Archive for ‘food security’

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04/04/2020

China able to ensure food security despite coronavirus impact

CHINA-BEIJING-COVID-19-FOOD SECURITY-PRESS CONFERENCE (CN)

Photo taken on April 4, 2020 shows a press conference of the joint prevention and control mechanism of the State Council in Beijing, capital of China. Chinese officials said Saturday that the country can hold firm its “rice bowl” despite the novel coronavirus impact, with ample grain reserves and measures to boost production. (Xinhua/Pan Xu)

BEIJING, April 4 (Xinhua) — Chinese officials said Saturday that the country can hold firm its “rice bowl” despite the novel coronavirus impact, with ample grain reserves and measures to boost production.

The country has recorded a long streak of bumper years, with grain output reaching a record of 663.85 million tonnes last year. With measures to boost grain production “we have the confidence and determination to hold firm our ‘rice bowl,'” Pan Wenbo, an official at the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, told a press conference.

The bumper harvests supported the country’s efforts to boost social and economic development as well as fight the novel coronavirus outbreak, Pan said in response to questions that whether some countries’ grain export ban would strain China’s grain supply.

Pan said China has unveiled a series of “unconventional measures” to stabilize grain production, including setting region-specific grain plantation targets, offering subsidies for farmers and raising minimum prices for state procurement of rice, which secured a good start this year and would ensure stable grain production for the whole year.

The country’s grain reserves have run at a high level, with those of rice and wheat being sufficient to meet the country’s consumer market demand for one year, said Qin Yuyun, an official with the National Food and Strategic Reserves Administration.

Qin said the administration will continue efforts to ensure abundant supply and stable prices.

Source: Xinhua

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17/05/2015

The wrong direction | The Economist

THE total value of support given by the Chinese government to farmers exceeds that of any other country. In 2012, the most recent year for which comparative data exist, China paid out $165 billion in direct and indirect agricultural subsidies. The next highest totals were those of Japan at $65 billion and America at just over $30 billion, according to research by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

On a relative basis, however, China’s support is more in line with global norms. Subsidies as a share of farm income are about 17%, rapidly catching up with the average for the OECD, a group of wealthier countries. The most lavish spenders include Japan, South Korea and Switzerland, where subsidies account for more than half of farm income.

More troubling is the trajectory (see chart). Among major emerging markets tracked by the OECD, China is second only to Indonesia in the rate of its subsidy growth. China’s farm support rose from 1.4% of GDP in 1995-97 to 2.3% in 2010-12. It is moving in the opposite direction from developed countries, which are gradually reducing such support. Average spending on it in the OECD countries fell from 1.6% of GDP in 1995-97 to 0.9% in 2010-12.

There are also concerns about the kind of support provided by China. Even those who advocate less intervention in farming by governments acknowledge that it can play a useful role in mitigating boom-bust cycles. The challenge is to design support that minimises distortions. Schemes that lead to more investment in yield enhancements or that provide flat subsidies, regardless of production levels, are best. Those that encourage farmers to plant crops even if real demand is weak are harmful.

The OECD calculates that nearly 70% of Chinese subsidies are of the most distorting sort. For example, the government guarantees minimum purchase-prices, currently well above global levels, to grain growers. Other Asian countries are worse offenders. In Indonesia, the most problematic forms of subsidies account for nearly all of the government’s agricultural spending. But given China’s size, its interventions and the mismanagement of its food reserves are likely to have more far-reaching consequences for global markets.

via The wrong direction | The Economist.

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22/02/2015

Modi bets on GM crops for second green revolution | Reuters

On a fenced plot not far from Prime Minister Narendra Modi‘s home, a field of mustard is in full yellow bloom, representing his government’s reversal of an effective ban on field trials of genetically modified (GM) food crops.

A scientist points to a patch of genetically modified (GM) rapeseed crop under trial in New Delhi February 13, 2015. REUTERS-Anindito Mukherjee

The GM mustard planted in the half-acre field in the grounds of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in New Delhi is in the final stage of trials before the variety is allowed to be sold commercially, and that could come within two years, scientists associated with the project say.

India placed a moratorium on GM aubergine in 2010 fearing the effect on food safety and biodiversity. Field trials of other GM crops were not formally halted, but the regulatory system was brought to a deadlock.

