From Bloomberg, May 22:
China’s 1.4 billion people are building up an
appetite that is changing the way the world grows and sells food. The
Chinese diet is becoming more like that of the average American, forcing
companies to scour the planet for everything from bacon to bananas.
But China’s efforts to buy or lease
agricultural land in developing nations show that building farms and
ranches abroad won’t be enough. Ballooning populations in Asia, Africa
and South America will add another 2 billion people within a generation
and they too will need more food.
That leaves China with a stark ultimatum: If it is
to have enough affordable food for its population in the second half of
this century, it will need to make sure the world grows food for 9
billion people.
Its answer is technology.
China’s agriculture industry, from the
tiny rice plots tended by 70-year-old grandfathers to the giant
companies that are beginning to challenge global players like Nestle SA
and Danone SA, is undergoing a revolution that may be every bit as
influential as the industrial transformation that rewrote global trade.
The change started four decades ago when
the country began to recast its systems of production and private
enterprise. Those reforms precipitated an economic boom, driven by
factories, investment and exports, but the changes down on the farm were
just as dramatic.
Land reforms lifted production of grains
like rice and wheat, and millions joined a newly wealthy middle class
that ate more vegetables and pork and wanted rare luxuries like beef and
milk.
When Du Chunmei was a little girl, pork was a
precious gift only for the elders of her village in Sichuan during the
Lunar New Year holiday. The family pig would be slaughtered, and
relatives and neighbors would pack their house for a feast.
“Meat used to be such a rarity,” said Du,
now 47 and an employee of state oil company PetroChina Co. whose family
celebrated the holiday this year at a restaurant. “Now it’s so common we
try to cut back to stay healthy.”
But the breakneck pace of the country’s
development brought some nasty side effects. Tracts of prime land were
swallowed by factories. Fields were polluted by waste, or by farmers
soaking the soil in chemicals. The country became a byword for tainted
food, from mercury-laced rice to melamine-infused milk powder.
So how can China produce enough safe food for its growing population if they all start eating like Americans?
The simple answer is it can’t.
It takes about 1 acre (half a hectare) to
feed the average U.S. consumer. China only has about 0.2 acres of arable
land per citizen, including fields degraded by pollution.
So China’s Communist government has
increasingly shifted its focus to reforming agriculture, and its
approach divides into four parts: market controls; improving farm
efficiency; curbing land loss; and imports.
In each case, technology is the key to balancing
the food equation. The nation is spending billions on water systems,
seeds, robots and data science to roll back some of the ravages of
industry and develop sustainable, high-yield farms.
It needs to succeed quickly, because China’s chief tool during the past decade for boosting domestic production is backfiring.
China has a goal of being self-sufficient
in staple foods like rice, corn and wheat. To ensure farmers grew those
crops, it paid a minimum price for the grains and then stored the excess
in government silos.
Farmers responded, saturating their small
plots with fertilizers and pesticides to reap bumper crops that filled
government reserves to bursting....
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