Who will feed China?

• Author: Brown, Lester R.
• Position: Chinese food consumption

It will not be in the devastation of poverty-stricken Somalia or Haiti, but in the booming economy of China that we will see the inevitable collision between expanding human demand for food and the limits of some of the earth's most basi natural systems.

In April of 1994, the Journal of Commerce reported that grain prices in China's 35 major cities had shot up by 41 percent during the first two months of the year. In March, driven by panic-buying and hoarding, the rise had continued unabated. In response, the government released 2.5 million tons of grain from stocks to check the runaway rise in prices. This action calmed food markets--at least temporarily.

What happened last spring may be a precursor to the much larger disruptions tha will occur as three extraordinary trends converge. China's population is growin by 14 million people a year. Incomes are climbing at a record rate, which means that even as the number of people increases, their consumption of meat is increasing even faster. And while the resulting surge in demand is occurring, the country's capacity to produce food is projected to shrink, due to the massive ongoing conversion of cropland to nonfarm uses.

In neighboring Japan, the soaring demand for grain driven by prosperity and the heavy loss of cropland to industrial development since mid-century have combine to push dependence on grain imports to 77 percent of total grain consumption in 1993. These same forces are now at work in China. It is one thing for a nation of 120 million people to turn to the world market for most of its grain, but if a nation of 1.2 billion moves in this direction, it could quickly overwhelm the export capacity of the United States and other exporting countries, driving foo prices upward everywhere.

Rather suddenly, China is starting to lose the capacity to feed itself. The decline comes on the heels of four decades of impressive progress, particularly since the agricultural reforms of 1978, which transferred land from production teams to individual families. The energies unleashed by these reforms boosted the country's grain production by half, from 200 million tons in 1977 to more than 300 million tons in 1984. That put China ahead of the United States as the world's leading grain producer, and boosted annual output from the subsistence level of roughly 200 kilograms per person to nearly 300 kilograms.

Though growth in output has slowed since the mid-1980s, that gain was enough to effectively eliminate the traditional threat of famine. The issue now facing Beijing is not starvation, but the prospect of a gap between the market demand for food and its production--a gap that will dwarf anything the world has ever seen.

This potential grain deficit is raising one of the most difficult questions world leaders have ever had to face: who will feed China? The only country to measure its population in billions rather than millions is moving into uncharte territory on the food front, and in an integrated world economy it will--one wa or another--take the rest of the world with it.

While China's food production capacity is eroding, its demand is surging. The country is projected to add 490 million people over the four-decade span betwee 1990 and 2030, swelling its population to 1.6 billion--the equivalent of adding another Beijing every year for the next 40 years. Because its population is so large, even a slow rate of growth means huge absolute increases. Yet, those increases are only the beginning of the story.

MOVING UP THE FOOD CHAIN

Even as population expands, incomes are rising at an unprecedented rate. Economic growth of 13 percent in 1992 and again in 1993, plus an estimated growth of 10 percent in 1994, adds up to a phenomenal 40 percent expansion of the Chinese economy in three years. Never before have incomes of so many people risen so rapidly.

PER CAPITA GRAIN USE AND CONSUMPTION OF LIVESTOCK PRODUCTS IN THE UNITED STATES AND CHINA, 1990 COUNTRY GRAIN USE LIVESTOCK PRODUCT CONSUMPTION Beef Pork Poultry Milk(1) Eggs (kilograms) United States 800 42 28 44 271 16 China 300 1 21 3 4 7 1 Total consumption, including that used to produce cheese, yogurt, and ice cream. Source: U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), FAO Production Yearbook 1990 (Rome: 1991). As their incomes rise, one of the first things that low-income people do with their money is to diversify their diets, shifting from a monotonous fare in which a starchy staple such as rice supplies 70 percent or more of the calories to more meat, milk, and eggs. Last year, when asked by a New York Times reporte if living conditions were improving, a Chinese villager responded, "Overall, life has gotten much better. My family eats meat maybe four or five times a wee now. Ten years ago, we never had meat."

Much of China is barren desert, and in a country where there is no vast grazing land like that of the U.S. Great Plains, the rising demand for livestock products translates directly into demand for additional grain. When the economi reforms were launched in 1978, only 7 percent of the grain was being used for animal feed, but by 1990 that share had risen to some 20 percent, most of it used to produce pork. Now, demand for beef and poultry is also climbing. More meat means more grain--2 kilograms of additional grain for each kilogram of poultry, 4 for pork, and 7 for each kilogram of beef added in the feedlot. As the Chinese get richer, they will eat more meat, milk, and eggs. But if the supply of grain does not expand apace with their appetites, food prices will soar.

To put this in perspective, consider the United States, where the use of grain to produce meat has reached its historic zenith. The United States is a leader in red meat consumption. The cowboy has been its mythic figure, the steak or hamburger its classic meal. Yet, the Chinese have eclipsed Americans in total red meat consumption almost entirely on the strength of their appetite for pork At 21 kilograms per person in 1990, China's consumption of pork is approaching the 28 kilograms (62 pounds) consumed by the average American. Chinese consumption of beef, poultry, and milk is still minuscule compared to that of Americans. So, what happens if the Chinese start closing the gap in these other livestock products as they have with pork?

In fact, that is beginning to happen. Poultry was once a rare luxury in China, and the average person still eats only one-tenth as much as an American, but th appetite for chicken is growing fast. Ironically, that change has been spurred by a government policy that encourages production of chickens because they convert grain into meat more efficiently than pigs or cattle do. During the 1990s, poultry consumption has expanded from its small...