Chinese grain harvest rises for the eighth consecutive year

BEIJING - China achieved another bumper agricultural harvest this year, the eighth consecutive year of growth for grain output and a record for food production, said the National Bureau of Statistics in a statement released on Friday.

Agricultural experts said the bumper harvest will help ease the country's food price hikes, facilitating the government's efforts to combat the stubbornly high inflation rate.

But the experts also said that China's robust demand means the increased grain production is unlikely to check the country's growing imports, particularly for corn.

Bumper yields this year saw food output rising to a record 571 million tons, registering a 4.5 percent increase year-on-year. The production volume has already reached the government's grain output target for 2020, the bureau said.

Yields of the three major crops - rice, wheat and corn - stood at 510 million tons. Rice output increased by 2.6 percent year-on-year to 200 million tons, wheat grew by 2.4 percent year-on-year to 118 million tons, while corn jumped by 8.2 percent from last year to 192 million tons, according to official data.

Increased corn yields reflected an improvement in the country's grain-production structure, the statistics bureau said.

"The increased food production will help stabilize the prices of agricultural commodities and ease the government's effort to contain the inflation rate next year," said Hu Bingchuan, a researcher at the Rural Development Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.