indeed both.

And so that's looking into the future. Where do you think the visit leaves things right now?

So it looks like for the moment, relations are back on a more stable footing. But it's important to remember that we lost almost an entire year in which the two sides could have been finding ways to reduce tensions and to cooperate on issues of mutual concern. There are still huge tensions, especially over Taiwan and China's support for Russia in the war in Ukraine. And the window of opportunity for making progress on those issues could really narrow in the coming months because we've got a presidential election in Taiwan in January. So there's potential for China to escalate its military operations around the island at that time to try to intimidate voters, as it has in the past. And then campaigning for America's 2024 presidential election is going to start in earnest around August, when we're due to have the first Republican primary debate. So it's good that the two sides are talking again, but the prospects of them resolving core differences remain slim, and there is still huge potential for another unexpected incident, especially in the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea, to send bilateral ties back into a tailspin.

Jeremy, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Thanks for having me.

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A few months ago I was in Brazil and in Rio de Janeiro I visited a small non profit group.

Avantika Chilcotti is an international correspondent for the Economist.

And what was really interesting to me was that all of the poor people I met who were women almost exclusively were all single mothers. And this non profit group which was trying to get women back into the workplace was focusing again on single mothers. They were running classes teaching women how to do makeup. And I met one of the women on the program who was called Vanessa. Vanessa was 22 and she had done very well for herself. She'd finished high school. Her goal had been to get a good job in the formal sector and get out of the favela. But those plans were derailed when she found out she was pregnant. A few years ago she and her partner had broken up and now she's raising her two year old daughter on her own. And Vanessa had a really hard time finding work as a single mother. Recently she had applied to work at a grocery store, for example, and she'd been turned away. The person who interviewed her just assumed that because Vanessa had to look after her child on her own, she was going to be on the phone all day checking in on her daughter. So for now she's operating a makeshift beauty salon out of her house in the favela. Her story of single parenthood and all the challenges that come with it is very common across Latin America.

Avantika, how common are we talking here?

When I got back from Brazil, I started to look at the data and the UN estimates that 11% of households in Latin America are led by a single parent, which is almost always a mother. That's the highest share in any region of the world. The global average is just 8%.

And is this a trend that's unique to Latin America?

What I think is unique to Latin America is to do with the odd stage of development that Latin America is stuck in. So there are other regions of the world, like Sub Saharan Africa, that are far poorer. They do much worse on measures of things like access to contraception, women's education. So you'd assume that they would have far more single mothers, but they don't. Only 10% of Sub Saharan African households are led by a single parent. And there's actually no country in Latin America that falls within the World Bank's Definition of low income. This is a place where female enrollment in secondary school is near 100%. It's pretty liberal in the sense that attitudes towards sex are liberal. So, yes, it's home to a third of the world's Roman Catholics. But there was a survey relatively recently which asked people, how justifiable is it to have sex before marriage? And around one fifth of respondents in countries like Argentina, Brazil and Chile said it's always justifiable. If you looked at places like sub Saharan Africa, that figures often about 5%. So you've got countries which are, they're not that poor anymore, that women don't get an education, that women don't get to go out on their own, they're not allowed to dress as they please or date. But these are also countries, unfortunately, where access to contraception, where attitudes towards women's role in society haven't really caught up.

So why is this happening? What might explain Latin America's high proportion of single parents?

There's two big factors that explain the high proportion of single mothers. The first is religion. So, yes, a lot of people say that it's justifiable to have sex before marriage, but, yes, young women are still nervous to go and buy condoms on their own. They're still getting sex education, which focuses on abstinence rather than safe sex. And the center for Reproductive Rights, which is an advocacy group, they reckon that more than 80% of women of reproductive age in Latin America live in countries where abortion rights are restrictive by their definition.

And so for the women who become single parents, how does it affect them economically?

