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This analysis of food security in China
had been carried out at the International Institute for Applied Systems
Analysis in the early and mid 1990s and published in 1999 on a
CD-ROM. It is now mainly of historical interest. At that time, in the
late 1980s and 1990s, parts of the academic community, particularly those
concerned with environmental questions, where publishing hysterical
warning cries that the world was facing food shortages - particularly in
China. Lester Brown had posted his (rhetoric) question: Can China feed
itself? and had answered it with the alarming conclusion that the country
would be unable to do so (Lester Brown: Who Will Feed China?: Wake-Up
Call for a Small Planet. 1995). A whole research community
was developing "doomsday scenarios" in which food shortages in China
would destabilize global grain markets, lead to spiking prices on the
global grain market and thus trigger widespread
famine in African countries that depend on food imports.
Much has happened in the meantime. China has
opened up its economy (and to some extend its society) and experienced
unprecedented development. Millions of Chinese peasants (some estimate
up to 160 million) have moved from their poverty-stricken villages in
central China to the booming coastal provinces and found
labor in the rapidly expanding manufacturing sectors. Contrary to
popular belief, the massive migration of farmers from rural to urban
areas had not triggered food deficits in China. To the contrary -
China's food supply is now more stable and diversified than in a long
time. What we have predicted in this study has actually happened: China
now imports large amounts of feed-grain (particularly soybean)
from Brazil, saving valuable domestic cropland for higher-value crops,
such as fruits and vegetables. Even with cropland "wasted" for
industrial and infrastructure developments China has not experienced
food shortages. It can afford to buy food on international markets, because it had
earned huge amounts of foreign currency by becoming the world's
prime manufacturing site and a leading exporter of industrial goods.
The times of the "Great Leap Forward" famine, when
dozens of millions of peasants perished in China, are now almost
forgotten. However, they should be a reminder that no population is more
vulnerable to the fanatism of their leaders or the variability of
weather conditions than uninformed and impoverished peasants who depend
for sustenance almost exclusively on their own small-scale food
production. Family farming may be the romantic ideal of some (urban)
academics, who have never seen the hardships of rural life. But it is
not a viable development model - not for China and not for Africa! Those
who promote small-scale, supposedly sustainable, agriculture for Africa or Asia
should try it out for themselves. They will quickly find out that they
have no chance against large-scale, industrialized production systems,
which can provide food and other agricultural products at a fraction of the costs due to economics of
scale. Those, who are interested in sustainable agriculture should
better spend their time in finding out how large-scale food
production can be made more energy efficient and environmentally benign.
Sustainability also means economic sustainability. Promoting an outdated rural development
model is a recipe for economic disaster
and social crisis - as we have seen in many parts of Africa (and some
parts of Latin America).
I have re-published this study on food security in China because it
offered an optimistic outlook more than 10 years ago (based on
information and data from up to 15 years ago) and proved
those wrong, who had alerted the international community with
outrageous doomsday projections of a looming food crisis. Today, we have
again discussion about (global) food shortages and dire predictions
linked to energy and water scarcity. I suspect that a more detailed study would
reveal again that many of these arguments are not based on facts, but
derived from a faulty
development ideology. Science and technology are the
ultimate driving forces of development - and that is true not only for
the urban sector, but also for the rural world. Promoting a
pre-industrial development ideal with self-sufficient, small-scale family farming at its
core, will not solve the development problems in large parts of Africa
and it will not increase global food security.
Gerhard K. Heilig, New Rochelle, NY in February 2011 |
