This is a bit of a diatribe but the underlying truth of the situation can be seen in yesterday's "U.S. White Wheat Prices Hit 27-Year High".
From Newsweek, March 15:
Consider U.S. farmers happy. They are exporting record volumes of products to China. Shipments of soybeans, corn and pork are bringing smiles back to the American heartland.
Or, to put this another way, Beijing is effectively acknowledging it cannot feed the Chinese people.
China's leader, Xi Jinping, recently made such an admission. Last August, he announced what became known as the "clean your plate" campaign to end what he called a "shocking and distressing" waste of food. Just about everyone saw this effort, to get the Chinese people to eat less, as a warning of food shortages to come.
Chinese officials will not formally admit China is becoming increasingly dependent on foreign food—that would be political dynamite—but it is now apparent that the country needs to buy foodstuffs from abroad.
We start in 2019, which according to Beijing was a very good year on the food front. The official Xinhua News Agency, in a piece titled "China's Food Self-Sufficiency a Blessing To World," claimed in October that China was producing far more food than it needed. The country, Xinhua reported, contained 20 percent of the global population and produced a quarter of its food. Moreover, Beijing felt it was time to brag, noting China had been able to accomplish this feat with only 9 percent of the world's farmland and 6 percent of its freshwater.
Xinhua in 2019 was exaggerating, and that became clear in 2020, an especially difficult year for Chinese agriculture. Floods in the country's south, drought in the north, typhoons in the northeast and pest infestations in the southwest took their tolls. Disease continued to spread among animals across China.
Perhaps most damaging were the floods. Floods in the middle and lower Yangtze River basin—Hubei, Anhui, Jiangxi and Jiangsu provinces—from June hit rice-growing regions. Floods in Jilin and Heilongjiang in the fall affected the corn and Japonica rice crops. The corn belt in the northeast was devastated by typhoons.
Beginning in 2018 and continuing in 2020, African swine fever also ripped through pork-eating China. Paul Midler, the author of Poorly Made in China, makes the case in comments to Newsweek that Beijing in 2020 slaughtered a considerable portion of its pig population in an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19—not to stop African swine fever, as Chinese officials maintain. Whatever the reason, it is clear, Midler points out, that China lost much of its supply of this food staple during the global pandemic.
Whatever the reason, disease and culls claimed more than half the country's pigs from 2018 to last year.
China's agriculture is also afflicted by long-term trends. As the country develops, it loses farmland to factories, for instance.
Moreover, misguided policies are leading to severe water shortages. The Yangtze River, cradling 460 million people, is drying up, and more than 1,000 lakes along its 3,900 miles have disappeared. Its water level, according to a recent study, has fallen 0.8 inches every five years since the 1980s, but that sounds like an underestimation. Chinese officials siphon off the Yangtze's water with their massive South-to-North Water Diversion project. More than half of Beijing's water comes from that river. To protect the waterway, fishing has been banned for a decade.
Scarcity is not the only water problem. Up to 80 percent of China's water is polluted....
....MUCH MORE
