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Crop caution

By Fu Jing (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-05-19 14:35

As hunger stalks other countries, the Chinese have good reason to feel secure.

The country's grain reserves, roughly equaling half of last year's harvest, is way above the world average, reveals a thorough check on State and private barns. Prices of staples have remained generally stable with the exception of Thai rice. Trainloads of rice have been swiftly moved from the northeast to the south to meet any possible shortfall. In a nutshell, China has deftly sidestepped the escalating global food crisis threatening about 100 million people across 37 countries.

"Because of sufficient reserves, China, by and large, will not be affected by the global food shortage," says Peking University professor Justin Lin, who will take over as chief economist at World Bank at the end of this month.

China's grain reserves have reached about 250 million tons, and last year the total yield surpassed 500 million tons. The country's ratio of reserves to yield, at 50 percent, is far higher than the world average of 17-18 percent.

But economists warn China must not rest on its laurels. More than being pleased at averting a crisis today, they worry about one tomorrow if the country fails to boost crop yield and maintain the current level of self-sufficiency given its population is growing, arable land is dwindling and per capita food consumption is edging up.

"China is lucky the global crisis occurred in a good-harvest year," Wang Ren, director of Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), tells China Business Weekly. But the crisis, he adds, has served as a wake-up call on possible shortages in future as China faces myriad problems in agriculture and rural development.

Wang is also concerned about the impact of climate change on agriculture and plant and animal diseases. "All these are obstacles to increasing China's crop yield," says Wang, whose organization is affiliated to the United Nations and the World Bank and works toward achieving food security and poverty alleviation through scientific research in the fields of agriculture, forestry, fisheries and environment. "That's why I'm more concerned about tomorrow."

China needs to work faster in developing and introducing core agricultural technologies. The cheap solutions to the problems China and the world face in developing agriculture have basically been exhausted and returns from efforts put into agricultural research and development are dwindling. The International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington DC estimates that every unit of harvested crop costs two-thirds more R&D expenses than it did 20 years ago.

Less land, more mouths

From 121 million hectares in 1978, the planting acreage dropped to 108 million hectares by 1984. By 2006, farming land had shrunk to 105 million hectares. But China's growing population by then had reached 1.31 billion, from 975 million in 1978. By 2033, China's population is estimated to reach 1.5 billion and the annual grain demand to around 600 million tons, 20 percent more than the current 500 million tons.

China's grain yield has risen by an average of 1 percent annually. From 1977, the country's economic development began to return to a normal track following the 10-year "cultural revolution" (1966-76) and farmers turned their attention back to farming. This led to the high yield of 300 million tons in 1978.

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