Can America feed China?

• Author: Brown, Lester R.
• Position: Eye On Ecology

AFTER A REMARKABLE EXPANSION of grain output from 90,000,000 tons in 1950 to 392,000,000 tons in 1998, China's grain harvest has fallen in four of the last five years, skidding to 322,000,000 tons in 2003. This drop exceeds the total grain harvest of Canada. Production of each of the three grains that dominate China's agriculture--wheat, rice, and corn--has plummeted, but wheat, grown mostly in the water-short north, has dipped the most. With wheat stocks diminishing and domestic prices climbing, Chinese wheat buying delegations have visited several grain-exporting countries. Recent purchases of some 5,000,000 tons in Australia, Canada, and the U.S. have set world wheat prices on an upward trend.

Yet, these price rises may be only the early tremors before the real quake. China's harvest shortfalls of recent years have been covered by drawing down its once massive stocks of grain, but these soon will be gone, forcing it to cover the entire shortfall with imports. China's wheat harvest fell short of consumption in 2003 by 18,000,000 tons. After wheat stocks have vanished within the next year or so, this entire shortfall will have to be bolstered by imports. In some ways, China's rice deficit is even more serious. Trying to cover its rice shortfall of 20,000,000 tons in a world where annual rice exports total a mere 26,000,000 tons could create economic chaos. With a corn shortfall of 15,000,000 tons and stocks already largely depleted, it soon will have to import corn as well

The handwriting on the wall is clear. While grain production is dropping, demand is climbing, driven by the addition of 11,000,000 people per year and by last rising incomes. As incomes increase. China's citizens are moving up the food chain, consuming more grain-fed livestock products such as pork, poultry, eggs, and, to a lesser degree, beef and milk. The fall in grain production hugely is due to a waning of the grain harvested area from 90,000,000 hectares in 1998 to 77,000,000 in 2003. Several trends are converging here, including the loss of irrigation water and grainland to desert expansion, conversion of cropland to nonfarm uses, shift of grainland to higher value crops, and a decline in double-cropping due to the loss of farm labor in the more prosperous coastal provinces.

Water tables are dipping throughout the northern half of the country. As aquifers are emptied and irrigation wells go dry, farmers either revert to low-yield dryland fanning or, in the more...