According to reports, Xi Jinping, at the Central rural Work Conference on Dec. 28-29, again emphasized food security, “to firmly hold the initiative of food security, food production should be tightened year after year.”
Xi Jinping said to firmly hold the initiative of food security, that is, China’s food to ensure that it is not subject to the reality is that China’s food self-sufficiency rate plummeted from 96% in 2013 to 86% in 2019, has fallen ninety percent of the national food self-sufficiency security line.
The latest official data show that from January to November this year, China’s imports of soybeans reached 928,000 tons, a jump of 17.5%, and the number of monthly imports of soybeans has hit a record high for six consecutive months in the same period, at this rate of growth, China is expected to import more than 100 million tons of soybeans in 2020, a record high. In addition, from January to October this year, China has imported a total of 7.82 million tons of corn, a huge increase of more than 3 million tons over the whole of last year, the market expects that China’s corn imports this year will reach a level of about 10 million tons, and next year (2021) imports will continue to increase.
The above data shows that, on the one hand, the official claim that there is no grain shortage appealing to the private sector not to hoard food, on the other hand, the official but a large number of imports of food, snapping up international soybean corn. The data also shows that soybeans, as the largest gap in China’s food varieties, external dependence is still expanding year by year. At the same time, China’s corn imports are feared to follow in the footsteps of soybeans, a grain variety that continues to grow.
Chinese Communist Party agriculture officials also said that the main reason for the increase in soybean imports this year is the strong demand for hogs. In other words, nearly 100 million tons of soybeans were imported during the year, a significant portion of which was used as livestock feed and ultimately, indirectly, eaten by people. Although agricultural officials do not consider soybeans as food, emphasizing that “the degree of dependence on food rations is extremely low,” China’s food meaning, including grains (the three major staples) and soybeans.
In August, an official think tank released a report on China’s rural development, stating that by the end of the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025), China will have a grain deficit of around 130 million tons, of which the three staple grains of rice, corn and wheat will be about 25 million tons.
In an interview with the official media, Yuan Longping, a famous Chinese hybrid rice expert, also confessed that “China does not have enough food to eat” and “if other countries don’t sell it, there will be trouble”.
The Chinese Communist Party authorities have been propagating that “grain production has increased year after year,” but China’s food security has been repeatedly questioned, with the loss of arable land bearing the brunt of the problem.
It is well known that China’s arable land is decreasing year by year, with desertification and construction taking over, especially for economic development, but where there are cities are often the best quality arable land in history. Experts point out that it is surprising that China has maintained an increase in the area of grain sown despite the declining area of good arable land, meaning that the utilization rate of arable land is increasing. The higher the utilization rate of arable land, technically speaking, increases the annual production per unit of arable land, but the consequence of doing so is that it is exhausted, which will lead to a continuous decline in the quality of the land. In other words, China’s arable land is not only already extremely tight, but also of rather poor quality. For example, Yuan Longping’s invention of double-season rice has only increased rice production by 13 percent in 20 years.
In addition to arable land, experts also point out that the analysis of China’s food crisis also depends on one important factor: “people,” who cannot grow land without farmers. As the Communist Party promotes urbanization, rural people continue to move to the cities, and when they do, they basically stop growing anything themselves.
For example, the aforementioned “China Rural Development Report” predicts that by 2025, the urbanization rate across China will reach 65.5 percent. Conservative estimates suggest that the new rural urban population will be over 80 million. As a result, the proportion of people working in agriculture will drop to about 20% nationwide. However, the proportion of the country’s rural population aged 60 or older will rise to 25.3%, or about 124 million people.
On the one hand, the CCP wants to boast that it cares about agricultural production, but on the other hand, the CCP does not care about the farmers for its own selfishness. In addition to the unjust treatment of farmers that one can read about in the newspapers, there are also numerous rural Falun Gong practitioners who are persecuted.
Overseas Minghui.com reports that in the persistent persecution of Falun Gong by the Chinese Communist Party, farmers in rural areas of China have also been brutally persecuted, whether they live in the vast plains or in remote mountainous rural towns.
Jilin Province, for example, is located in one of the world’s three “golden corn belts,” and more than 20 counties (urban areas) in Changchun, Songyuan, Siping, Baicheng, Jilin, and Yushu, which have been hardest hit by persecution since July 1999. Minghui.org reports that so far this year, under the pretext of “zeroing out” the persecution, many Falun Gong practitioners have been illegally arrested, harassed, threatened with non-payment of pensions, sent to brainwashing classes, and had their contracted land withdrawn since late December of this year in these major grain-producing counties in the province. And these lands grow important grains such as corn and soybeans.
There is a saying that has been circulating on the Internet for many years that China’s food crisis can be described as an “internal and external problem,” but the “internal problem” of China’s three agricultural problems is actually far greater than the “external problem” of international The food chain is broken. And in a nutshell, the Chinese Communist Party is worried about the food crisis in China because of the stability of the regime, while the Chinese people are particularly worried about the food shortage because they have too deep a memory of how many people died of starvation during the famine.
Recent Comments