New Delhi: Economists noticed an interesting trend from China signing back-to-back deals on grains and food products with various nations around the world. Most offers involve a massive food transaction. It has also signed agreements with its adversaries, reflecting that the country is likely going through a major food crisis.
Food inflation in China increased by 13.2% in July 2020. The prices of most of the foodstuffs consumed by a common Chinese every day have skyrocketed, from cereals to meat products. The National Statistics Office has revealed that the prices of the most consumed meat, pork, have increased by 86%.
China is resorting to aggressive importation of food products from around the world. The critical condition can be understood by the fact that the country is acquiring almost all the main foods.
According to the General Administration of Customs of China, the country has also increased its grain imports during the first half of this year by 22.7%, leading to a food grain import of 74.51 million tonnes. Although China has been the biggest soybean producer in recent years, it plans to import 40 million tonnes this year from its archrival the United States.
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Import data suggests that China’s wheat import hit a seven-year high during June this year. It imported 910,000 tons of wheat during June 2020, which was a year-on-year increase of 197%. In addition, it also imported 880,000 tons of corn, 680,000 tons of sorghum and 140,000 tons of sugar.
The harvest has been so low that China’s state grain reserve system was only able to buy 45 million tonnes of wheat in June-July, reflecting a 17.2% decrease from last year. Observers believe that in addition to the low harvest, farmers are storing food with them and not with the government under apprehension over the ongoing food crisis. The Chinese government is believed to be pressuring citizens to stockpile their food grains with the government to allow the country to project that the food crisis is not too serious.
Low production is also combined with intense flooding in the Three Gorges and the Yangtze Basin, which washed away thousands of acres of fertile land with standing crops. The floods have affected the lives of 54.8 million people and have caused an economic loss of 20.8 billion dollars.
Locust swarm attacks and African swine fever have also proven deadly to the country’s agricultural sector. The latter is said to have killed a majority of the country’s pig population, causing a crisis in meat production.
The calamity has come at a time when the proportion of arable land in the country has decreased at a rapid rate. According to China’s Ministry of Natural Resources, its arable land continued to decline for four consecutive years in 2017, measuring 60,900 hectares compared to the previous year.
To cover the gap between food consumption and food production, China has started buying and leasing fertile land and fields in many African, South American and ASEAN countries, including Djibouti, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Chile, Argentina, Cambodia, Laos, etc. China spent about $ 94 billion to buy agricultural land abroad. The number appears to have increased in recent years.
However, experts believe that China is also looking at the fertile areas of Pakistan, its all-weather ally. In addition to exploiting Balochistan’s natural resources, China now plans to use Sindh as its center for growing food. Although it has already established some control over territories such as GB, PoJK, Baluchistan and, given the less fertile lands in these areas, China cannot use them for farming, so Sindh is a new alternative. Another major advantage of controlling agricultural grains and growing crops in Sindh is the economic cost of transporting agricultural products to China. Transportation from African or South American countries is expensive and time consuming.
For an institutional sanction on the use of Pakistani land by China, the country recently signed an agricultural cooperation agreement with Pakistan. China now owns several thousand acres of Pakistani land for the purpose of ‘demonstration projects’ in the field of agriculture.
The Chinese president appears to be increasingly concerned about the impending food crisis in the country. After running the campaign to stop food waste, media censorship of food-related videos, and urging the Chinese not to waste food, Xi Jinping is also looking for expert ideas to handle the crisis. At a recent seminar with leading scientists and entrepreneurs, Jinping discussed possible ways and sought ideas to reduce dependence on foreign countries, especially on food grains. The Chinese president is recounting the importance of agriculture in his speeches in recent visits of agriculture dominating the Chinese provinces.
The decrease in consumption due to insecurities due to the pandemic has also forced citizens to limit their consumption, causing an economic recession. Markets are empty and people are unwilling to spend. China’s Ministry of Commerce launched a campaign titled “China Consumption Promotion Month” to encourage Chinese citizens to accelerate consumption, organized between September 8 and October 8. To further boost consumption, the Chinese government has started issuing coupons since March 2020 to entice consumers to spend. According to Alipay data, local governments in more than 100 cities have issued digital coupons to boost consumption.
From aggressive imports and foreign land deals to massive campaigns against food waste and content censorship, China is making every effort to address the looming crisis. Even if he fails miserably, he plans to cover up the news from the rest of the world. Various reports in the global media suggest that the world has apparently come to know about China’s failure to provide food security for its citizens that it has promised to its citizens under the ‘six guarantees’ of the Chinese state.
China’s aggressive behavior towards India, Taiwan, Japan and the ASEAN countries is only to divert the attention of the Chinese public from the economic crisis.
Interestingly, China has been at odds with its own data on agriculture, claiming that its economy is reviving despite the pandemic. However, experts believe that China has been manipulating economic data for propaganda purposes and it is too early to conclude that the Chinese economy is in the recovery phase.
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