China's food problem: the massive imports begin.

• Author: Brown, Lester R.

A year ago, the article "Who Will Feed China?" appeared in this magazine and precipitated a cascade of events - first in the international news media, then in the government of China - that may have important consequences for the world's long-term capacity to produce enough food.

The thesis of the article was that record economic growth in China would lead many of the country's 1.2 billion people to consume more pork, poultry, eggs, beef, and beer - in effect, moving them further up the food chain. Because it takes much more grain to produce a kilogram of animal protein than to get that protein by eating grain directly, this shift in diet pointed to a growing demand for grain production per person. Meanwhile, the population of China was growing by 14 million per year. The combined effect, we noted, would be a rapidly growing demand for food - at a time when the same industrialization that was increasing affluence and changing consumption patterns was also reducing the amount of cropland available to produce that food. In short, China would soon move from being a modest net exporter of grain to an importer whose demand would eventually overrun the capacity of exporting countries to supply it.

A followup "Note to Readers" in the January/February issue chronicled the remarkable speed with which this thesis elicited responses from the Chinese government. First, the Ministry of Agriculture held a press conference at which Deputy Minister Wan Baorui disputed our findings with the assertion that China would double its grain production by 2025, and would never need to import grain. But within a few weeks, the government had been forced to abandon this position.

Since then, the changes we forecasted have begun to take place with disturbing rapidity. By October, the Ministry of Statistics was announcing that grain prices had risen 60 percent from a year earlier. The government released grain from stocks and banned rice futures trading on the Shanghai Commodity Exchange. Speculators were driving futures prices upward, leading to panic among urban consumers.

After drawing down its own grain reserves, China was forced to turn to the outside world for imports. It became a huge economic sponge, soaking up not only wheat, rice, and corn, but also cooking oil, sugar, and other foodstuffs. Within one year, the country went from net exports of 8 million tons of grain (mostly corn) to net imports of 16 million tons of grain, mostly wheat. This...