Why is strengthening granary safety management urgent?
On October 8, a fire broke out at a granary of Sinograin in Hailin City, Heilongjiang, and the fire was not put out until around 7 a.m. on the 10th, lasting more than 50 hours. And on May 31 last year, a fire broke out at the Lindian Directly Subordinate Depot of Sinograin in Heilongjiang, causing 40,000 tons of grain to be affected by the fire. Now, more than a year later, a fire has once again occurred at a national reserve grain depot, causing serious losses to grain stocks, which is deeply regrettable!
October 16 is the 34th World Food Day, and the whole society is promoting love for grain and saving grain. At present, the autumn harvest has entered a critical moment, and all parts of the country are going all out to get every grain into the granary. Against this background, seeing the news that grain was swallowed by fire is even more distressing!
Every grain is hard-won. Farmers work hard for a year, and one mu of land can only produce more than 1,000 jin of grain. Scientific and technological workers rack their brains and shed their blood only to raise the per-unit yield of grain by a few percentage points. In every battle of “snatching grain from the mouths of insects” and “fighting drought to protect grain,” how many people stayed up all night fighting the weather and fighting disasters, just to recover even a few thousand or a few hundred tons of losses. Yet now a single fire so easily reduces tens of thousands of tons of grain and the hard work of so many people to ashes. How can people bear it?
“Of the eight principles of governance, food is the first.” Food is a necessity for human survival and life, a form of wealth, and also a strategic material. Reserve grain, as a strategic reserve established by the state to stabilize grain market prices and respond to major natural disasters and emergencies, is even more significant. At present, as China's industrialization and urbanization process accelerates, demand for grain continues to grow rapidly, and rigid constraints on land and water resources intensify, the supply and demand of grain will remain in a state of tight balance for a long time. Ensuring food security is the top priority in China's economic and social development. In order to hold the line of food security, to keep the Chinese people's rice bowl firmly in their own hands, and to fill this rice bowl with Chinese grain, over these years, from the central government to local governments, party committees and governments at all levels and all departments, the vast number of agricultural workers, scientific and technological workers, and hundreds of millions of farmers have, from top to bottom, thought of every possibility, tried every means, and endured countless hardships. At present, although China's grain production has had bumper harvests for many consecutive years and created the miracle of “ten consecutive increases,” on the issue of grain we must not forget history or be blindly optimistic. We must not forget yesterday's taste of hunger just because we are full today, and we must not fail to see the difficulties and pressure of ensuring food security in the future just because grain output has increased for many consecutive years. The task of ensuring food security remains very arduous.
The successive fires at reserve grain depots have sounded an alarm for China's granary safety management and set higher requirements. China is the world's largest grain-producing country. With the continuous development of agricultural production and many consecutive years of increased grain output, the task of grain reserves is growing day by day. In the future, with the rapid development of China's rural economy and society, the number of grain-growing farmers will gradually decrease, the amount of grain stored by farming households will drop significantly, and farmers' retained grain will increasingly enter the large circulation of grain, thereby increasing the proportion of the population that needs to rely on commercial grain for supply and further increasing the pressure on and dependence on grain and oil enterprise storage. Under such circumstances, higher requirements will inevitably be placed on granary safety management, and strengthening granary safety management is urgent! It is necessary both to establish a complete set of daily management systems and to do a good job in risk assessment, material reserves, team building, and equipment improvement under normal conditions; it is also necessary to improve emergency response capabilities under sudden situations such as earthquakes, fires, and floods, conduct good plan drills, and take preventive measures before trouble occurs; and it is even more necessary to formulate strict accountability systems, give play to their deterrent effect, and improve the work responsibility and conscientiousness of personnel in all aspects.
The successive fires at reserve grain depots also require us to further deepen our understanding of food security. Food security is weightier than Mount Tai, and it lies not only in planting and harvesting, but also in storage and management. Food security is by no means only a matter of production; granary safety is also an important component of food security. It must be said frankly that in recent years, due to poor storage conditions, improper management, and other reasons, grain losses in the storage stage have been serious. Insects, mold, quality deterioration, and losses alone amount to millions of tons each year. If the impact of sudden meteorological and geological disasters and losses caused by major safety accidents such as fires are added, the number is even more astonishing! Under the new development situation, and in the face of increasingly severe food security challenges, we must have a deeper and more three-dimensional understanding of food security. We must not only attach importance to the production stage, but also extend it to all links such as storage, transportation, and preservation, and build a whole-process, three-dimensional food security guarantee system.
As long as there are no major problems with grain, China's affairs can remain stable. At present, China is at a critical stage of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects, and ensuring national food security faces new situations and tasks. We must, with a broader vision, accurately grasp the rich connotations of the national food security strategy under the new situation, and with more practical and effective means, ensure the implementation of major tasks and measures for national food security. We must persist in both opening up sources and reducing consumption, and grasping both production and storage-transportation together. At every step and in every link, we must keep the string of food security tightly drawn, and truly build a strong edifice of China's food security.