China's voracious appetite goes beyond industrial commodities. With the world's largest population, food insecurity is a persistent problem in China, one that appears to be getting worse in 2022.
In the face of rising food-security challenges, realising just a 1 per cent rise in this summer’s wheat harvest from last year’s record-high level came at a massive cost to the central government, local governments and hundreds of millions of farmers, according to Thursday’s commentary in the official Economic Daily newspaper.
“This also shows that it is becoming more and more difficult for our country to increase grain output,” the piece warned while also saying that “reducing grain loss and waste is equivalent to increasing grain production”.
In China, as everywhere else, economic crisis has a disturbing tendency to become a food insecurity crisis as well. Prosperity is not just a full purse, but a full belly as well.
In the SCMP article you linked Du Ying, former deputy head of the National Development and Reform Commission, "warned against directly buying or leasing land overseas to grow grain because it would provoke “strong political and social sensitivities.”
What to make of how much farmland China has been buying in the U.S.? Like real estate, foreign investors/corporations face shockingly few obstacles. Sen. Cotton has written a bill that might stop more foreign acquisitions of farmland. The Chinese clearly understand that there are "sensitivities" that go along with selling out a nation's most essential resources — land for growing food — but the U.S. political climate is so toxic commonsense is far from common ground.
China's Economy Is Shrinking. Will Its Harvests Do Likewise?
In the SCMP article you linked Du Ying, former deputy head of the National Development and Reform Commission, "warned against directly buying or leasing land overseas to grow grain because it would provoke “strong political and social sensitivities.”
What to make of how much farmland China has been buying in the U.S.? Like real estate, foreign investors/corporations face shockingly few obstacles. Sen. Cotton has written a bill that might stop more foreign acquisitions of farmland. The Chinese clearly understand that there are "sensitivities" that go along with selling out a nation's most essential resources — land for growing food — but the U.S. political climate is so toxic commonsense is far from common ground.