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Feeding the Masses? China Shows How It's Done
For more than 200 years now, a furious debate has been raging in academic circles about the world's ability to feed itself.
Ever since 18th century British economist Thomas Malthus raised the spectre of a rapidly growing population ultimately descending into mass starvation, China has looked as though it might put the controversial theory to the test.
Home to a fifth of the planet's population, China is not a particularly fertile land. But the country has now shown that it can feed its 1.3 billion people, even with some to spare.
Thanks largely to the modernisation of the rural economy and stringent demographic controls, China is sitting on huge stocks of grain. It can afford the occasional harvest disappointment and is a significant exporter of corn.
Last year, China's farmers reaped 462.5 million tonnes of grains, down nine percent year-on-year, but officials and analysts say there is no cause for panic.
"The output fall is not as scary as it sounds because we had a series of bumper harvests before that," said Li Chenggui, a researcher of the rural development institute at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing.
"Current production levels are considered pretty healthy."
Huge grain silos with more than 200 million tonnes have reassured China that there will be no mass starvation.
"We have enough food to feed ourselves. What matters most is how we distribute it," Li said. "We have capped grain imports at five percent of consumption so as not to over rely on other countries for staples," he added.
NOT DOOMSDAY Down on the farm in rural China, far from the ivory towers, enough food is being produced to feed bustling population centres like Shanghai, and imports are still relatively modest.
"What Malthus predicted is not likely to happen in China in the short term, say the next 20 years," said N.T. Wang, senior research fellow of the East Asian Institute at Columbia University in New York.
"The USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) recently had a report which pointed to quite a big under-estimate of China's grain stocks previously. The new figures showed that China still has warehouses filled with grains," Wang said.
The USDA made a 250 percent upward revision in May of its estimates for China's grain stocks, raising them to 230.1 million tonnes at the end of the 2000/01 marketing year.
Of course, population growth poses a challenge, but agricultural advances, including the introduction of genetically modified (GM) crops, have so far managed to keep pace with the increasing number of mouths.
In fact, many Chinese are becoming more fussy about their diets, developing a taste for meat which will test crop technology further as more grain is required to feed livestock.
In China, the one-child policy has also helped to control the population. A census last year reported a population of 1.265 billion, rising 11.7 percent since the previous count 11 years ago, but the growth rate has fallen steeply.
GM EXPERIMENTS The "Green Revolution" of the 1960s -- which introduced new crop strains, fertilisers, pesticides and irrigation methods -- was touted by its backers as the saving grace of the world's growing population. Those who support GM crops say the same.
China has adopted some modern farming methods and it is still exploring advanced ways of raising crop yields of rice, its main staple food.
Researchers are coming up with better cross breeding methods and hope to introduce "super hybrid rice" in the next few years, which gives a yield of 12 tonnes a hectare compared to 5.4 tonnes a hectare for ordinary strains.
But China is still thinking twice about importing and growing transgenic products, although GM cotton is grown in some provinces. The authorities unveiled new restrictive GM food rules in early June.
"A lot of farm produce that we have today is undesirable for the environment...desertification will worsen and we have to rely more on fertilisers due to soil degradation," said Wang.
"We will have to rely on human ingenuity to contain these problems," he said.
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