Not going against the grain

Food security is not only about having enough food to feed all the people in China but also about ensuring that the food is safe

Even in a year of excellent harvest, China faces a food shortage. Although crop output has continuously increased in the past decade and the overall grain production in 2013 broke the 600-million-ton mark for the first time, it is no easy task for China to become self-sufficient in food grains.

With the rapid increase in population and consumption, the gap between demand for and supply of food has been widening. In 2012, China's self-sufficiency rate in food dropped below 90 percent, and net imports of three major crops (wheat, corn and rice) became a normal phenomenon.

Given the ever-increasing prices of grains, China's food security is now directly related to its national security and sovereignty. In fact, to illustrate the central government's understanding of food security, the Central Rural Work Conference said: "Chinese people's bowls should be tightly held in their own hands, and the bowls should be filled with Chinese crops. Only if a country is self-sufficient in food production can it ... (ensure) food security and further grasp the overall situation of social and economic development."

Food security refers not only to enough food to feed the entire population, but also to food safety. Food security focuses on the capacity to supply food in the short as well as long terms. Therefore, to ensure food security, the authorities have to have a better understanding of food safety and accord it the needed importance.

China faces great challenges in terms of food security. First, agriculture has become less profitable forcing many farmers to look to other fields to earn a living. Agriculture's economic scale is comparatively low in China. In 2012, for instance, the per capita net income of Chinese farmers was 7,917 yuan ($1,306), and only 26.6 percent of it came from agriculture. And in 2013, farmers earned 45.8 percent of their overall income from nonfarming activities. So farming-being a drain on the young workforce in rural areas-is carried out mostly by elderly people and women.

Second, rapid industrialization and urbanization have eaten into good agricultural land and caused soil pollution. Ministry of Land and Resources data show that from 1998 to 2011, China's agricultural land decreased by about 8 million hectares, with the total farmed area almost dropping to the "red line" of 120 million hectares. This is not a healthy development, especially as there are already reports on farmland being polluted by heavy metals.