This year, China will mark the 30th anniversary of the start of its reform. Taking a stock of the reform's experience is particularly important at a time of worldwide alarm of inflation, driven by industrial materials as well as farm products.
When Ban Ki-moon, United Nations secretary-general, called for the world to increase its food production by 50 percent between now and 2030 at the world food summit in Rome in early June, he might not have known which country had actually managed to raise its farm output by as much. China did that, if we compare its 2007 grain harvest with its record in 1978, the first year of the reform.
Back then, under the collective farming system, China was able to produce less than 305 million tons of grain for a whole year. With around 1 billion population, the per capita grain supply was only 300 kilograms.
Whereas in 2007, when the nation's yearly grain production exceeded 500 millions, or over 60 percent more than in 1978, its population was under 1.4 billion.
So China's per capita grain supply enlarged to more than 350 kilograms when its human grain consumption, at least as official statistics can show in the cities, had seen a decline of 40 percent from 1990 to now - from around 130 kilograms to 75 kilograms.
Of course, there has not been much of a surplus - as meat and milk supplies must pose a larger grain demand (in animal feed). But the fact is that from 1978 to 2007, in less than 30 years, China did raise its grain production by 60 percent.
Much of the success should be attributed to the dismantling of the rigid, and often inefficient, system of management, and a return to individually managed farms.
The government also deserves credit for upholding the individual farm system whatever new challenges it has faced. Managing farmers is a delicate art. Luckily, the government has so far shown no tendency to replace it with a larger system. There has been no PetroChina's equivalent in agriculture, nor sovereign funds to control the best resources. The role of the State, as it has been since the ancient time, is just to maintain a good amount of national reserves - in case of natural disasters and market fluctuations.
This may also be part of the explanation why Chinese agriculture can continue to grow after its accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), the world's free trade regime, and why the nation can depend its domestic suppliers for 95 percent of its basic grain items - despite its concession to drastically slash its tariffs on agricultural imports.
As Zeng Liying, an official from the State Administration of Grain (SAOG), recently assured the press, it has enough grain reserves to keep food prices stable, by and large.
But what SAOG can offer now is a short-term assurance - although good enough to comfort Chinese consumers from this year to the next. In the long run, however, China still has to create for itself a more solid insurance. Being able to raise farm output more than 50 percent in the past 30 years does not guarantee a repeat of the same performance in another 30 years in the future.
Apart from consistent government policies, China's insurance can most likely be from new farm technologies, and their application in key grain producing areas, especially the northeastern provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning.
The three provinces contributed more than 16 percent of China's total grain output in 2007.
They have great potentials, too, and have been able to expand more than 140,000 hectares in grain acreage in 2008.
For years, agricultural technologies have been spreading in rural China through specialized services and farm operators' associations, with the government providing certain supplies and price incentives. Whether such a model can help promote not just one or two new methods but endless new technological innovations still remains a question to be answered.
E-mail: younuo@chinadaily.com.cn
(China Daily 07/07/2008 page4)
