National early rice output fell 0.9% year-on-year in 2015

XINHUA NEWS AGENCY, BEIJING, AUGUST 21 (Reporter Wang Xi) The National Bureau of Statistics released national early rice production data on the 21st. This year's national early rice output was 33.691 million tons (67.38 billion jin), a reduction of 320,000 tons from 2014, down 0.9% year-on-year.

According to a survey by the National Bureau of Statistics, this year's national early rice sown area was 5,715.4 thousand hectares (85.731 million mu), a decrease of 79.5 thousand hectares from 2014, down 1.4% year-on-year; the national early rice yield per unit area was 5,894.8 kg/hectare (393.0 kg/mu), an increase of 25.6 kg/hectare from last year, up 0.4%.

Regarding the decline in early rice sown area, Hou Rui, a senior statistician in the Rural Department of the National Bureau of Statistics, believes that on the one hand this was because drought occurred in some areas during early rice transplanting, which affected early rice planting; on the other hand, because early rice cultivation has relatively low returns and high labor intensity, some farmers switched from double-cropping rice to single-cropping rice. This year, due to the reduction in sown area, national early rice output decreased by 467,000 tons.

She stated that because overall agro-meteorological conditions were relatively good in most areas, and government departments in various localities continued to support early rice production through measures such as unified seed supply, centralized seedling raising, and specialized unified prevention and control of pests and diseases, this year's early rice yield per unit area increased slightly.

The early rice output data published by the National Bureau of Statistics were obtained through two methods: sample surveys with provinces as the overall units in major early rice production areas, and key surveys in non-major production areas. The major production areas include Zhejiang, Anhui, Fujian, Jiangxi, Hubei, Hunan, Guangdong, and Guangxi. The survey offices of the National Bureau of Statistics conducted sample surveys in more than 150 national survey counties (cities) selected from the 8 major production provinces (regions), and their combined output accounted for more than 97% of the national total early rice output. The early rice data for the non-major production areas of Hainan, Yunnan, and Sichuan were calculated by the relevant survey offices based on key surveys.