The Ministry of Agriculture warned Tuesday (April 20) that this year’s meteorological year is still not optimistic, with the possibility of more extreme weather and the recurrence of major pests and diseases, and that the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development needs to work on three fronts to ensure a “good grain harvest. These remarks have once again raised concerns about the “food crisis” in mainland China.
During this year’s two sessions, the Chinese Communist Party put forward in its government work report, one of the main development goals is to maintain grain production at more than 1.3 trillion jin. On Tuesday, Liu Lihua, deputy director of the Department of Plantation Industry at the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, said at a press conference that to achieve the target of a good grain harvest this year, a three-pronged approach is needed, including the launch of a “100-day battle for a good summer grain harvest”.
However, Liu Lihua also pointed out that this year’s meteorological year is still not optimistic, drought and flooding, extreme cold, extreme heat and other extreme weather may be more frequent, major pests and diseases also show the re-emergence of the situation.
From June to early September last year, 70% of China’s counties (cities) experienced heavy rainfall, and the Yangtze River basin was hit by the most severe flooding since 1998. Heavy rains hit 27 provinces including Jiangxi, Anhui, Hubei, Hunan, Guangxi, Guizhou, Guangdong, Chongqing and Sichuan, flooding as much as 5.26 million hectares of arable land, with the Yangtze River Delta basin, known as the “land of fish and rice,” being the hardest hit.
Not only the Yangtze River basin, three typhoons swept through the northeast region from late August to early September last year. This caused some crops to collapse as they were in the midst of the crop filling period. This caused crops not only to lose yield, but also to become moldy and lose quality. The northeast is the largest corn-producing region in China, with Jilin, Liaoning and Heilongjiang accounting for more than 31.6% of the country’s corn sown area.
The issue of “food security” in mainland China was once a cause for concern. In July last year, Chinese authorities held a meeting on the food issue and asked governors to take responsibility for “food security” in their regions. Hu Chunhua, vice premier of the Communist Party of China, said at the meeting that both the main production areas and the balanced production and marketing areas should ensure that the sown area and production of grain “will only increase but not decrease”.
Subsequently, a “fierce” campaign to conserve food was launched across the mainland. Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China, has repeatedly mentioned that “the wastefulness of food and drink in the mainland is alarming”, and said that there should always be “a sense of crisis” about food security. People have come up with a variety of new terms for food conservation, such as “Operation CD-ROM” and “restoring hunger”.
China’s soybean imports from the United States rose sharply in March this year. According to Chinese customs data, soybean imports from the U.S. reached 7.18 million tons in March, more than tripling the 1.71 million tons imported in the same month last year. According to the outside world, all the above phenomena highlight the imminent food crisis on the mainland.
Hu Xingdou, a professor of economics at Beijing Polytechnic University, told Hong Kong’s Apple Daily that a food crisis in China is “absolutely possible” and should be a cause for concern because China relies on imports for more than 30 percent of its food, and the proportion of actual imports could be even higher.
He also stressed that the United Nations has warned of the possibility of global famine, and China has encountered various natural disasters since last year, including floods and locusts, and even the problem of misrepresentation of food in various places, so “China’s food problem cannot be ignored.
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