Yu Xiaohua: China’s Food Security Problems

Release time:2018-04-23Author: Yu Xiaohua

Food security has always been the core of China's agricultural policy. Under such policy targets, increasing grain production has always been the main goal of China's agricultural policy. However, such a policy system is now facing an unprecedented challenge.Along with the rise of domestic grain production, grain imports have been increasing year after year. The implementation of minimum grain price protection policy caused the expensive domestic grain purchased by the state and became inventory, while the low-cost international grain import volume continued to refresh high. This has brought huge financial burden and made China's agriculture lose its international competitiveness. At the same time, due to the shortage of arable land resources, a large amount of chemical fertilizers and pesticides need to be applied, and intensive farming methods are adopted. It leads to the pollution of soil, water, air and other resources, as well as the degradation of soil fertility.In the face of the excess supply, our policy should be transformed from "ensuring production yield" to "ensuring production capacity". Thus, China's food security can be guaranteed in the long term. At any time when the supply is insufficient, the production capacity can be quickly started to meet people's food demand, instead of making full use of these capacity now and realizing it directly into yield.