Editorial: New decade fresh with possibilities

Opinion

This morning a page has turned. A new day, new year, new decade. Time seems fresh with possibilities. Predictions are pointless but hope is irresistible. We have only to glance back a year or a decade at predictions made for the period just passed to see how pointless they are.

Nobody imagined this time last year that the financial collapse and the Depression it threatened would have responded so quickly to Keynesian medicine. This time 10 years ago a new millennium arrived with the world released from a long Cold War of terrifying nuclear possibilities. Peace, freedom, democracy and trade had triumphed in eastern Europe, South Africa, Latin America, seemingly everywhere. Not many imagined on January 1, 2000, that the early years of the 21st century would be racked by the return of a religious conflict from 1000 years before.

A New Year insists we look forward and invites optimism. Look forward another 10 years and consider the possibilities if we follow the best trajectories of the present. Prosperity would have spread as mobile manufacturing continually seeks cheap labour, leaving rising incomes, higher education, better healthcare and living standards in its wake.

Africa could be the China or India of today. China, meanwhile, could be as rich as the United States, particularly if it has finally floated its currency. If it has not floated, the course of the next decade could be very different. The stresses of a low fixed exchange rate, giving an advantage to China's exports and denying its citizens imports and travel at world prices, could invite economic retaliation, particularly from the US.

A trade war is too easy to predict from this point, with the US suffering high unemployment, low growth and deeply in debt to China. A trade war between them would have wider consequences for the world even if the conflict was kept to trade.

The past decade has not recorded progress in global trade rules for goods, services and intellectual property. The millennium round of negotiations launched at Doha got nowhere and states have resorted to regional and mutual free trade agreements where possible. But technological globalisation has continued in bounds and the next decade is likely to bring more wonders in personal communications, interactive media, "smart" meters for buying household electricity and many more applications for micro-circuitry.

If environmentalists are right, consumers are going to be monitoring much more of their supplies, including food, for health standards, resource depletion, carbon emissions in production and delivery. That could bring problems for exports of butterfat from this distant corner of the globe.

But if the world can agree on an emissions cap and a market in permits within the next decade, New Zealand might pay its way with permanent forest plantings. By 2020 magnificent native trees might be rising in every farm gully and on many a steep hillside where their living carbon credits could be worth more than their timber or any other crop.

They would certainly be worth more than stock if the emissions cap applied to all greenhouse gases, including methane, this country's largest contribution to global warming. But the significance of all human contributions, and the seriousness of climate change, did not convince the world to act at Copenhagen last month. Might the case be proven beyond doubt during this decade at a cost to Pacific communities?

Thankfully, little can be said of the future with certainty. We contemplate a year and decade knowing dire predictions will probably be wrong and the unexpected will happen. That is why it is always a happy new year.