China is having trouble feeding its 1.35 billion people. As the nation underwent industrialization and urbanization in recent years, its productive farmlands have dwindled, reducing domestic supply, while rising incomes have boosted demand. As a result, China has had to import an unprecedented amount of food, and may begin to drive up global food prices.
With the Chinese importing more and more food, global food prices have risen sharply enough that they may threaten to take food off of the tables of the rest of the world.
It’s never been easy to feed the world’s largest population. The late 1950s and early 1960s saw policy-induced famine during the Great Leap Forward that led to tens of millions of deaths. But the current administration in China has the daunting task of keeping 20 percent of the global population fed with just 8 percent of the world’s arable land and only about 30 percent of the world’s per capita availability of fresh water, reported the Foreign Policy on Tuesday.
Ironically, the scarcity is worsening as China’s GDP grows and average incomes rise. People are not only demanding more food, but more varieties of food as well – which in China’s case, means meat.
Total annual meat consumption in China reached 80 million tons in 2012, which is about 115 pounds per person, double that of the United States. China’s middle class is projected to grow to 40 percent of China’s population by 2020, from the current 10 percent, and with that increase, meat consumption is sure to shoot up as well – likely hundreds of millions more regular meat consumers in mainland China in the coming decade.
While China has managed just fine for pork thus far, it is far from self-sufficient in grains. Beijing has a grain security policy in place, which practically insists on grain production self-sufficiency until 2020, in spite of its scarce resource base, and prevents imported grains from playing the same role as domestically produced counterparts. In the last few years, the government has managed to almost achieve this goal in rice, wheat and other staple grains that are essential to the Chinese diet, but the rapid growth of China’s food consumption is threatening that achievement.
Along with growing demand, domestic supply has dwindled. Cities have sprung up all over China in the past two decades, taking land away from agricultural use. China’s flourishing appetite has a global impact – what the Chinese demand, the rest of the world ends up paying more for it, according to Foreign Policy.
Take rice, for example, of which the Chinese imported 2.6 million tons in 2012. The nation has previously been a net exporter of rice for the last half-century, and its sudden switch has sent global rice prices to a near all-time high. With recent news of cadmium-tainted rice, even more Chinese are anxious to source the staple grain from Hong Kong and elsewhere, further eroding China’s self-sufficiency and exerting more pressure on the global market.
Running out of land at home, China is starting to look abroad for food production. Last month, a Chinese firm reached an agreement to develop as much as three million hectares of farmland in Ukraine. Similar projects have been made abroad by state-owned corporations, in accordance with the government’s directive to encourage companies to farm overseas.
China's Food Challenge: Demand Rises As The Nation Becomes Wealthier, While Domestic Supply Dwindles
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