Development, Urbanization, Migration, and Quality of Life - Dragons and Tigers: A Geography of South, East and Southeast Asia - page 114

now work on what might be termed a “disassembly line.”
Companies now try to break up their products into spe-
cialized disassemblies to drive down costs, improve qual-
ity , and reduce the time it takes to get the product to
market. This arrangement is referred to as a supply chain .
Here' s how a supply chain works. J.C. Penney orders
100,000 copies of a shirt. It buys the yarn from a Korean
producer that sends it to Taiwan to be woven and dyed
into cloth. Buttons are ordered from a Japanese manufac-
turer located in China. Both buttons and cloth are
shipped to Thailand to be cut and sewn into shirts. J.C.
Penney wants the shirts on the shelves right away be-
cause fashions change so quickly . So the materials are
sent to five different Thai factories that rush to make
20,000 shirts apiece. A few weeks later, you are trying on
a supply chain shirt in your local mall.
While poorer countries like Bangladesh or Vietnam
might not have the capability to produce a whole com-
puter or car suitable for export, they can make relatively
uncomplicated components. Such countries are often the
origins of supply chains—doing the first basic steps of
the production process.
The pace of urbanization and landscape change in
general is exacerbated with global economic interchange
that, in essence, ignores political boundaries, human
costs, and environmental concerns. As we noted in
Chapter 2, the majority of the world' s most polluted
cities are in Asia. Fortunately , there is growing awareness
that we are running a race on a deteriorating environ-
mental track. Development, whether indigenous or in-
ternational in scope, is consuming the social and natural
capital upon which it depends.

Large numbers of people are environmental
refugees . Some of these people are compelled to leave
their homes due to environmental problems related to
global warming and land degradation. Climatic factors,
such as increased aridity or high winds, combined with
overuse of soils to feed large populations, lead to land
degradation. Entire families have little choice but to leave
their land because it is so eroded or exhausted that it no
longer can support them. Other driving forces are rising
sea levels, weather-related flooding, desertification, and
dried-up aquifers. Scholars estimate that there are at
least 50 million environmental refugees worldwide.
There are two broad categories of migration:

• Internal, such as movement from rural to urban

environments or changing residences within a city .

• External, such as working in or moving to another

country or continent.

INTERNAL MIGRATION PATTERNS
As we have already seen, rural-to-urban migration is a
significant cause of city growth in Asia. Important factors
in the generation of these migration patterns are the im-
provements that have been made in agriculture (see
Chapter 5). Increased productivity releases farm workers
for alternative, better-paying jobs in or near cities. Other
push factors include landlessness, hunger, and loss of so-
cial cohesion that is induced by growing competition for
declining resources.
Such movement is of paramount importance in the
evolution of cities, especially those in China and Southeast
Asia. For example, 200,000 rural people moved to
Jakarta, Indonesia, in 2008. These were relatives of peo-
ple who already worked in the city and had returned to
their villages for a festival. The government is making an
all-out effort to create employment in the countryside in
an attempt to curtail such movement. Family ties are im-
portant factors in migration everywhere in the world.
People also will move to cities in order to take ad-
vantage of services such as education and health care. In
2004, it was estimated that 60 percent of Cambodian
peasants who sold their land and moved to a city were
forced to do so because of medical indebtedness. Inter-
estingly , prior to 1991 the official attitude of India' s
government was that expansion of the telecommunica-
tion infrastructure encouraged rural-urban migration.
Therefore, telecom services should be curbed in cities to
stem the population influx. This policy has changed.
One of the most important types of migration is chain
migration, whereby the mover is part of an established mi-
grant flow from a common origin to a prepared destination.

Migration

Population migration —the movement of people from
place to place—is generated by pushforces and pull forces .
Push forces are conditions that drive people away from
their home and pull forces are conditions elsewhere that
look better. People are lured by real or perceived opportu-
nities in other places. Globalization has led to one of the
largest migrations in human history as increasing numbers
of people move to cities and countries around the world.
The numbers of people who change locations within their
own country can only be guessed at. While we can track
major streams of international migration, it is impossible
to determine exact numbers of migrants because many
move without documentation. Furthermore, untold num-
bers of refugees who are escaping war, persecution, or
environmental catastrophes are not counted either.