Not going against the grain
DATE:2014-03-05 SOURCE:China Daily
By Shi Xia (China Daily USA)
Food security is not only about having enough food to feed all the people in China but also about ensuring that the food is safe
Even in a year of excellent harvest, China faces a food shortage. Although crop output has continuously increased in the past decade and the overall grain production in 2013 broke the 600-million-ton mark for the first time, it is no easy task for China to become self-sufficient in food grains.
With the rapid increase in population and consumption, the gap between demand for and supply of food has been widening. In 2012, China''s self-sufficiency rate in food dropped below 90 percent, and net imports of three major crops (wheat, corn and rice) became a normal phenomenon.
Given the ever-increasing prices of grains, China''s food security is now directly related to its national security and sovereignty. In fact, to illustrate the central government''s understanding of food security, the Central Rural Work Conference said: "Chinese people''s bowls should be tightly held in their own hands, and the bowls should be filled with Chinese crops. Only if a country is self-sufficient in food production can it ... (ensure) food security and further grasp the overall situation of social and economic development."
Food security refers not only to enough food to feed the entire population, but also to food safety. Food security focuses on the capacity to supply food in the short as well as long terms. Therefore, to ensure food security, the authorities have to have a better understanding of food safety and accord it the needed importance.
China faces great challenges in terms of food security. First, agriculture has become less profitable forcing many farmers to look to other fields to earn a living. Agriculture''s economic scale is comparatively low in China. In 2012, for instance, the per capita net income of Chinese farmers was 7,917 yuan ($1,306), and only 26.6 percent of it came from agriculture. And in 2013, farmers earned 45.8 percent of their overall income from nonfarming activities. So farming-being a drain on the young workforce in rural areas-is carried out mostly by elderly people and women.
Second, rapid industrialization and urbanization have eaten into good agricultural land and caused soil pollution. Ministry of Land and Resources data show that from 1998 to 2011, China''s agricultural land decreased by about 8 million hectares, with the total farmed area almost dropping to the "red line" of 120 million hectares. This is not a healthy development, especially as there are already reports on farmland being polluted by heavy metals.
Third, in these times of globalization, external factors also play a role in China''s food security. For example, China''s grain processing industry and its seed sector are, more or less, controlled by foreign enterprises, and without a secure seed industry there can be no food security. Also, potash, which plays a key role in increasing grain production, is scarce in China. So China has to produce and have a sufficient reserve of potash fertilizer. This shows that China''s food security depends not only on farming, but also on the strategic deployment of its agricultural industry.
The No 1 Central Document gives food security top priority in governance and emphasizes that China has to devise a national food security strategy. While devising a national food security strategy, the authorities should focus on three aspects.
To begin with, the authorities should cultivate and develop new agricultural management bodies to increase the comparative effectiveness of agriculture and ensure agriculture yields enough profit to keep farmers rooted in the profession. To maintain and stabilize land contract relations, the authorities should allow and guide farmers to develop scale management by transferring to them the land contract rights, which would allow them to become shareholders or leasers. They should encourage new-style agricultural management bodies such as professional large families, household farms, rural cooperatives and agricultural leading enterprises. And to create new management bodies, the authorities should respect farmers'' wishes.
Second, the authorities should improve the price control mechanism for core agricultural products such as grains in order to prevent grain prices from dropping to very low or rising to very high levels, because "low grain prices undermine the interests of farmers" and "high grain prices undermine the interests of consumers". Besides, they should gradually establish a subsidy system for target prices and strengthen the control mechanism of agricultural products, and strike a balance between demand and supply in the market by having enough grain reserve, and through imports and exports.
Third, the authorities should encourage the development of environmentally friendly, resource-saving and sustainable agriculture, and support recycling and organic agriculture suited to local conditions, for that will help build a harmonious, eco-friendly social environment in China.