Ministry of Agriculture ensures 100% self-sufficiency in staple grains

Recently, the Ministry of Agriculture issued the "Guiding Opinions on Further Adjusting and Optimizing the Agricultural Structure." A relevant official from the Development Planning Department of the Ministry of Agriculture, when answering reporters' questions, stated that the "Opinions" put forward the bottom line and goals of “ensuring basic self-sufficiency in grains, with staple grain self-sufficiency capacity reaching 100%” and “stabilizing grain output and grain production capacity, achieving basic self-sufficiency in grains and absolute security in staple grains.” At the same time, the "Opinions" made developing grain production one of the key tasks of structural adjustment.

The official stated that the agricultural structural adjustment in the mid-1980s caused grain production to stagnate for 5 consecutive years; in the structural adjustment in the late 1990s, because grain production was somewhat relaxed, cultivated land area and grain sown area continued to decrease, and grain output declined continuously.

Summarizing and drawing lessons from the previous two rounds, the "Opinions" clearly emphasized in the first part that “further adjusting and optimizing the agricultural structure absolutely does not mean relaxing grain production.” It is necessary to break out of the fixed mindset of choosing one or the other between grain production and agricultural structural adjustment, take stabilizing grain output as the premise and enhancing grain production capacity as the foundation, build a solid and reliable national food security guarantee system, ensure that the rice bowl of the Chinese people is always firmly held in their own hands, and blaze a new path of coordinated development and mutual promotion between the two. It also put forward the bottom line and goals of “ensuring basic self-sufficiency in grains, with staple grain self-sufficiency capacity reaching 100%” and “stabilizing grain output and grain production capacity, achieving basic self-sufficiency in grains and absolute security in staple grains.”

At the same time, the "Opinions" made developing grain production one of the key tasks of structural adjustment, proposing to focus on “storing grain in the land, storing grain in technology, and storing grain among the people,” adjust and optimize the path to ensuring national food security, and made detailed deployment arrangements. In short, further adjusting and optimizing the agricultural structure absolutely does not mean relaxing grain production; rather, it is through adjusting and optimizing the agricultural structure that the rice bowl will be held more and more firmly.