So once you become a single mother, as Vanessa, who I spoke to in Rio, found out, it's hugely challenging. So 78% of single mothers in Latin America and the Caribbean are in the workforce, which means that they're either working or actively looking for work. That's far higher than the average for all adults, which is 73%. And yet single mothers have a far higher unemployment rate. They're basically more likely to be unemployed than anyone else. A single woman without a child, a single father. And when they do find a job, they make far less money. About 23% of single mothers are classified as working poor, which means that they're working, but they still can't really make ends meet. And the trouble is that they need to juggle childcare with work. And the only jobs that offer that flexibility are often in the informal sector, which has low pay, little rights for workers, and very little chance of job progression.

Okay, so you've told us how it affects the women themselves. But what does it mean for everyone else? Are there knock on effects of this phenomenon?

Yeah, so it's basically really, really bad for the economy. It's bad for not just these women, but everyone around them. If you look at the gender gap in terms of workforce participation rate and women's access to education, the estimate is that the gender gap drags down GDP per capita by about 14% in the period 2020-2050. The World bank has a measure called the Capital Index and that looks at productivity. It says if a girl is born today in a country like Brazil, she will accumulate more human capital by the age of 18 than a boy. So this girl is more likely to finish school, she's less likely to get into a violent gang. But that advantage is totally wasted when she enters the workforce. The World bank reckons that men use about 2/5 of their potential, whereas women use only 1/3. So just think about the massive waste there, what that means for productivity and.

What are governments doing about all this.

So there are efforts to change things. There is a real acknowledgement that single mothers just don't have the support they need. So in recent years, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico have all decriminalized abortion. So the idea is that women who don't want to have children don't have to have them. They're also trying to make sure these women can make ends meet. So in Brazil, during COVID there was a huge crash transfer program and it offered single mothers double the benefits. There's something really interesting going on in Bogota, where the mayor's office has built what they call care blocks. There's 18 of them across the city. And women who are caregivers, often looking after a young child on their own, can go there and just get help. They can get free vocational training, they can get health services. There's often even just a laundry. And yet there's still so much more that these women need. One big thing is child support. The share of women who actually receive child support is very low. The World bank thinks it's about 15% somewhere like Guatemala. Even though Latin America has rules about child support, it's not enforced particularly well.

And Avantika, is there anything that the mothers can do to try and help themselves?

You know, it's a tradition in Andean countries like Peru to live with extended family, which is really helpful for mothers to get some extra money to have free childcare. And 43% of Peruvian mothers live with someone, an adult, who is not their spouse or partner. So what you're finding is that where Governments don't help and fathers don't help. Well, often it's the grandparents who do.

Avantka, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Thanks for having me. Ori.

About four miles off the coast of North Devon, Ollie Hicks is trying to grow seaweed.

And then you can see the yellow marks, the special marks, they mark the outer perimeter of the site. So it's about a square kilometer.

Algapelago, the name of the company that he co founded, is in the middle of setting up a kelp farm.

Sam Westren is a senior producer on the Intelligence.

He's pointing out to what is essentially an empty patch of ocean. Apart from a few buoys bobbing around in the water, you wouldn't know that there was anything out there.

Yeah. See that single boy there? That's about two meters. About. Yeah. Two meters down to the, to the main line.

The seaweed grows a couple of meters under the water. Ollie takes the boat up to one of the boys and points out the line to me.

So the line's under the boat now. It's going from there on a straight line through to there. It's 200 meters long.

Yeah.

So there's, there's seeds all the way along it.

Yeah.

So in a perfect world, you'd have a even crop all the way along that line and, and, and the amount would be anywhere from 6 to 15 kilos a meter.

It's actually a pretty simple setup. A 200 meter rope suspended in the water between two buoys with seaweed growing off it. Or at least there should be seaweed growing off it. This seaweed was planted in December. It's a winter crop and now it's a gorgeous day in early summer. It's about the time to start harvesting it. But it's been a pretty miserable spring and for the past few weeks the team haven't been able to get out and check on the site because of bad weather and they don't know what state the crop is in. So Luke, one of the team, is going to need to get into the water, dive down to the line and check that everything's all right.

