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Dick Tinsley's comments earlier today on high-value crops prompted me to
mention an article titled "China Races to Reverse Its Falling Production
of Grain" in yesterday's NEW YORK TIMES (p. 6), which in turn raises
some issues that take us back to S&T.
The basic problem in China is that the rapid urbanization process has
led to a significant loss of farmland. Since 2002, China has lost more
than 13,500 square miles, and last year alone more than 2%, of its
farmland. In addition, farmers have converted fields to "more lucrative
cash crops'' ("the farming community of Shouguang is covered with
thousands of hump-shaped greenhouses stretching to the horizon") as well
as to grazing for livestock. The result of these and other forces is a
drop in rice, corn, and wheat production from a record 486 million tons
in 1998 to 401 million tons in in 2008, a decline of 18%. Last year it
consumed 40 million tons of grain than it produced. Consequently the
government is increasing its imports and tapping into grain reserves.
This has "left government leaders worried about China's ability to feed
itself and prompted a campaign to curb land losses and increase grain
output." "In an era of global trade, many economists find the
political fixation on grain outdated. But it underscores the historic
resonance of food security in China..." "For years, Chinese policy has
had a goal of 95% self-sufficiency for rice, grain and corn." Prime
Minister Wen Jiabao said "Grain security concerns the nation's
livelihood and social stability." Hence the government is establishing
incentives for farmers to increase production and is "handing out
awards for record yields." A top government researcher announced a new
super hybrid strain of rice to increase production."
All of this illustrates, in a possibly extreme way, some of the dilemmas
that face national policy makers. On one hand, the China situation
would seem to represent progress to many. Production is being converted
to higher-value commodities and the country certainly has plenty of
foreign exchange which it can use to buy foodgrain imports (though some
in the past have wondered about the adequacy of world supplies for
massive imports in the longer run), for which it may not, in some cases,
have a comparative advantage in production. But for a massive country
such as China, the question of somne degree of domestic food grain
security is not trivial. The more general need, given China's
relatively limited (for its population) and shrinking supply of arable
land, is to continue to increase productivity across the board. This
requires, among other things, further research. But even with
biotechnology, there is only so much that research can accomplish.
Everything, in nature, is connected with everything else, and it can be
hard to make gains on one end without loosing somewhere else. There are
limits, which are nicely spelled out in a recent article by R. Ford
Denison, et al. titled "Darwinian Agriculture; When Can Humans Find
Solutions Beyond the Reach of Natural Selection?" in the QUARTERLY
REVIEW OF BIOLOGY, June 2003. And we cannot take current yield levels
for granted: an increasing amount of maintenance research will be needed
to hold on to current levels, let alone productivity-increasing research
to meet the needs of an expanding, wealthier, and increasingly
urbanized population.
In Lewis Carrol's THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, the Red Queen famously told
Alice that "Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to
keep in the same place." But she also said that "If you want to get
somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that." That is
the challenge for S&T and for agricultural policy more generally in the
developing nations, especially down the road. It requires a much larger
and longer-term view, and that is harder to come by in a political
setting. China may be recognizing it. So may others in time.
Please visit dfid-agriculture-consultation.nri.org.