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Page added on March 3, 2014
20 Years After Doomsday Predictions, China Is Feeding Itself, But Global Impacts Remain Unclear
How has China managed to feed nearly one-quarter of the world’s population with only seven percent of the world’s arable land?
In 1995, Lester Brown forecasted doom and gloom for China’s ability to produce enough grain for its people, in his popular book, Who Will Feed China? He hypothesized that China would be forced to buy grain from abroad, thereby seriously disrupting world food markets.
But, says Christine Boyle, co-author of a recently released World Bank report on China’s water and food security through 2030, China has proved naysayers wrong. Thanks to improved smallholder farms and land diversity, “China has been able to meet grain production targets year after year despite large portions of the country stricken by drought,” Boyle says in an interview with the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum.
However, as domestic farmland and water become more polluted and agriculture increasingly competes with industry for the same precious water resources, China has also turned to the global commodity market and buying farmland abroad to augment this strategy. And the effect of this shift overseas remains unclear.
9 Comments on "20 Years After Doomsday Predictions, China Is Feeding Itself, But Global Impacts Remain Unclear"
bobinget on Mon, 3rd Mar 2014 3:06 pm
Chinese grain imports to strain world food supply – expert
LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – China’s growing demand for grain imports will place new strains on a world food supply already stretched thin by plateauing farming yields, over-used aquifers and climate change, according to a leading expert on food security and water.
Lester Brown, founder and president of the Earth Institute and author of several books on food security, said during a teleconference this week that changing Chinese appetites and losses of farmland to industrialisation mean China will need to look abroad for an increasing share of its grain.
According to data from the United States Department of Agriculture, Chinese grain imports shot up to 22.8 million tons in 2013, nearly twice what they were the year before and the highest they’ve been in the country’s history. Brown says the increase is driven by rising demand for meat among China’s increasingly affluent population, and a desire to produce that meat at home.
The country’s industrialisation is reducing the amount of land suitable for growing grain, meaning it is increasingly having to turn to other countries to meet this demand at a time when many world grain producers are already pushing the limits of the land they farm.
As farmers struggle to produce enough, total food prices have doubled and grain prices have more than doubled just in the last 10 years, according to U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation.
Meat is becoming a larger part of the Chinese diet. Pork has long been the most popular meat in China, accounting for nearly 70 percent of meat consumption in 2013. Globally, the country consumes roughly half the world’s pork and is home to about half the world’s pigs.
Yet, pork is starting to lose its dominance in China. “China is beginning to now more and more diversify its meat consumption,” Brown said. “The Chinese want to live like Americans,” and pork is America’s least favorite meat. Instead, people in the U.S. eat more poultry and a lot more beef, a historically small part of the Chinese diet but one that takes more grain than pork to produce.
This aspiration to be like Americans poses serious problems for grain production. Brown estimates that for the Chinese to eat as much meat per person as Americans would require imports of 240 million tons of grain per year – “a huge amount of grain in global terms,” and more than India produces each year.
Worldwide, farmers produced 2.2 billion tons of grain in 2012.
What is more, raising beef, in particular, requires a lot of grain. According to the Earth Institute, it takes seven pounds of grain to produce just one pound of beef, compared to three pounds for pork and two for poultry.
As such, it comes as no surprise the increase in Chinese meat consumption has corresponded with a steady rise in the amount of grain used as feed since 1960, according to USDA data.
Industrialisation, the source of China’s increasing affluence, is making it harder for domestic farmers to respond to this demand.
“The rapid rate of industrialisation in China is really chewing up crop land at an alarming rate,” Brown said. “China is now losing cropland.”
He said there is technological capacity for Chinese farmers to increase their yields per acre of certain grains like maize and wheat, but “for rice, there’s just not much there.”
China is pressing against what agronomists call a “glass ceiling” of rice production, Brown said – a point at which a rice plant cannot produce more grain because of limitations such as day length, solar intensity and its capacity for photosynthesis.
Once a crop reaches this point, the only way for farmers to produce more is to plant more, Brown said.
Farmers in China are not the only ones facing a glass ceiling. In fact, 40 percent of grains across the world have already hit it, Brown said. American farmers have not seen significant increases in maize yields per acre for four years, and in Europe, wheat yields have remained stagnant for more than a decade.
“It’s not that farmers wouldn’t like to raise their wheat yields right now, because prices are good,” Brown said. “It’s just that they can’t.”
To make matters more complicated, Brown said grain producers may need to try to keep up production despite dwindling access to water. In China, he estimates, 130 million people are being fed with grain produced from wells where water is being pumped faster than it can be replaced. In India, as many as 190 million people rely on grain produced using such well, and even in the U.S. aquifers are being over pumped.
“Almost everywhere that you have irrigated agriculture, wells are going dry,” Brown said.
Although countries generally eat more meat as they become more affluent – as is happening in China – Brown noted that in the United States meat consumption has started to drop off slightly in the last few years. In fact, U.S. Department of Agriculture numbers show about a 9 percent decrease in the amount of meat Americans eat per person since a peak in 2004.
