On April 8, Huang Wei, deputy director of China’s State Administration of Grain and Material Reserves, announced at a regular State Council policy briefing held by the State Council Information Office that the revised Regulations on Grain Circulation will come into effect on April 15, 2021. It is interesting to note that in the newly revised regulations, “food security party and government share responsibility” for the first time in the administrative regulations to be clearly defined. The specific content is: food security to implement the same responsibility of the party and government, the “rice bag” governor to be responsible, the secretary is also responsible. The essence of this new provision is to require the head of each place, that is, the secretary of the party committee, to be directly responsible for food security issues, hoping to raise the attention of local governments to the issue of food security. This has brought the issue of food security in China to the surface once again.
China’s food security problem came to the forefront when Xi Jinping visited the corn fields in the northeast in 2020, drawing outside attention to whether China was in a food crisis. in July 2020, the food security issue was officially put on the table when Hu Chunhua, a member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and Vice Premier of the State Council, held a mobilization and deployment video conference on the assessment of the national food security governor responsibility system. That meeting proposed that the assessment work should be organized to comprehensively promote the implementation of the responsibility system for food security governors and to ensure that there would be no lapses in national food security. This also shows once again that there is indeed a serious food crisis in China. The Grain Circulation Regulations, which were revised on April 8 this year, require the local party system to also take responsibility for ensuring food security on top of the governor responsibility system, showing that China’s food security problem has not been alleviated, but rather tends to be aggravated. Otherwise, the central government would not have stepped in to put further pressure on local governments at all levels by enacting regulations and ordinances.
Food security is an important part of national security for all countries, and as a country with a large population, food security is especially important for China. If China relies on food imports for a long time, it will be in a passive position in the international political landscape. Therefore, in the past few years, the Chinese Communist Party has repeatedly stressed the need to “seize the initiative of food security and keep the rice bowl firmly in its own hands. But as the Chinese side continues to import large quantities of U.S. corn in the U.S.-China trade war, it is not so easy. The key to the problem is that China’s agriculture is withering, production resources continue to add less and less, in the case of active investment in industrial development around the world, will inevitably lead to serious loss of arable land, the control line of permanent basic farmland is increasingly difficult to hold, and the existing arable land also exists a serious “non-agricultural, non-food” phenomenon.
With less farmland available for cultivation but escalating domestic consumption and growing demand for food, it is a serious challenge to ensure the State Council’s goal of “basic grain self-sufficiency, absolute food security, and adequate supply of important agricultural by-products”. At the beginning of this year, Chinese meat prices rose across the board, with pork prices up 27.1%; corn prices rose, described by the media as “off the rails. In addition, the prices of eggs, wheat, barley and rice are all rising, demonstrating the seriousness of China’s food security problem.
Another serious challenge is the changing international environment for China. As competition between China and the U.S. intensifies, China faces an increasingly unstable and uncertain international environment, and agricultural imports will certainly be affected. In recent years, the Chinese Communist Party has proposed a “major domestic cycle” to prepare for a gradual shift away from dependence on international markets. However, it is almost impossible to achieve full self-sufficiency in food. At the end of last year, the Indian media revealed that China imported rice from India for the first time in 30 years, because suppliers from traditional rice importers such as Thailand, Myanmar, Vietnam and Pakistan were offering $30 more per ton of rice than India. The border dispute with India on one side and the dependence on cheap rice imports from India on the other side fully exposes the dilemma of China’s food security with insufficient internal circulation and its dependence on imports. In short, although officials have repeatedly created the public opinion that China’s food security is safe, the issue of food security is actually always a hidden worry for China.
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