UN warns of two global super disasters in 2021, global hunger to soar; CCP official stresses no food crisis in China; figures show China has a food shortage of 252 million people; does the problem of food shortage exist?
The current re-emergence of the Chinese Communist Party virus in many parts of China, along with the oncoming epidemic, has brought the issue of food security, which has been talked about for a whole year last year, back into focus. In 2020, there were several major events that affected food production, such as the huge number of grass-craving night moths that had appeared in many parts of southern China in the months following the outbreak in 2020, while the northeastern region caught the epidemic during spring plowing, and the massive floods that ravaged the southern grain-producing base, among others.
Under such circumstances, the Chinese Communist Party has been officially emphasizing that there is no food crisis in China, and late last year the National Bureau of Statistics of the Communist Party announced that total grain production in 2020 had increased by 0.9% year-on-year. Despite these official statements, in early December 2020, in the absence of a resolution to the current Sino-Indian conflict, CCP officials uncharacteristically purchased 100,000 tons of rice from India, and Indian food officials confirmed that this was the first time in nearly 30 years that China had imported rice from India.
The CCP loves to tell lies. Looking back to the days when the CCP’s bull was blown out of proportion, in 1958, Mao Zedong once asked Khrushchev fretfully, when receiving him on a visit to China, what to do with too much grain in China. But then the lie of 10,000 jin per mu was dashed and China entered a period of severe food shortage.
Just at the end of last year, many mainland media reported an article called a heavy warning. The article cited a warning from the United Nations that the world could face two major super disasters in 2021 that would affect everyone. The first of these two catastrophes is the new coronavirus epidemic; the other is that the number of hungry people in the world will soar to 270 million by 2021. As Chinese, we are worried about whether our compatriots in mainland China will really be spared from the hunger panic.
So, does China have a food shortage problem now or not? Today, let’s explore this topic. Perhaps some clues can be seen in a series of signals released by the Chinese Communist Party officials in the past few months.
Xi Jinping: food security issues to “party and government share responsibility”
On Dec. 29, 2020, Communist Party leader Xi Jinping made a number of demands on food security at a rural work conference, including “to firmly hold the initiative on food security” and “to strictly guard the red line of 1.8 billion mu of arable land”. “Local party committees and governments at all levels should shoulder the political responsibility for food security, the party and government together” and so on. This is the first time the Chinese government proposed food security issues to “party and government together”.
At the same time, the mainland media also published an article saying that in 2020, affected by the epidemic, the trade and supply chain of food and other bulk agricultural products have been affected, and the uncertainty of supply in the international market has risen. If the problem continues to develop, it will affect national food security, and under the basic condition that China has more people and less land, the whole country must make efforts to solve the problem of feeding 1.4 billion people.
From these official statements, it is easy to see how nervous and worried the CCP is about the “food security issue”.
Food shortage signal? The Communist Party of China says it will prevent the “de-fooding” of agricultural land
On November 17, 2020, the General Office of the Communist Party of China (CPC) issued a document requesting “to prevent the conversion of agricultural land to other uses, and also to prevent the conversion of agricultural land from growing food crops such as rice and wheat to economic crops such as vegetables and cotton.
Since 1978, the Communist Party has allowed farmers to choose their own crops, but now it is asking them to guarantee the cultivation of staple foods, so this document reveals some unusual information about the hidden danger of China’s staple food supply and the serious loss of arable land.
In the midst of desertification, and the CCP’s push for urbanization, China’s arable land is now extremely tight, and the effort to ensure land utilization has also led to a decline in land quality. At the same time, the CCP’s discriminatory household registration system has led to an increasing number of rural people moving out of farming and into the cities to make a living.
In August 2020, the CCP officially released a report on China’s rural development, predicting that by 2025, the urbanization rate across China will reach 65.5%, with a conservative estimate of more than 80 million new rural urban migrants. As a result, the national share of people engaged in agriculture will drop to about 20%.
The decrease in arable land and the limited amount of arable land with fewer people to cultivate are also important reasons why the CCP has to worry about food security.
China has a food gap that falls short of UN standards
Although the Chinese Communist Party has officially tried to emphasize that China has a high grain self-sufficiency rate and that China is fully self-sufficient in two major rations, rice and wheat, with a grain self-sufficiency rate of over 95%, this is not the case.
First of all, let’s be clear here that grain self-sufficiency rate and grain self-sufficiency rate are not the same concept. There are more varieties of grains than just rice and wheat, but also soybeans, corn and various other miscellaneous grains, such as sorghum and oats. According to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics of the Communist Party of China in December 2018, China’s grain self-sufficiency rate is about 82.3%. And what is the world food security standard set by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations? It’s a self-sufficiency rate of 90%, and this grain includes all the major types of grains, soybeans, corn, etc. According to this standard, that is to say, China’s food deficit is 17.7%, which does not meet the food security standard set by the UN FAO.
He Qinglian, a Chinese economic expert, has published an article analyzing that the official emphasis of the Chinese Communist Party is mainly on the grain self-sufficiency rate of 95%, which seems to be higher than the world food security standard self-sufficiency rate of 90%, but it is actually a stolen concept, and in fact, these are two different indicators. And as measured by the world food security standard, China’s food deficit is the food needed by 252 million people. That’s a very large number.
China is No. 1 in the world in food waste and embezzlement
China has officially been the world’s number one food importer since 2014, and along with this world number one, there is another world number one, according to the Chinese Communist Party’s Chinese Academy of Sciences back in September 2020, China is also number one in the world in food waste. China wastes roughly 135 million tons of food each year, nearly one-third of the world’s total food waste.
