Night view of Shanghai from the top of the Jin Mao tower. Photo courtesy of Flickr.com/Molas

Introduction

At times, one is astonished by how little appreciation there is for the concept of food security in the affluent world. In the midst of plenty, there is a tendency to forget what hunger means and how it afflicts millions of impoverished people in many parts of the world. In the historical famine of 1984-1985 in Ethiopia, also called the Great Famine, about one million people died of starvation and many of those deaths could have been prevented. The Great Famine was the worst of its kind in Ethiopian history. It also left a scar on world history. The rest of the world was criticized for its apathy in not providing sufficient aid in time. Ever since, the issues of hunger, poverty, and malnutrition have stayed on top of the global agenda.

Food Security in the Pre-Reform Era

How has China made it possible to feed its enormous population and ensure continued availability, stability, and access to daily food? The Chinese say that “food is heaven.” Agriculture has over the centuries been China’s sole, limitless industry. Many rituals are woven around harvest, invoking the divine for a bumper crop. Food security continues to occupy center stage in the national socio-economic planning, as the single most delicate issue to Chinese policy makers. It is also extremely sensitive, because any significant changes in China’s agricultural production directly impacts the rest of the world, which remains watchful of China and closely monitors its ability to grow enough food for its population.

To better appreciate China’s miraculous achievements in the agriculture sector, it is interesting to look at it in the backdrop of pre-reform agricultural policy that led to serious food crisis in the 1950s and 1960s. Hunger and famine haunt the Chinese people, as the country has been afflicted with recurrent famines in its history. The “Great Leap Forward” of 1958-60 is regarded as one of the most tragic man-made disasters, resulting in the death of approximately 23 to 30 million lives. Following this spectacle of human suffering, another dark chapter in Chinese history unfolded. Mao Ze Dong’s decade long Cultural Revolution (1966-76) led to widespread social, economic and political upheaval of enormous proportions which brought the Chinese society to the brink of civil war. The agriculture sector, like the rest of the economy, was thrown into a crisis, unable to keep up with the growing population. Of 800 million farmers, 250 million were considered absolutely poor. The nation could not achieve self-sufficiency in grain and required massive imports to stave off starvation.

Poor agricultural policy and inefficient agricultural collectives with an unfair pattern of holding resources greatly contributed to low productivity and production. Agriculture stagnated for two decades (1957-78) and due to persistent shortages, rationing had to be continued.

1978 Agricultural Reforms - an Era of Rural Prosperity

Through two decades of shortages, rationing, and starvation that food security became a precursor of market-oriented reforms. The turning point came in 1978, when Deng Xiaoping initiated economic reforms, which opened China’s economy to the outside world. It is estimated that more than 100 million people suffered from recurrent food shortages resulting in severe stunting, leading to diminished capacity for work and higher incidence of morbidity. Deng Xiaoping’s pragmatic reforms put China on the fast track of prosperity unrivaled in its modern history. Agriculture became the engine of growth. It lifted the nation out of chronic food shortages and widespread malnutrition.

Deng Xiaoping has defined for himself a place in history, being the engineer of 1980s economic reforms that provided an environment in which Chinese could maximize their incomes and freely make money, a previously sacrosanct endeavor. The miracle of the early 1980s in agriculture was the product of far-reaching changes in socio-economic policy brought about by well-conceived re-distribution of country’s farming land, best known as Household Responsibility System (HRS), which revised thirty years of vested interests in a mere five years. After the beginning of land re-distribution, although land still belonged to the State but with peasants free to plant crops and to breed animals as they wished, China had already attained average per capita food availability of 2,700 kcal/day. The HRS unleashed the untapped potential of the peasantry and offered incentives to produce more. An individual household would pay a fixed amount to the government and keep the rest for its own consumption and still bring the surplus to the market. Bumper harvests of oil crops such as rapeseed, peanuts, soybeans, and sunflower led to dramatic increase in incomes and visible improvement in quality of lives of rural populace.

The abundance of production, led to China’s position as both the world’s largest producer of meat, pork, and aquatic products as well as a primary consumer. China doubled its meat output and quadrupled its aquaculture production in a decade.

The highest grain harvest in post-reform era was recorded in 1984 and the following year, the country actually became a net exporter of food. Although all food rationing was eventually abolished, malnutrition persisted in the remote areas with poor infrastructure and harsh climate. But, it could be easily argued that such inequities must be expected in any country of that size and at that stage of development. According to a Harvard Medical School study, even in the United States, hunger, defined as a chronic shortage of nutrients needed for growth and good health, affected about 12 million children and eight million adults during the late 1980s.

No doubt, China’s efforts in fighting hunger and malnutrition have been spectacular. Underweight prevalence in children under five was reduced by more than half from 19 percent in 1990 to just less than seven percent in 2005. The under–five mortality rate also sharply dropped from 49 per 1000 live births in 1990 to 31 in 2004. The country reduced the percentage of its population classified as hungry by a third in a single decade.

China has significantly improved the availability of and access to food through a combination of a sound agricultural policy that has led to a gradual liberalization of the sector, the development of rural infrastructure, and investment in research and development in agriculture. In this liberalized set-up, efficiency rather than only equity was the key. The excellent infrastructure developed in the 1990s played a key role in improving food security as a whole, since it allowed for the timely movement of commodities between provinces and between food surplus and food deficit areas. The fact that China has instituted research centers in virtually every county to work on development of high yielding varieties of crops has also been another major contributing factor in increasing food production. The reforms led to huge gains for agriculture opening up a new era of prosperity for the Chinese people unknown in recent times.