Safeguarding Food Security: Let the Chinese Bowl Be Filled Mainly with Chinese Grain
Food security brings prosperity to the nation; agriculture is the foundation for building a moderately prosperous society in all respects and achieving modernization. In the full text of the “13th Five-Year” Plan recommendations recently released to the public, the issues of agriculture, rural areas and farmers have become a major focus. General Secretary Xi Jinping has always attached great importance to the food issue. He stressed: “Safeguarding national food security is an eternal subject, and this string can never be loosened at any time; the rice bowl of the Chinese people must always be held firmly in our own hands; our rice bowl should be filled mainly with ‘Chinese grain’.” To achieve “our rice bowl should be filled mainly with ‘Chinese grain’,” ensuring the effective supply and quality safety of agricultural products is the top priority. How can all localities do this top-priority work well? How can both the quantity and quality of “Chinese grain” be ensured? What problems still remain to be solved?
Test One: Grain Production Continues to Increase in Many Places, and “Reluctance to Sell and Watching the Market” Has Already Emerged
With these questions, reporters from People's Daily Online in multiple teams rushed to Heilongjiang, Hubei, Shaanxi and other places to investigate and found that a bumper grain harvest in many provinces this year is basically a foregone conclusion: the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region's grain output this year is expected to reach more than 55 billion jin, and 12 consecutive years of bumper grain production is a foregone conclusion; Jiangsu Province achieved an “eleventh consecutive increase” in grain in 2014, and this year is expected to continue to increase production; in the first three quarters, grain production in Hubei Province remained stable, and according to statistical analysis, it is expected that Hubei Province's grain output this year is expected to achieve a twelfth consecutive increase; Shaanxi's total grain output for the whole province is expected to be 12.3376 million tons, an increase of 3% over the previous year, setting a new record for grain production……
Along with the increase in grain production, “difficulty in selling grain” has also appeared. Due to reasons such as consecutive increases in grain production, a surge in imports, and inverted prices, some provinces have seen grain farmers “reluctant to sell and watching the market” and reduced enthusiasm for purchases by private enterprises and grain brokers.
To solve this problem, local governments have adopted various means according to local actual conditions and strived to ease it.
Inner Mongolia has established a “green channel” for purchase loans at all levels of banks throughout the region, issuing loan notices to borrowing enterprises 5 working days in advance, and promptly issuing start-up purchase funds. As of November 6, the region had issued 446 million yuan in start-up purchase funds.
Jilin uses various news media such as radio, television, newspapers and the Internet to focus on publicizing the national grain price policy and purchase quality standards, convey market information, and promote scientific grain storage technology, thereby gaining farmers' understanding and support. It also implements the “Promoting Grain and Benefiting Farmers in Ten Thousand Homes” activity, explaining grain policies, understanding farmers' grain-selling needs, and guiding farmers in safe grain storage.
Anhui urges all localities to further adopt a series of measures such as accelerating warehouse relocation, consolidation, reserve rotation, and sales outside the province to expand effective warehouse capacity. In particular, as the “324” project for the maintenance and renovation of dangerous and old warehouses is completed one after another, the pressure on warehouse capacity for the autumn grain purchase has been effectively eased. In response to long queues in some areas, the Anhui Provincial Grain Bureau promptly required all purchasing and storage depots to start purchases, adopt appointment and pre-inspection methods for orderly purchases from large grain-growing households, and separately open green purchasing channels for ordinary farmers. Personnel and equipment are dispatched in a unified manner to increase purchasing bays and shorten the time for farmers to sell grain.
Henan Province has established long-term and stable grain production and marketing cooperation relations with 18 provinces, municipalities and regions across the country, organized grain purchasing enterprises within the province to connect with large grain-using enterprises inside and outside the province, and carried out various forms of cooperation such as grain purchase and sales trade, warehouse leasing, commissioned purchasing, commissioned storage, commissioned sales, and commissioned processing, and secured grain sources according to market demand.
Shaanxi grasps both policy-oriented and market-oriented purchases, gives play to the role of the state-owned main channel for grain, sells grain in a centralized and unified way through cooperatives, and at the same time sells grain through orders with leading enterprises, making grain purchasing entities diversified.
Test Two: Ensuring Production and Quantity Is Not the Key Point; Ensuring Safety Is the Key
In random street interviews, People's Daily Online found that the public has given great support and expectations to the goal that “our rice bowl should be filled mainly with Chinese grain.”
Ms. Wu, born after 1985, believes that each place's water and soil nurture its own people, and Chinese grain is the most suitable for native-born Chinese people.
Mr. Yin, who works in the construction industry, said, “Filling our rice bowl with Chinese grain is also a contribution to China's economic growth; what we eat is a sentiment.”
“The high-quality wheat from Guanzhong in Shaanxi is very good, and the rice from the Northeast is so popular; I will give priority to domestic grain,” “From ancient times to the present, we have been a major agricultural country, and ‘Chinese grain’ is a symbol of quality”…… On the streets, citizens gave a thumbs-up to “Chinese grain” one after another, expressing trust in and expectations for “Chinese grain.”
To achieve “the rice bowl filled mainly with ‘Chinese grain’,” it is necessary not only to ensure that grain production and purchasing do not go wrong, but also to ensure grain quality. This requires efforts throughout the entire process from seeds and pesticides to purchasing and storage, and then to processing and sales. In order to make “Chinese grain” become “safe grain” in people's mouths, all localities have made great efforts and actively used the development opportunity of “Internet+” to strengthen means of supervising the quality and safety of agricultural products through informatization technology, making every effort to safeguard food security:
Liaoning Province has established an informatization service platform for the quality and safety supervision of agricultural products, composed of 6 subsystems including agricultural input filing, agricultural product traceability, complaints and reports, testing data management, public opinion monitoring, and purchase, storage and transportation monitoring. The platform has now been put into operation. Pilots have been carried out in Shenyang, Liaoyang, Chaoyang and other places. Nearly 1,000 agricultural input supervision points have been included in traceability, and the production area of agricultural products included in traceability pilots has reached 3.8 million mu.