But allowing GM crops is critical to Modi’s goal of boosting dismal farm productivity in India, where urbanisation is devouring arable land and population growth will mean there are 1.5 billion mouths to feed by 2030 – more even than China.

via Modi bets on GM crops for second green revolution | Reuters.

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18/08/2014

Drought in Northeast China Is the Worst in 63 Years – Businessweek

Southern China is a rice-growing region, while the northeast is the country’s wheat and corn-growing “bread basket.” This summer the northern province of Liaoning is suffering the worst drought in 63 years, according to the local meteorological bureau: The province has seen the lowest precipitation since the government began keeping records in 1951. The dry summer threatens immediate drinking water supplies and autumn harvests.

A farmer stands at the bottom of the Zhifang Reservoir, near Dengfeng, China

The agricultural research service Shanghai JC Intelligence predicts that China’s corn yields may drop 1.5 percent this year, which could drive up domestic corn prices and compel farmers to use alternative grains for animal feed.

(China also imports from the U.S., but since last fall, Chinese inspectors have rejected an increasing number of shipments found to contain unapproved genetically modified organisms (GMO) varieties.)

Other regions have also suffered under the drought, including the northern provinces of Inner Mongolia and Jilin, and central Henan province. In Inner Mongolia, 300,000 people have faced drinking-water shortages, according to state-run Xinhua newswire. More than 270,000cattle have also gone without water. Xinhua reported economic losses to the poor northwestern province total $37 million so far.

Harvests of soybean and barley may also be hurt by the drought, as well as livestock health.

via Drought in Northeast China Is the Worst in 63 Years – Businessweek.

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21/05/2014

Does China Pose a Threat to Global Food Security? It Says No – China Real Time Report – WSJ

Twenty years ago, environmental advocate Lester Brown got in hot water with Beijing for writing a book called “Who Will Feed China?”

China was displeased with the suggestion in his book that the country’s growing population and water scarcity could drastically burden the world’s food resources. Beijing publicly criticized the author – then began a series of reforms including improving farming techniques and adopting a national policy of self-sufficiency in grain consumption that vindicated Mr. Brown’s arguments. It paved the way for a gradual rapprochement with the American, now 80.

Détente is over.

On Wednesday, China’s agriculture ministry issued a statement again criticizing Mr. Brown. It took umbrage with an essay he wrote titled “Can the World Feed China?” a riff on his earlier book. The essay details Mr. Brown’s concerns that rising domestic pressures on food consumption could result in spiking food prices and political unrest as China joins in a global “scramble for food.”

It isn’t clear why Mr. Brown was singled out for criticism; many analysts have in one form or other also articulated these trends, though arguably not as directly or pungently. But the move underscores how increasingly sensitive China is to the growing impression that it can’t feed itself and that its acquisitions of global food assets are posing a risk to food security for the rest of the world. China has been keen in recent years to head off any impression that it’s on a global grab for natural resources.

Mr. Brown wasn’t immediately available for comment.

The government is unhappy with the notion it’s being blamed for sharpening global competition for food. Mr. Brown’s essay said China’s rising grain imports  mean “it is competing directly with scores of other grain-importing countries.” He also warned that China’s purchase last year of U.S. pork producer Smithfield Foods “was really a pork security move.” So too, he said, was China’s deal with Ukraine to provide $3 billion in loans in exchange for corn. “Such moves by China exemplify the new geopolitics of food scarcity that affects us all,” he wrote.

Not likely, ministry spokesman Bi Meijia said in the government’s statement. Mr. Bi said 97% of China’s grain consumption comes from its own output, not imports.

“On the issue of food security, China not only does not pose a threat to the world, but makes a contribution to global food security,” he said. China intends to continue its existing policies, he said.

Mr. Bi said rising grain imports aren’t due to domestic shortages, but because global prices are lower than domestic prices. The ministry also pointed out that imports accounted for just 2.6% of domestic grain production volume in 2013, and just 4% of global output.

via Does China Pose a Threat to Global Food Security? It Says No – China Real Time Report – WSJ.

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02/05/2014

Agriculture: Bring back the landlords | The Economist

CHINA’S Communist Party has always had a problem with big landowners. In Communist culture, they are synonymous with evil. In January on the country’s most-watched television show—a gala at lunar new year—viewers were treated to a scene from a Mao-era ballet featuring young peasants fired with zeal for revenge against a despotic rural landlord. Some critics rolled their eyes about such a throwback to the party’s radical past, but few complained about the stereotyping of landowners. Yet when it comes to letting individual families control large tracts of farmland, Communist Party leaders are beginning to have a change of heart.

