Safeguarding Food Security: Eating Enough and Eating Well

The Rome Declaration and Plan of Action adopted by the Second World Food Summit in November 1996 stated the following: “Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.” According to the above definition, national food security includes the following basic connotations:

I. Sufficient and stable food acquisition capacity

A country has two ways to acquire food: one is its own agricultural production, and the other is food imports. From the perspective of its own agricultural production, to obtain a sufficient and stable food supply, it is necessary to fundamentally establish a complete institutional system that can ensure the improvement of comprehensive grain production capacity. For example, the measures adopted by our country mainly include improving the household contract responsibility system, strengthening scientific and technological support for agriculture, consolidating agricultural infrastructure, increasing agricultural subsidies, and building a market circulation system for agricultural products. From the perspective of food imports, an appropriate volume of food imports and stable food import channels are important measures for ensuring a country’s food security.

II. Excellent food quality and optimized food structure

Food security is not only a matter of quantity, but also a matter of quality and structure. The so-called food quality refers to the various qualities that food should possess from food production to food processing, and from food circulation to final consumption, in order to meet people’s health needs. It requires emphasizing that the government implement effective supervision in all links and aspects of food production to ensure that people can safely consume all kinds of food. In terms of structure, food security is a broad agricultural concept, including not only agricultural food, but also animal husbandry and fisheries; not only bulk agricultural products, such as corn, soybeans, and wheat, but also some minor agricultural products and cash crops.

III. An efficient and orderly food circulation system

How sufficient food can be distributed to consumers and producers at a relatively fast speed and lower cost is an inherent requirement of food security. The establishment and improvement of the food circulation system is an important mechanism for ensuring food security. In terms of food business entities, the threshold for entering food trading should be lowered, and economic entities under multiple forms of ownership should be encouraged to participate in food business. In the market structure of food circulation, it is necessary to cultivate a relatively large number of food fair markets, wholesale markets, and futures markets with larger scale and complementary functions, so as to respond sensitively to residents’ food needs, thereby ensuring that residents can obtain food at lower cost and avoiding large fluctuations in food supply and demand. The purpose of establishing an efficient food circulation system is to build an effective competitive pattern in the food circulation market, straighten out food circulation relations, reduce food circulation and transaction costs, and ensure food security.

⟦NL> IV. Strong national macroeconomic regulation and control capacity

The fundamental reason for emphasizing the government’s macroeconomic regulation and control function lies in the special attributes of food and some drawbacks of market regulation. On the one hand, food is a strategic material, and food plays a very important role in maintaining national economic, political, and social stability. Former U.S. Secretary of State Kissinger once said: “Whoever controls oil controls all countries; whoever controls food controls all people.” On the other hand, as a daily necessity, food has the obvious characteristics of low price elasticity of demand and high price elasticity of supply. From the demand side, food demanders are not sensitive to fluctuations in food prices, and rises or falls in food prices have little impact on food demand. From the supply side, food suppliers are sensitive to price changes, and slight rises or falls in food prices will lead to sharp expansion or contraction of food production. Therefore, when solving the problem of food security, it is necessary to rely simultaneously on the regulation of the “two hands” of the market and the government. When the market is powerless to solve food security, the role of the government must be brought into play, relying on non-market means to correct market failure and market defects.