The Future of Asia is Huge

by Rob West 17. January 2010 03:42
America and Europe don’t stand a chance in this battle for future global dominance while Canada and Australia best keep their heads down and continue to supply the fuel for the fire. I’m not talking about foreign reserves, trade balances [though how Australia has a negative trade balance is worth a separate post] and national and personal debt loads. No, I’m talking about BMI, girth, flab, middle spread, the battle for the widest people on the planet.

I've seen it firsthand.

As one travels from Laos through Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia to Singapore, incomes and waistlines expand with each border control. From the 50kg subsistence farming wraiths of northern Laos and Cambodia, to the ballooning urban populations of Saigon and their newly forming paunches, to the fast-food gobbling masses of the swanky half of Bangkok down through the Malay peninsula to the Singapore mum-cramming-it-in her-8-year-old-son’s-bursting-balloon-like-face, big change is afoot. Orchard Road in Singapore is like Grafton Street in post-Celtic Tiger Dublin on a Saturday afternoon. Strapping well-fed under 30 giants towering over their diminutive everyday-was-like-the-Great-Depression parents and grandparents.

To be sure, as with financial power, the lipid shift from West to East can be greatly exaggerated and the West hasn’t lost this eating contest yet. Singapore’s still got nothing on Chicago and its deep dish pizza, BBQ smokehouses and 3-metre sidewalks for double-wide pram pushing couples walking hand-in-hand. Or for that matter Shepherds Bush with its pint guzzling fireplugs downing fried chicken before a Queens Park Rangers match. But as with cars, electronics and IT-technology, in the battle for girth, Asia looks posited to leapfrog the West provided it can get an expanding leg over, and soon enough those circus big top relaxed fit Old Navy trousers won’t need to be exported to the American mid-west.

All eyes to the East – there are big things on the horizon.

Rob West is Earthscan's former Senior Commissioning Editor, currently on a round-the-world trip.  This article has been syndicated from Rob’s blog Flaneur: A slow wander round the world

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