Embracing Sustainable Agriculture, Exploring the Path of Green Ecological Farming

Every day, China must provide food for more than 1.3 billion people. Considering the complex process of getting food from farm to table, this achievement is astonishing. No other country needs to ensure food security on such a massive scale, and China's current achievement is unprecedented.

What cannot be overlooked is that behind China's achievements lie enormous contrasts in “pressure factors” such as population size, arable land area and freshwater resources. As development deepens, land will become scarcer and freshwater resources will also decline. To achieve sustainable development, a farming method that is high-yielding, resilient to climate change and has minimal environmental impact is needed, yet for China, which achieves incredible feats every day, this is no difficult task.

China once adopted this method on the Loess Plateau. As the leader of a World Bank team project, I first visited the Loess Plateau in 1991, when it was like a barren lunar surface. Growing crops and orchards for tens of millions of residents on a plateau that had been degraded for decades seemed almost impossible at the time.

But with the help and advice of the Chinese government and the World Bank, local communities and farmers gradually began to restore the degraded land, transforming decades of unsustainable land use practices. Scientific farmland construction and changes in land use rights incentivized farmers to cultivate their fields sustainably and conserve soil and water. Simple changes brought enormous improvements, for example, our multi-party cooperation in pen-raising sheep and goats promoted the lush growth of fruit trees and vegetation.

Visiting the Loess Plateau now, people will find the tremendous changes brought about by sustainable land management and farming methods. Forests, grasslands and animals have become lush and vibrant, and flourishing high-quality orchards, farms and penned livestock are the guarantee of farmers' prosperity. Vegetation such as forests has enhanced the local capacity to cope with climate change and also suppressed soil erosion and the risks of floods and droughts. Land that was once barren is now full of life.

Every country's situation is different, but the lessons we learned from China's Loess Plateau project are enduring, and these valuable lessons have been extended to other countries——such as Rwanda.

China continues to achieve astonishing successes in the economic field, and will also achieve success again in transforming the agricultural industry. The Loess Plateau has already set an example in this regard.