In August of last year, Xi Jinping criticized China’s food waste and called for food conservation, and the People’s Daily Online called for stronger legislation to stop food waste. The Chinese Communist Party has always said what is on its lips, often because it is afraid of what is in its heart, so Xi Jinping’s emphasis on saving food may mean that food is tight.
Duan Shaoyi, a Chinese economist, has analyzed that the CCP fears that once international food imports to China stop, or foreign tariffs on Chinese food exports increase, it will lead to a big price hike for Chinese food and a food shortage in China. Duan Shaoyi also said that although the Chinese Communist government has built many grain depots, there is no grain in them. More than ten years ago, Zhu Rongji went to inspect the grain depots, but there was no grain in the depots, and the local governments were misrepresenting. Now if international relations deteriorate, no grain reserves will be in trouble, so Xi Jinping is worried.
There are also netizens who know the inside story said that some grain depots privately sold grain to grain processing enterprises, but in order to cope with the inspection, they transferred grain from another grain depot, in fact, are a batch of grain, transferring around. Leaders to check is also greeted in advance, otherwise, the real check out the problem, the leaders themselves are difficult to deliver.
In recent years, many places in China have been on fire in the granary, a half-life in the granary had revealed that the granary under normal circumstances will not catch fire, even if the electric short circuit will not, the four walls of the granary and the roof are non-combustible materials, and said, these fires are definitely the local government poured gasoline to burn, there is no food inside, afraid to check out! This kind of truth from insiders makes people understand why, in the past years, every time the State Council of the Communist Party of China issued a notice to check the grain depots nationwide, grain depots all over China would catch fire one after another.
In addition, the CFS has become a major corruption area, and many officials who look after the grain depots have been uncovered to be corrupt. The system of CFS Henan Branch has revealed that there are 110 “rats” using the national “market grain” acquisition policy to buy and sell empty “circle grain”, and many of these grain depots are empty.
Economists: Who will feed China?
As early as 1994, the U.S. economist Lester Brown (Lester Brown) said, “The government’s policy of buying grain from the market is to buy and sell it short. Lester Brown published a report called “Who will feed China” (Who will feed China). The report pointed out that the problem of water shortage in China is getting more and more serious, and farmland is being eroded and destroyed by the rapid industrialization process; the report predicted that with the population growth, by the beginning of the 21st century, in order to feed more than one billion people, China may need to import large amounts of food from abroad, which may lead to a rise in world food prices and affect the world’s food supply and production.
In 2012, the Financial Times published an article titled “China on a cereal buying spree” in which it said that China faced a prophetic warning more than three decades ago when it began a period of rapid economic growth: China’s growing demand for food could lead to worldwide Food shortages. The article also quoted then-communist agriculture officials themselves as saying that China would probably inevitably increase its imports of grains and oil-bearing seeds.
Grain imports soar in 2020
So what will China’s agricultural imports look like in the 2020 epidemic? Let’s look at the official Communist Party figures.
According to official figures released by CCP Customs at the end of 2020, in terms of grains, corn imports reached 1.23 million tons in November, soaring 1,142.2% year-on-year; the annual cumulative corn imports between January and November were 9.04 million tons, up 122.8% year-on-year.
Wheat imports in November were 800,000 tons, up 77.6% year-on-year, and the annual cumulative imports were 7.49 million tons, up 150.6% year-on-year.
Barley imports in November was 1.11 million tons, up 170.7% year-on-year; annual cumulative imports of 7.1 million tons, up 24.8% year-on-year.
And as recently as April 2020, the CCP’s Ministry of Commerce was claiming that China’s stocks of the three major staple foods – corn, wheat and rice – were fully self-sufficient and that no imports would lead to a shortage of domestic food supply, but the rapidly growing imports suggest otherwise, and that the CCP has been worried about food shortages.
In addition, imports of soybeans, sorghum, pork, beef, and sugar have all clearly shown an upward trend of several or dozens of times.
Thus, it seems that the CCP’s propaganda to the public that there is no food shortage and not to hoard food is merely a fear of market panic and a need to maintain stability.
The Challenge of China’s Food Security in 2021
China is so dependent on imports of grain, but the current international market environment is not optimistic either. in March 2020, after a major global outbreak of the CCP’s new crown epidemic, several countries and regions around the world began to close customs, affecting grain exports, including India, Vietnam, Thailand and other traditional Chinese grain importers. At the same time international food prices also saw a major increase, with information released by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in December 2020 showing that in November, global food commodity prices had risen for six consecutive months to their highest level in nearly six years, with the cereal price index rising by about 20 percent year-on-year.
With global food facing challenges, it is inevitable that China, the top food importer, will also be hit harder. As early as 2019, China’s famous hybrid rice expert Yuan Longping once said in an interview with the official media that China’s grain is not enough to eat, and that other countries are in trouble if they don’t sell it and are going hungry.
The famous 16th century prophet Nostradamus predicted in The Centuries that the earth would suffer a great famine in 2021 as described in the Bible and on an unprecedented scale, and that the majority of the world’s population would not be able to solve the problem.
The British prophet, Hamilton B. Parker, who successfully predicted the election of Trump as president of the United States in 2016, also mentioned in his prophecy for 2021 that the world will face severe food shortages and unemployment in 2021.
As the saying goes, it is better to prepare for a rainy day in order to be prepared. It is good that the Chinese public has long learned to understand the various official propaganda of the Chinese Communist Party in reverse. At present, as the global epidemic situation tends to get worse, the risk of a food crisis in China and globally will be a probable event.
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