2020: How to eat well in a full-fledged China

 2020: How to eat well in a full-fledged China


In the new decade, how do Chinese policymakers view food security and international agricultural markets? Interpretation by Wang Chen.
Just by the end of 2019, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of China has set a new goal to ensure that 80 million mu of high-quality farmland will be added by 2020. Entering the second decade of the 21st century, food security remains one of the most important concerns of Chinese policy makers. The most comprehensive interpretation of this concern comes from China's Food Security, which was released a few months ago by the State Council Information Office, also known as the "white paper on food security" ("white paper"). In the 70 years since the founding of the People's Republic of China, New China has achieved a five-fold increase in grain output, doubled its per capita share, and achieved a basic balance between supply and demand. In 1996, China's first issue of "Food Security in China" responded to questions from the international community about "who will feed the Chinese". After a lapse of 23 years, when the White Paper on Food Security was released again, the goal of "feeding" citizens was basically achieved. The new "White Paper" summarizes China's food security status and development requirements in recent years, and puts the focus of China's food security on how to "eat better" in the next step.
Increasing production and high quality In 1994, the book "Who Will Feed China" by Lester Brown, an American scholar, caused the international community to worry about the global food crisis caused by China's food security problems. This kind of international public opinion has impacted China. China, which has only 7% of the world's cultivated land, has to feed more than one fifth of the world's population. China has begun to increase investment in food research projects and put forward more policy support for agricultural production. When the White Paper on Food Security was first released in 1996, China's grain output exceeded the 1 trillion kilograms (500 billion kilograms) mark for the first time. Zhang Zhaoxin, a researcher at the Rural Economic Research Center of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, said that China's food security is closely related to the world's food security pattern.   When China released the white paper again in 2019, the technical level of grain production had been greatly improved. According to Zhang Zhaoxin, China's grain industry has achieved good results in twelve consecutive years of income growth, and its output has been stable at 1.3 trillion kilograms (650 billion kilograms) for four consecutive years.
Zhang Zhaoxin said that for China, the issue of food security that needs to be faced is no longer simply a matter of "quantity." China needs to optimize the structure of grain varieties. He mentioned that increasing production but not high-quality food production has been a headache for food manufacturers. Taking wheat as an example, China's wheat production is actually surplus, but it still needs to import wheat from Canada, Australia, the United States and other countries.
Because our wheat varieties are mixed, the quality is difficult to unify. Manufacturers need to import high-quality special varieties if they want to produce high-quality flour of a certain type," Zhang Zhaoxin explained.
Luo Shiming, former president of South China Agricultural University, told China Dialogue that in recent years, the Chinese government has paid more and more attention to seed resources and increased investment in related research cultivation and systems. The "Seed Law of the People's Republic of China", which was formally implemented in December 2000, was revised in 2015, focusing on strengthening the protection of new varieties and the control of low-level counterfeit varieties.
Hidden Concerns Happened Year after Year
The white paper also states that in the medium and long term, China's grain production and demand will still maintain a "tight balance" trend. In recent years, China's population has stabilized and declined slightly, but the increasing demand for animal protein such as meat, eggs, and milk will increase the demand for feed. The white paper shows that this trend will continue for some time. Therefore, even if production increases year after year, China's grain is not surplus.

In the years after 1996, China's grain output fluctuated, and once showed negative growth in 1999. It did not resume growth until 2004, and did not return to the same level in 1998 until 2008. In addition to severe floods and natural disasters such as the El Niño phenomenon, the loss of cultivated land resources is considered to be an important cause of setbacks in food production. Due to factors such as urbanization and industrialization, China's cultivated land area has fallen for 11 consecutive years after 1997, forcing the Chinese government to propose a "1.8 billion mu red line" policy in 2006 to keep the cultivated land area stock. Under strong arable land protection policies, recent reports have claimed that China's arable land area has slightly recovered, and the 1.8 billion mu red line is temporarily intact.
But the protection of cultivated land is not only related to the stock, but the overall quality of cultivated land in China is also not ideal. Long-term over-cultivation, the use of fertilizers and pesticides, and single-planting methods have quickly tightened the environmental carrying capacity of the land, making it difficult to resist sudden natural disasters. Luo Shiming told China Dialogue that by the time of reform and opening up to 2005, farmland was seriously polluted by non-point source pollution and industrial pollution. The unreasonable farming methods have caused the government to pay attention to the long-term land loss. Since 2018, various ministries and commissions, including the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs and the Ministry of Land and Resources, have started a series of actions to ensure high standards of farmland. The Central Document No. 1 of 2019 also set the goal of "guaranteeing the completion of 800 million mu of high-standard farmland by 2020
Strict adherence to the cultivated land red line and improving  environment pollution to food security issues. degree.