http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,,1824582,00.html?gusrc=rss

After 26 years of receiving food aid, China has emerged as the world's third largest food donor, according to a report released today by the UN's World Food Programme (WFP).

China donated 577,000 tonnes of food to more than a dozen countries around the world in 2005, with the great majority sent across the border by rail to North Korea, which relies on food aid to feed its poverty-stricken rural population.

The report's findings, which track all international food donations, underline China's growing economic and political clout in Asia, and show how far the country has come since the great famines of the late 1950s killed an estimated 30 million peasants.

For the first time since 1979, China will not receive any food aid itself from the WFP this year, under an agreement reached five years ago to phase out donations to the world's most populous nation.

China's food aid soared by 260% compared to 2004, accounting for more than half of the rise in overall food aid donations in 2005.

For China's leaders, many of whom grew up during the periodic food shortages of the Mao years, ensuring food self-sufficiency is regarded as a basic duty of government. China became self-sufficient in food production in the mid-1990s, and last year the country's grain output grew to 484m tonnes.

Unicef estimates that 8% of Chinese children under the age of five remain moderately underweight. But a greater concern in China's prosperous coastal cities is obesity among the over-pampered "little emperors."

Courtesy of Tom Miller, the Guardian