Since January last year the term “family farm” has come into vogue in the party’s vocabulary. It refers not to the myriad tiny plots, each farmed by a single family, that are characteristic of the Chinese countryside; but to much larger-scale operations of a kind more familiar elsewhere, such as Europe or America. The trigger for this was the term’s use in a Communist Party directive known as “document number one”, the name traditionally given to the party’s new-year policy pronouncement on rural issues. It said the consolidation of household plots into family farms should be given “encouragement and support”.

On his first trip outside the capital after being appointed prime minister in March last year, Li Keqiang visited a 450-hectare (1,110-acre) family farm in the coastal province of Jiangsu. He said that boosting production was impossible on the tiny plots that most rural households farm (the average is less than half a hectare). “It can only be done through concentrating the land into larger farms”, Mr Li said. With more government support, “the earth could yield gold”, he told residents; a notion that would surprise the 260m people who have left the countryside to work in cities over the last three decades. Many villages are now home mainly to the elderly and left-behind children. During a visit to Switzerland two months later Mr Li again stopped by at a family farm (of a more modest 40 hectares). Chinese media said he wanted to pick up tips from Europe’s “advanced experiences” in running them. Chen Xiwen, a senior party policymaker on rural affairs, was even quoted as saying last year that he would like China to have vast “family farms like America’s”, but that he was worried about the impact on rural employment if farmland were to be managed by so few hands.

As is often the case whenever party policy appears to shift in the countryside, reality on the ground had long been changing before official rhetoric began to catch up. (Peasants started dismantling Mao’s disastrous “people’s communes” before the party began formally doing so in 1982.) The exodus from the countryside has allowed entrepreneurial farmers to build up their holdings by renting land from neighbours who no longer need it. They have not been able to buy it since all rural land is owned “collectively” by villagers. But they have been allowed to take over the right to farm it, and keep any profits. The party does not harp on about evil landlords of yore, since the new big-farmers are, legally speaking, merely tenants. In March last year the agriculture ministry took its first survey of family farms, though it has yet even to define the term precisely. It found there were already 877,000 of them, with an average size of around 13 hectares. They covered 13% of China’s arable land. Since 2008 the area of farmland rented out to other farmers has more than tripled.

via Agriculture: Bring back the landlords | The Economist.

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17/02/2014

India budget-2013/14 agri exports likely to touch $45 bln vs $41 bln in 2012/13 | Reuters

India’s Finance Minister P. Chidambaram told parliament on Monday that India’s 2013/14 agricultural exports were likely to touch $45 billion vs $41 billion in 2012/13.

Chidambaram was presenting an interim budget to tide public finances over until a new government is formed after elections due by May.

via India budget-2013/14 agri exports likely to touch $45 bln vs $41 bln in 2012/13 | Reuters.

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09/02/2014

India may produce record 263.2 MT foodgrains this year: Pawar – The Hindu

Foodgrain production is likely to touch a record 263.2 million tonnes (mt) this year, beating the previous high of 259 mt achieved two years ago, Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar said on Sunday.

Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar. File photo

“The country is likely to achieve record 263.2 mt foodgrain production this year. This would be about 4 mt higher than the record of 259 million tonnes achieved two years ago,” Mr. Pawar said at an agricultural exposition here.

The foodgrain production fell marginally to 255.36 mt in the last crop year (July-June) due to drought in some parts of the country.

A good monsoon along with improved sowing of both kharif (summer) and rabi (winter) crops have improved prospects of a better foodgrain production this year.

India has now emerged as the world’s top rice exporter and second-top exporter of wheat and cotton. The country is also the top producer of milk and horticultural crops, Mr. Pawar said highlighting progress made in the farm sector.

via India may produce record 263.2 MT foodgrains this year: Pawar – The Hindu.

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22/01/2014

China Aims for Food Security as Pollution Destroys Crop Land – Businessweek

China must stick to a policy of “basic grain self-sufficiency.” While keeping imports at an “appropriate” level, it must “not relax domestic food production at any time,” decrees the first policy document of the year, issued on Jan. 19 by the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

A farmer working her land next to a lead factory near Hengyang, China

Released every January, the zhongyang yihao wenjian, or “No. 1 Central Document” has for the last 11 years focused on China’s agricultural economy, a reflection of the importance the leadership puts upon China’s countryside and its rural population. Previous versions have emphasized everything from scientific and technological innovation and water conservancy to raising farmers’ incomes and agricultural modernization.