I just drop you up, tied a bit.

It's a big deal for them if the crop isn't healthy or if there's a problem with the line. They have to wait another seven months until they can plant again. A full year until the next harvest. While Luke was diving down to the line, I had a rather cynical thought. Why bother? The quayside that he had just come from was covered in seaweed. Why go to all this effort or for something that grows naturally in the uk, pretty much everywhere. Why farm it?

Well, seaweed has no requirement for inputs like fertilizer, fresh water. You don't need to alter it in some way. You literally just plant it in the ocean. All you need is sea water and sunlight and it will grow. So I'm Rhianna Reese. I'm the Seaweed Academy Coordinator at the Scottish association for Marine Science.

I wanted to speak to someone who thinks a lot about this. Rhianna runs a course teaching people how to grow it and why it's such a useful thing to farm. And she's been busy. The academy, she tells me, has been inundated with people trying to set up farms of their own. And there's a good reason. It turns out it's a very easy crop to grow. It's climate friendly, it can be used for food, it can be used for cosmetics. People have found ways to use it as a plastic alternative. It really can be used in so many ways. At the moment, researchers are looking into whether it can be grown to capture carbon. And it's also a global industry, so.

The business element of seaweed is burgeoning. It's growing, but it's also quite challenging at the same time.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, worldwide production reached 36 million tons in 2019, and that's an industry worth about $13.5 billion. But the UK contribution to that is tiny, and it mostly consists of what people harvest by hand, not people like Ollie, who are trying to grow it, trying to farm it themselves. And getting a bigger slice of that pie, she says, is really quite difficult, mostly because we don't really eat it here in the UK, 97% of the world's seaweed is grown in Asia and 97% of it is consumed there, too.

You've got seaweed that you can import from China and South Korea and other parts of Southeast Asia that are incredibly cheap, and in most cases, about 10 times cheaper than it is in the UK to produce. So this argument for cultivating seaweed here, we need to cultivate it because we've only got a limited supply, so if we keep hand harvesting it, we won't be able to meet demand. But at the same time, is there that market there, that demand at a price that's viable?

There is money to be made from it here in the uk, and more companies are starting up all the time, trying to do clever things with it. But she says the only way the companies can really make money at the moment is if they're vertically integrated, which is basically businesses that want to grow it for themselves, process it and then sell a product that they've made out of it. Farming it just to sell it wholesale wouldn't really work right now because they're.

Competing with much cheaper sources from. From abroad. It's not financially viable. You're not going to make a return on investment, or at least I haven't seen many farmers be able to make a return on investment. That creates a fully functioning business model year on year.

Ultimately, she does think there is a future for seaweed farming in the UK and that over time it can develop and scale up into a more significant industry.

We're positioned in the uk where we have really nice, cool coastal waters, we've got 10% of the shoreline of Europe, so we're positioned in a great way here to utilise this space. And if we can apply this innovation, if funding goes to the right places, then we'll get to a place where we can compete with the likes of Southeast Asia.

That should be 12 if I can count. You've done it. Time for tea.

Good job.

Back on the boat. Luke has returned with samples and it's good news.

Oh, that's a beauty. Hope that wasn't the best one there.

For now, the company will be able to press ahead with its plan.

There.

Ultimately, it's farming it to make a product farm feed. So there'll be one of those vertically integrated companies that Rihanna was talking about. Next year they're going to scale up again and when the farm is at full capacity, Ollie and the team think that they could be making as much as 2000 tons every year.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. Let us know what you think of the show. You can get in touch@podcastseconomist.com and if you're not a subscriber to the Economist, you're really missing out. Dive in. Get a free 30 day digital subscription by going to economist.com intelligenceoffer the link is in the show notes. We'll see you back here tomorrow.

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