Two Major Weaknesses in Chinese Agriculture Need Urgent Solutions

The introductory section of the No. 1 Central Document points out some major trend-related issues facing Chinese agriculture in the future. Among them, I think two aspects deserve the most attention: First, domestic agricultural production costs are rising rapidly, and the prices of bulk agricultural products are generally higher than those on the international market. How to innovate agricultural support and protection policies and improve agricultural competitiveness under the “double squeeze” is a major test we must face; Second, China's agricultural resources are scarce, overdeveloped, and increasingly polluted. How to ensure the effective supply of agricultural products and quality safety under hard resource and environmental constraints, and enhance the capacity for sustainable agricultural development, is a major challenge we must meet.

This one major test and one major challenge aptly point out the “two major weaknesses” of Chinese agriculture, and both are fatal vulnerabilities.

Let us first look at the issue of agricultural costs. China's grain production has not escaped shortage. According to statistics, China now imports 80 million tons of crops each year, of which three-quarters are soybeans. The reason for importing such a huge amount of soybeans is by no means just a matter of shortage; the key lies in price. As a low-yield crop (one season per year), soybeans are too costly to grow in China. Just imagine, if we allow the costs of all bulk agricultural products to remain high for a long time, and their market prices to remain higher than those on the international market for a long time, the result could be the total collapse of Chinese agriculture and a full-scale outbreak of China's grain security problem.

There is also “agricultural resources are scarce, overdeveloped, and increasingly polluted.” Even if we can achieve grain self-sufficiency, if the grain is all polluted, that is not only a health problem for ordinary people, it also foretells that China's grain market will certainly be seized by “pollution-free” or “low-pollution” foreign grain. That, too, is China's grain security problem.

China uses 7% of the world's arable land to feed 22% of the world's population. This is a basic fact. Therefore, there is simply no such thing as “fallow land” in China's arable land. It must rely on large amounts of chemical fertilizer to force growth, and crops must be grown in two or three seasons a year to supply food for the Chinese people. But the question is, can the land withstand such overuse? In some developed countries such as the United States, government subsidies are used to forcibly require farmers to “leave land fallow,” and every year 2% to 10% of land is in a resting state.

In 2025, China's population will reach a peak of 1.4 billion, and the problems of land and grain will become even more prominent. Even if China's population decreases after the peak, the rise in global population will also compete with China for grain supply. These are all major agricultural problems placed before China.

Some scholars believe through research that China's grain production still has 15% room for growth. This growth can barely maintain a “tight balance” in China's grain supply. But I think this is only a hypothesis. As long as the above “two major weaknesses” are not properly solved, the impact of foreign grain on the Chinese market will be unavoidable. And once an impact is formed, needless to say incremental production, even whether existing production can be maintained must be marked with a huge question mark.

Therefore, I believe that reducing agricultural production costs and tackling water and land pollution should be the top priorities of government work, and there is no time to delay. At present, the solution given by the central government is: first, rely on accelerating reform; second, rely on science and technology. I believe that among these, science and technology are extremely important. They must achieve an increase in efficiency, and the magnitude of this increase must be far greater than the magnitude of cost increases. At the same time, saline-alkali land, mountainous land, and other land that originally could not be used to grow grain must also be turned into arable land. Of course, the premise is not to destroy the ecology.

China's agricultural tasks are too heavy, and the difficulty of governance now is also very great. We must be especially careful about one problem: when our science and technology are not yet efficient enough and are still insufficient to cover costs, our agriculture may already have been crushed by the market. This is probably the danger we most need to guard against at present.