Brown attributes part of that decline to meat prices rising faster than wages – and the price increases are in part because of increased demand from places like China. But he also noted a change young Americans, in particular, are more aware on the impact meat eating has on their health and the environment.
Jake Lucas is an AlertNet Climate intern
Davy, Hermann, MO on Mon, 3rd Mar 2014 3:13 pm
China is a runaway train of growth and ecosystem decline. Their ability to feed themselves has already been breached. They will now pressure the world food export arrangement. This arrangement is already strained and showing signs of protectionism, high prices, and unstable production. Countries like Egypt are now at this moment faced with a huge food crisis in relation to a population far in excess of carrying capacity. This when there economy is contracting. How long can the Saudi’s support them is unknown. Multiply Egypt by many if China continues to pressure the global food export system. China will in the very near future find growing their food system and their industrial society are not compatible. China’s constantly increasing need for energy is already stressing their water shortages. Energy needs water is as simple as E=MC squared. It is a very dangerous mix of a large population with a large environmental crisis. The world will find itself with a food system in dysfunction as conflicting demands on it cannot be reconciled.
rockman on Mon, 3rd Mar 2014 4:15 pm
Hmm…not importing much food? China’s wheat imports grew over 5,000% from Dec 2012 to Dec 2013. They have also been importing record amounts of corn. And they aren’t just into veggies: China consumes about half the pork on the planet. But they are also developing a taste for more expensive meats.
You don’t have to grow all your own food if you can outbid other folks for what’s in the market place. Kinda like US oil consumption.
rollin on Mon, 3rd Mar 2014 6:15 pm
More BS about China. They can’t feed themselves from their own land. Large imports and China owns farmland in the Ukraine amounting to 5% of their total land area. Also a number of large farms in Africa. And to top it off, the biggest pig farm system in the US.
Send them lots of starchy – sugary snacks to make them ill, fat and lazy. Worked in the US.
Not a big deal though, other countries are far more dependent upon external farmland than China. Japan is a great example.
Northwest Resident on Mon, 3rd Mar 2014 7:24 pm
China is NOT feeding itself, at least, not on food that is grown and/or raised in China. The premise of this article is a big fat lie.
The big story worldwide is food, or lack thereof. Humans can live in peace and accept their fate as long as they have food, shelter and water. Take any of those three away, and humans have nothing to lose, which translates into desperate acts of survival. Wherever we riots and violent turmoil in the world today — and it is ongoing in a lot of places — chances are good that lack of food is at the very base of the problem. Or, to reduce it to the lowest common denominator — too many mouths to feed.
islander on Mon, 3rd Mar 2014 8:44 pm
China imports a huge amount of food, this is just Communist Party propaganda and shouldn’t even be posted on this site.
DC on Mon, 3rd Mar 2014 8:58 pm
At best, China has managed to temporarily stabilize its problem. The problem with its current strategy are many. Yes, maybe they are buying farmland all over the world, but that tactic can only work so long. The planets ‘supply’ of quality arable land is pretty well maxed now. And even the ‘good’ lands have a long list of problems of their own-imperial valley USA anyone? The biggest problem of course, is the very vulnerability of placing your food supply at the end of such long supply chains. I am sure it has occurred to the amerikans that in order to threaten China with famine, all it has to do is order its ‘al-qaeda affiliates’ in Africa, or Ukraine even lol!, to start an uprising. Even if the uS does not go out of its way to disrupt the networks China is trying to build, gov’ts could nationalize forign owned farmland in order to deal with their own population and food issues. China would have little recourse in such an instance but to take whatever paper currency they were offered in exchange and start looking anew.
And with all that on their plates, China continues to poison their own farmland in order to make i-craps and salad shooters for wall-mart consumers in nebraska. No matter what happens, we still on a course for mass famines in China, India, and it cant even be ruled out here in fatland(N. America) either. Making shytty food filled with starch, sugar and salt and chemically altered corn is all our corporations will allow us to eat now-and we have it ‘good’. Most people wont be able to deal with ‘bad’ once it starts to kick in. no matter where they happen to live.
Makati1 on Tue, 4th Mar 2014 1:29 am
Perhaps … China is storing it’s grain purchases? After all, the US used to do that before the banksters moved onto the farm and deeper into government. Wheat can be stored for thousands of years, and also any other grain that they may want to keep. Not saying that they are, but they do have a lot of dollars to burn … er …. spend quickly.
Either way, few countries will be able to grow all of the food they want to consume, including the US, who already imports 20% of what they eat and this year food imports will only increase. It will be rationed by price at first. Then by more drastic means eventually. Does starvation seem like a good way to die? Ask the millions of 3d worlders who die that way every year, while some countries have an obesity problem.
Preston Sturges on Tue, 4th Mar 2014 3:47 pm
This reads like one of those stories from The Great Leap Forward about 100 fold increases in crop production under Mao.