China will no longer chase bumper grain harvests and instead make safer foods a priority and boost imports as it bids to tackle its rural environmental problems, government officials said.
The shift in emphasis suggests the authorities are willing to forgo their obsession with agricultural output growth.
Achieving bumper harvests has long been considered a political necessity for the world’s most populous country, particularly after Mao’s 1958 “Great Leap Forward” industrialisation campaign led to widespread famine.
China has been beset by a series of food safety scandals in recent years.
These included the contaminated milk controversy in 2008 when at least six children died after drinking baby formula containing the industrial chemical melamine.
It had been added to watered-down milk to distort tests into showing the produce was high in protein.
Han Jun, the deputy director of the Office of Central Rural Work Leading Group, the country’s top decision maker on rural policy, said. “In our current grains policy, one of the most important ideas is to speed up the transition in the way we boost grain output.
“In the past we were exhausting our resources and environment in pursuit of yield and now we have to focus equally on quantity, quality and efficiency and particularly the quality of grain output growth, environmental protection and sustainable development,” Han told the China Development Forum on Saturday.
He said China had recently published its sustainable development plan for agriculture, which will cap water use as well as reduce the use of chemical fertiliser and pesticides in its agriculture production.
China’s huge grain reserves should help ease the transition and reduce the risk of food shortages, said Han. His speech was carried on the news website Sina.com.
China should remain self-sufficient in cereals given its huge population, while making full use of international markets for farm products that are in short supply.
Qian Keming, chief economist at China’s agriculture ministry, said the country could achieve an 85 per cent self-sufficiency ratio by 2020, which was lower than the controversial 95 per cent rate that Beijing has been aiming to maintain over the past few decades.
China’s grain production should be capped at 610 million tonnes, rather than the previous level of 650 million tonnes, which is close to the country’s maximum capacity and puts its resources and the environment under strain, said Qian.
Ning Gaoning, chairman of the China National Cereals, Oils and Foodstuffs Corp, told the Saturday forum that China could open up more to agriculture trade.
As well as growing amounts of rice and wheat, China is also consuming more protein-rich food, which means it needs extra supplies, he said.
