Christmas is coming, this is the story of how cashmere goats are starved, and how that cheap sweater pollutes the air you breathe and how the rise of China shapes the world.
ON THE ALASHAN PLATEAU, China — Shatar the herdsman squinted into the twilight on the ruined grasslands where Genghis Khan once galloped.
He frowned and called his goats. The wind tasted like dust.
On the other side of the world, another morning dawned in the historic embrace between the world's low-cost factory and its best customer. Every minute of every day last year, America gobbled up $463,200 worth of Chinese goods, including millions of cashmere sweaters made from the hair of goats like Shatar's.
In less than a decade, a deluge of cheap cashmere from China has transformed a centuries-old industry, stripping the plush fabric of its pricey pedigree and making it available in big-box America. Chinese-made cashmere sweaters now go for as little as $19.99.
But behind the "Made in China" tag is something Americans rarely see: the cascade of consequences around the world when the might of Chinese production and U.S. consumption converge on a scarce natural resource.
With all the grand ways to measure the impact of China's ascent — the mountains of exports, the armadas of oil tankers — there might seem little reason to take stock of cashmere. Yet the improbable connection between cheap sweaters, Asia's prairies and America's air captures how ordinary shifts in the global economy are triggering extraordinary change.
Cashmere production primer
Cashmere is combed each spring from beneath the coarse "guard hair" of the outer coat of Capra hircus, the goat. It takes two or three animals to produce a sweater, twice that for a sport coat.
About 70 percent of the roughly 15,000 tons of cashmere produced a year comes from China.
Alashan Plateau, near the Mongolian border, produces the world's most expensive cashmere.
Across Inner Mongolia, the number of goats soared tenfold from 2.4 million in 1949 to 25.8 million in 2004, helping to turn China's grasslands, the world's third-largest, into deserts. From 1994-99, the Gobi Desert expanded by an area larger than the Netherlands.
China had an average of five dust and sand storms per year during the 1950s , 14 in the 1970s, and 23 in the 1990s, mostly derived from Alashan.
A 1998 storm that began in China and Mongolia caused health officials in Washington, Idaho, Oregon and British Columbia to issue air pollution warnings. Much more:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003498352_cashmere282.html
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