Eating old grain is making a contribution to food security
Recently the media have been hyping the case of a state grain depot in Jilin passing off old grain as new grain for storage in order to fraudulently obtain state subsidies.
In China, the grain issue is a matter of great importance, and playing tricks with grain very easily stirs public anger. So as soon as the report came out, public resentment boiled over, and it was like a rat running across the street with everyone shouting "kill it."
The key to this incident lies in the matter of new grain versus old grain. So-called new grain is grain produced in the most recent production year. As things stand now, that means grain produced in 2014; grain for 2015 has not yet been produced, and there is no grain newer than that from 2014. So-called old grain is grain produced in years before 2014. Normally, the price of new grain is somewhat higher than that of old grain, because old grain has after all been stored longer and its quality is generally somewhat lower. Passing off old grain as new grain does not actually fraudulently obtain state subsidies, but rather the price difference.
However, as far as food security is concerned, there is basically no harm. After all, this is not a case of empty warehouses; all that grain is still there, it is just a few years older. Many readers, upon hearing "old grain," easily equate it with aged and deteriorated grain. This is incorrect. Aged and deteriorated grain has already rotted and spoiled and no longer meets edible requirements. Old grain still meets edible requirements in all its indicators. Moreover, strictly speaking, grain quality cannot be judged solely by whether it is new or old. If storage conditions are good, such as in low-temperature cold storage, grain may stay as fresh as new after several years inside. Conversely, newly marketed grain, if poorly stored, may become moldy and spoiled within a few days.
The ultimate purpose of grain reserves is to be eaten, so fundamentally the question should not be whether it is old grain or new grain, but rather the setting of an edible standard. As long as it meets the edible standard, it can be purchased and stored, even if it is grain from several years ago. Why does the state not emphasize the quality of grain but rather whether it is new or old? There are reasons for this. New grain comes from farmers, and if grain depots only purchase new grain, this can ensure that farmers get a good price for their grain. This is the minimum grain purchase price policy that has been implemented for over ten years. Every year when new grain comes to market, the state's offer price (the minimum grain purchase price) is far above the market price, so each year's new grain is basically monopolized by state purchasing. The state cannot only take in and never let out; after new grain has been in storage for a period, sooner or later it must be sold to the market. At that point, the sale price is basically market-based. That is to say, it must follow market pricing; if it is priced too high, the market will not accept it and it will not sell.
In that case, China's grain market is in fact split apart: one new grain market and one old grain market; the price in the former is decided by the state and carries a strong policy bias, while only the price in the latter reflects true demand. The price in the former is far higher than in the latter, but the quality of the former is not far higher than that of the latter; in fact, the difference is not great. Since the quality difference is not great but the price gap is enormous, some grain depots have an incentive to buy old grain and pass it off as new grain, since laboratory tests cannot detect it anyway. Once this kind of arbitrage is carried out on a large scale, the two split markets will tend toward unification, which means grain prices will have to come down, and the high-price market-support policy will fail. This is something the government does not want to see.
Why have the grain depot incidents reported in recent years occurred mostly in Northeast China? This is no accident, because in recent years grain output in Northeast China has increased dramatically, and the market cannot absorb it, so most of it has been forced into state grain reserve depots. Such a large volume of temporary state purchasing involves enormous funds and interests, so it is only natural that problems easily arise.
In grain depots in Northeast China today, grain purchased six or seven years ago is still lying in the warehouses. Northeast rice has the highest proportion of old grain. So if you do not want to eat rice that is too old, it is best to avoid rice from Northeast China. Of course, given that China is the country with the highest proportion of grain reserves in the world, Chinese people also eat the highest proportion of old rice in the world. There is no way around it; who told us to store so much grain for food security? Eating old grain every day, this too is making a contribution to food security.