Heilongjiang, based on creating standardized agricultural production demonstration bases, vigorously promotes standardized production. It has newly formulated 8 local agricultural standards, including production technical regulations for 100 million mu of ecological high-yield standard farmland. The province has cumulatively formulated and revised 1,290 local agricultural standards, basically covering major advantageous agricultural products. It has newly created 255 agricultural standardization demonstration bases at all levels and 806 provincial-level agricultural product standardization demonstration zones (counties, farms), further improving the household coverage rate and conversion rate of agricultural standards.
Shanghai arranges 80,000-100,000 yuan in reward and subsidy funds for each supervision demonstration town, focusing on establishing a traceable agricultural archive system, that is, all planting and breeding households within the jurisdiction (especially scattered households) establish production and sales archives; incorporates vegetables into the city's electronic production information platform to strengthen effective supervision during vegetable production; comprehensively promotes the use of two-dimensional code ear tags, regularly collects epidemic prevention information and uploads it to the Ministry of Agriculture's central database; comprehensively implements the construction of agricultural traceability archives, and actively promotes the “market exit” system and archive fishery system for locally produced aquaculture products.
Hubei has issued measures for the supervision and assessment of the administrative head responsibility system for food security, making the principal heads of municipal and county governments at all levels the first responsible persons for food security in their regions. The “Assessment Measures” follow the principles of combining annual assessment with routine inspection, combining key assessment with comprehensive supervision, combining quantitative evaluation with qualitative evaluation, and combining unified coordination with division of responsibilities. In eight aspects, the provincial government uniformly organizes assessments of municipal and prefectural people's governments, and municipal and prefectural governments assess the counties and cities under their jurisdiction.
At present, Gansu is exploring the creation of “Internet + seed production industry” to safeguard the quality and safety of corn seed production, and has begun to launch the construction of a national-level corn seed production base information supervision cloud service platform. This platform takes Zhangye as the core, with its center located in the Linze National Corn Seed Industrial Park, radiating to surrounding counties and districts, and strives to be fully completed and put into use in 2016.
Experts: To Improve the International Competitiveness of “Chinese Grain,” It Is Necessary to Adjust the Structure, Emphasize Quality, and Strengthen Planning
As the distribution of China's grain production and inventories becomes increasingly concentrated in core production areas, the pressure on purchasing and storage in major production areas is huge, policy-oriented grain inventories have been “rolling snowballs” year after year, and the burden on the central finance is becoming heavier and heavier. How to digest the stock and curb the increment needs to be solved. But at the same time, it should also be seen that constrained by resources and the environment such as arable land and fresh water, it is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve consecutive increases in grain production, while with population growth, upgrading of the consumption structure, and acceleration of urbanization, grain demand will continue to grow rigidly. In this overall environment, how to achieve scientific, sustainable grain production with both quantity and quality ensured has become a problem facing local governments. Regarding this, a number of grain experts expressed their views.
Dr. Jiao Jiang, chief agricultural economist of the Heilongjiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences, believes that under the overall background of economic integration, it is necessary for the state to issue policies, strengthen the planning of grain production, and manage by variety and type, in order to thoroughly solve the problem. He suggests that the state plan the production of edible grain, guide the adjustment of planting area through benefit-to-farmers policy subsidies, set area according to sales volume, avoid excessive production, and at the same time reduce waste caused by state storage; give major commodity grain production areas the “right for originating enterprises to export directly,” encourage the export of distinctive variety advantages, and form a “coexistence of imports and exports” in which ordinary grain is imported at low prices and distinctive varieties and products are exported at high prices; control import volume through all measures such as various quality testing indicators, and resolutely crack down on and control smuggling imports.
Experts from the grain department of Hubei Province introduced that with the implementation of the minimum grain purchase price policy, farmers have received subsidies, but in the long run, grain prices that only rise and never fall have overturned the circulation pattern based on marketization. In the long run, it is necessary to advance the reform of the grain price support policy, decouple the grain price formation mechanism from government subsidies, and, on the premise of safeguarding farmers' basic interests, give full play to the decisive role of the market in resource allocation.
Lai Zuolian, associate researcher at the Rural Development Research Institute of the Shaanxi Academy of Social Sciences, suggests that at present, the opportunity of relatively loose grain supply at home and abroad can be used to accelerate the adjustment of the grain industrial structure, adjust the planting area, and focus on improving the quality of “Chinese grain.” At the same time, support for new types of grain production and operation entities such as large grain-growing households, family farms, farmers' professional cooperatives, and leading enterprises in agricultural industrialization should be increased in terms of land transfer, financial support and other aspects, and new types of grain production and operation entities should be actively cultivated. However, attention should be paid to preventing the “de-grainization” of land transfer in the process of actively promoting it.
“We must attach importance to and strengthen the scientific and technological contribution to grain production.” Lai Zuolian believes that carrying out actions to create high-yield grain through science and technology and integrating and promoting high-yield, efficient and sustainable technologies and models will improve the international competitive advantage of “Chinese grain.”
Regarding the issue of food safety, “it is necessary not only to strengthen supervision, including supervision by government departments, but also to mobilize the supervisory role of society and civil organizations, and also to carry out governance from the source of agricultural product production and across the entire industrial chain, and establish a traceability system for agricultural products.” Lai Zuolian emphasized.