Rice Bowls and Dust Bowls: Africa, Not China, Faces a Food Crisis

Most astonishing is Brown’s projection that China will suffer a 20 percent decline in grain production between 1990 and 2030. Again, he is badly out of step with mainstream expectations. The U.S. Department of Agriculture projects annual growth of about one percent in China’s grain output in the years ahead. The International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington forecasts that Chinese wheat, corn, and rice production will increase by 90 percent, 80 percent, and 54 percent, respectively, by the year 2020. Nikos Alexandratos, a specialist at FAO, has estimated China’s production of cereals -- wheat, corn, and rice -- could rise 68 percent between 1990 and 2030, even if the area sown with cereal crops were to decline 12 percent.

Brown justifies his extraordinary pessimism about China by predicting a massive loss of land now used for growing grain -- roughly half by 2030 -- through degradation or conversion to other uses. He argues that better crop yields will not be enough to offset the loss. This is misleading because switching from grain to high-value crops, such as vegetables, should be viewed as a gain for Chinese farmers, not a loss, and it is unjustified because it is based on an imperfect analogy to the experiences of countries such as Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. They converted land away from farming, including grain production, as their economies developed, but did so because they had fewer options for growth in agricultural production than China has today.

Brown’s forecast of China’s future crop yields is derived in part from Chinese government reports, which suggest current rice yields are already approaching Japan’s output of roughly five tons per hectare -- a high level that seems to leave little room for improvement. This is mistaken on two counts. The crop yields officially reported by the Chinese government are indeed high, yet they are known to be inflated to offset chronic underreporting of cropland area by farmers seeking to escape property taxes. Vaclav Smil, a professor at the University of Manitoba, estimates that actual yields for most crops in China are 15 to 20 percent lower than official figures, and for some crops nearly a third lower, which would put Chinese yields well below the Japanese level. Furthermore, the Japanese level of five tons per hectare is not the current limit. Since 1985 rice yields in the United States have exceeded six tons per hectare, South Korea’s yields have approached seven tons per hectare, and Australian yields now exceed eight tons per hectare. Assuming investment in research, yield potentials will, in any case, continue to rise through the year 2030. In 1994, at roughly the same time Brown was first making his argument, the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines announced that it had developed a new strain of rice with a yield as much as 25 percent greater than existing varieties.

IS TRADE BAD?

Who Will Feed China? also raises issues of interpretation. When countries such as China, Japan, Taiwan, or South Korea turn to the world market for grain imports, the move should not be taken as evidence of a faltering agricultural sector or an inability to feed themselves. Their steadily increasing grain imports are affordable because they have positive trade balances and balance-of-payments accounts. Grain imports are also a proven path to improved domestic nutrition and food security and permit a wiser use of environmental resources.

Grain imports spur economic growth in East Asia by allowing importers to capitalize on their comparative advantage in economic activities other than grain production. Japan would be a poorer country today if the feed grain it needs to produce domestic poultry, pork, and beef supplies had to be grown domestically, where land is scarce and expensive, rather than purchased at low cost from countries such as the United States, Canada, and Argentina, where land is far more abundant. China is wise to pursue similar gains from trade.

Grain imports make economic and environmental sense for China because its rural water resources and croplands are already under strain. From an environmental perspective, producing more feed grain on the flat, well-watered, naturally fertile, clear terrain of Illinois or Iowa makes more sense than plowing up more sloping, arid, infertile, and forested lands in rural China. Only by turning to the world market for grain will China save its depleted ground water from exhaustion and its scarce surface-level water resources from costly and environmentally unsustainable diversion.

Reliance on commercial grain imports is also a sound food and nutrition policy for China. Historically, threats to nutrition in China have come not from dependence on markets but from the actions of government officials who were unwilling to trust markets. In 1959-60 during the disastrous Great Leap Forward, when China was obsessed with self-sufficiency, the mismanagement of government grain procurement led to the deaths of an estimated 30 million Chinese peasants. The International Food Policy Research Institute has concluded that if China is willing to rely more on grain imports, the number of malnourished children nationwide could be reduced by 42 percent between 1990 and 2020 -- potentially the single largest reduction in malnutrition, in both absolute and relative terms, in any country in the world.

AFRICA, THE TRUE CHALLENGE