Customers shop for rice at a supermarket in Xi’an, Shaanxi province.
A Japanese scholar’s latest estimate is that China’s grain self-sufficiency rate was only 76 percent last year, far below the official claim of 95 percent. Official Communist Party figures also show that China’s cumulative grain imports of 142.62 million tons in 2020 exceeded 140 million tons for the first time. Xi Jinping, general secretary of the CCP, has repeatedly expressed concern about food security, emphasizing the need to “protect arable land like a giant panda”; the CCP’s government work report this year also emphasizes the need to ensure food security. The Communist Party claims that China has achieved “17 consecutive bumper crops” in grain production even in 2020, when the year was unfavorable. At the same time, the Chinese government has repeatedly stated that it will not waste food and drink, raising questions about whether domestic food production is really self-sufficient.
In this regard, Xia Yeliang, a former associate professor at Peking University’s School of Economics who lives in the United States, said in an interview with Voice of Hope that in the 1990s, Mr. Brown of the Worldwatch Institute asked the question, “Who will feed China in the 21st century?” At that time, the government urgently called experts to study the severity of China’s food crisis and how to deal with it if it really occurs. At the same time, Brown’s views were criticized in the mass media as a deliberate attempt by Western anti-China activists to intimidate and create artificial tension. The Chinese Communist Party, like Mao Zedong’s era, has continued this divisive situation to this day, which is called “internal tightening and external loosening” according to the Chinese Communist Party’s customary terminology.
[Recording]: “Internal tightness and external looseness” means that internally, in private, they have to study countermeasures and take the problem seriously. But in terms of external propaganda, in terms of daily education for the people, they are told that China has a strong capacity for food self-sufficiency, that there will be no crisis at all, and that we have enough surplus food to sell abroad. So then, in the Xi Jinping era, this bragging is even more obvious. But we only need to look at a few data to understand whether he was bragging or not, right? The first one is the quantity of grain imported by China every year.
Xia Yeliang believes that if China’s ability to produce its own grain reaches several trillion pounds a year, but at the same time to import hundreds of millions of pounds of grain, this is self-contradictory. In the past, there was an official explanation called “variety transfer”, saying that the reason for food exports and imports is that some varieties are not produced domestically, so that the public can have a different choice, which is actually nonsense. In the past years, China imported wheat from Canada and Australia, corn and soybeans from the United States, some people say that soybeans are used as livestock feed, but in fact, soybeans are also related to the processing of foodstuffs, and also the part of human consumption, so this argument is completely avoiding the important. In recent years, China’s grain imports have increased rather than decreased. According to the Chinese Communist Party, grain production has increased every year, so why should the number of imports increase? Of course, the official explanation to you is that the people’s demand for life has increased, and the number of side dishes and other snacks has increased, and some of the imported grain is used in those areas. They have a lot of ways to justify it.
[Recording]: But why is it that in some places, in some areas, there has been a state of food tension or panic for a period of time? Some people said they needed to stockpile more food at home, especially during the epidemic. But now that the epidemic is over, or that it is not as serious as before, then it seems that there is no more food crisis, but actually you can see that the current relationship between China and the world economy, and some major countries, if it is causing this kind of tension and confrontation, then you do not have enough food reserves, there is a big crisis.
On the issue of food security, Xia Yeliang mentioned that when Wen Jiabao was the premier, because China’s arable land was gradually decreasing, in order to keep the bottom line, a red line was drawn at that time, which was 1.9 billion mu of arable land, which later turned out to be 1.8 billion mu, and then it was losing ground and further reduced to 1.7 billion mu. A sharp decline in arable land, one because of the 1990s after the real estate development took up a lot of land, some places in order to climb the political achievements, even in the county, the township are engaged in development zones, said to “build a nest to attract phoenixes”, to introduce foreign capital, a large number of farmland into a business investment area, the results did not attract phoenixes, many land was abandoned, and even some Land after the so-called “three flat four whole”, the original farmland has become unsuitable for cultivation, some also poured cement, how to ensure that the arable land area is not reduced?
Xia Yeliang said, from the natural condition of China’s land, although the overall area of China’s arable land is large, but the proportion of good land is not particularly high, not as good as the natural soil fertility of the United States, Canada, Australia, plus China is an ancient agricultural country with thousands of years of farming history, some land after years of cultivation declining fertility, the need to return fertility by natural means, so Zhu Rongji as premier When Zhu Rongji was the premier, he once proposed “returning farmland to forest” to give the land time to rest and return to fertility.
Another reason is the destruction of the land caused by industrialization, especially the excessive use of chemical fertilizers, resulting in a significant decrease in soil fertility. There is also the problem of heavy metal pollution brought about by chemicals, etc. Various factors have caused the original traditional agricultural cultivation period not only the fertility to decline, food has also suffered from pollution to some extent. For example, some rice and food crops in the cadmium, mercury, arsenic and other harmful chemicals seriously exceed the standard, the future will cause a variety of diseases, such as leukemia, cancer will be produced.
So China is now saying that if you look at agriculture from the point of view of comparative advantage, China does not have such an obvious comparative advantage in agriculture, so some economists have suggested in the past that since China cannot rely 100% on its own farming, why not import a lot of food or produce other things to exchange food with others. But China’s national leaders have always stressed that because of China’s huge population base, self-sufficiency in food is always the most critical issue and cannot depend on imports. Therefore, over the years, on the one hand, the arable land is decreasing, and on the other hand, as I mentioned earlier, various kinds of pollution, so objectively it will also cause the increase in the number of imported food. But if there is some economic crisis, or some tensions between countries and confrontation, then the future will have a considerable impact on the normal food imports and supply, there may be a short-lived food crisis.
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