Obsessions with food security are certainly not new. “The idea of storing surplus grain in good times to guard against famine dates back at least as far as the Old Testament, when Joseph gave just such advice to the Pharaoh. Its history in China is almost as long,” wrote Jim Harkness, president of the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in a policy paper back in 2011. (Harkness previously lived and worked for many years in China.)

via China Aims for Food Security as Pollution Destroys Crop Land – Businessweek.

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25/12/2013

China to deepen rural reforms – Xinhua | English.news.cn

Chinese President Xi Jinping addresses the central rural work conference in Beijing, capital of China, Dec. 23, 2013. China pledged to deepen rural reforms and step up agricultural modernization, according to a statement issued after the central rural work conference which ended on Tuesday. (Xinhua/Lan Hongguang)

BEIJING, Dec. 24 (Xinhua) — China has pledged to deepen rural reforms and step up agricultural modernization, according to a statement issued after a central rural work conference which ended on Tuesday.

The two-day meeting was attended by Chinese President Xi Jinping, Premier Li Keqiang and senior leaders Zhang Dejiang, Yu Zhengsheng, Liu Yunshan, Wang Qishan and Zhang Gaoli.

Central government policy on the countryside, agriculture and farmers has been effective in arousing enthusiasm in the new century and has boosted the development of agriculture and the countryside, the statement said.

Reform started in the countryside and rural growth has contributed much to the leap from being barely fed and clothed to moderate prosperity.

\”When defining a moderately prosperous society, the key is to observe the condition of farmers,\” the statement said.

It must be noted that agriculture is still the weakest among the four pursuits of industrialization, informatization, urbanization and agricultural modernization. The countryside still lags behind, the statement said.

\”If China wants to be strong, agriculture must be strong. If China wants to be beautiful, the countryside must be beautiful. If China wants to get rich, the farmers must get rich,\” the statement said.

Tackling problems in the countryside should be at the core of work of the central authorities, the statement said.

FULL BOWLS OF RICE

Populous as China is, the task of simply feeding the people remains a high priority, the statement said.

\”The bowls of the Chinese, in any situation, must rest soundly in our own hands. Our bowls should be filled mainly with Chinese grain. Only when a country is basically self-sufficient in food, can it take the initiative in food security and grasp the overall situation for economic and social growth,\” it said.

China has set a red-line guarantee that arable land never shrinks to less than 1.8 billion mu (120 million hectares). The line should be strictly followed, the statement stressed.

To ensure the farmers profit from grain planting and the key production bases are active in encouraging farmers to plant grain, more efforts should be made to link agricultural subsidies with grain output, it said.

IRREPLACEABLE RURAL FAMILIES

To stick to the central authorities\’ rural policies, the first lies in the basic rural management system.

Rural land is owned by the peasantry collectively and this is the \”soul\” of the rural basic management system, the statement read.

Collective land should be contracted by rural families, namely members of the collective economic organizations.

No other party can substitute the rural family status in contracting land and no matter how the right to contract for management is transferred, the right to contract collective land belongs to rural families, it said.

\”The subjects of the rights to contract for management will grow apart from the subjects of the rights to manage. This is the new trend for China\’s agricultural production relations,\” the statement stressed.

The rural basic management system must improve

The rural land management rights transfer, land concentration and scale land use should move in proportion to urbanization and changes of rural labor, as well as technological progress and social service in agriculture.

SAFER FOOD, BETTER VILLAGES

The government has vowed to improve agricultural product quality and food safety. The environment where agricultural products grow will be improved, the statement said.

If any farmland or water is seriously polluted, the area should be taken out of use, and supervision should be stepped up on food safety.

The government has also pledged to enrich the peasantry and take care care of their children, women and the aged left behind in villages, as many of their families might be working in cities.

\”Soil culture\” shall not be ruptured, as villages were sources for the Chinese traditional civilization and the countryside shall by no means turn into \”desolate villages, left-behind villages or hometowns alive only in memory,\” the statement said.

via China to deepen rural reforms – Xinhua | English.news.cn.

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