Ecological agriculture transformation and food security assurance advance in parallel

In 1994, Lester·Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute in the United States, published an article titled "Who Will Feed China?" in the US journal World Watch, claiming that China would inevitably experience food shortages, thereby causing a global food crisis. At the time, this view immediately caused a huge international response. However, in 2013, figures released by the National Bureau of Statistics showed that the country's total grain output exceeded 600 million tons for the first time, reaching 12038.7 billion jin, achieving the miracle of “ten consecutive increases,” which powerfully shattered Brown's prediction of that year and is worthy of our pride. Under the influence of multiple unfavorable factors such as “drought in the south and floods in the north,” it was extremely difficult to push grain output to a new high again; this was the first time since the founding of the People's Republic of China that grain output had maintained ten consecutive years of growth.

However, against the backdrop of the “ten consecutive increases” bumper harvest, the figure for China's grain imports is surging continuously. In 2012, we imported 80.25 million tons of grain, the largest grain import volume in history. Why are so many imports needed? A growing population, increasingly scarce land and water resources, increasingly picky consumer tastes in food, and an insufficient degree of mechanization are the main reasons for the increase in imports. For example, Guangxi's sugarcane planting area and sugar output have long ranked first in the country, and half of the country's sugar output comes from Guangxi. However, the latest data show that imported sugar now accounts for nearly 30%, and the price gap between domestic and foreign white sugar has intensified the losses of domestic sugar enterprises. Why is there such a large gap? It is the severe lack of mechanized harvesting. One person works a small plot, machines cannot get in, and planting sugarcane, cutting sugarcane, and pressing sugarcane all rely entirely on manpower. At present, however, countries such as Thailand, India, Australia, and the United States all use automatic harvesters to harvest sugarcane.

Agricultural mechanization is a prerequisite for the development of modern ecological agriculture. The primitive ecological agriculture system relied purely on the volume sources and material flows of the ecosystem to maintain circulation, whereas the modern ecological agriculture system relies to a large extent on agricultural machinery to greatly increase agricultural labor productivity and reduce production costs, thereby increasing land output and resource utilization rates. For a long time, China's agricultural machinery has had low power, limited production scale, declining cultivated land quality, low operational efficiency, and low production benefits. The development of large-scale agricultural machinery, however, will promote the standardization, scaling up, and industrialization of agricultural production. This can not only increase crop yields, but also save seeds, water, fertilizer, and labor, reduce production costs, realize cost savings and income increases in agriculture; the improvement of agricultural labor productivity also promotes the transfer of farmers to non-agricultural industries and broadens channels for increasing farmers' incomes. At the same time, using large-scale agricultural machinery for cultivation can also give full play to the effectiveness of large machinery in combined tillage and land preparation, improve the utilization rate of land resources, and promote the sustainable development of agriculture.

Therefore, agricultural mechanization is the key to the transformation and development of China's ecological agriculture, and it is also an inevitable choice for safeguarding China's food security. In the future, we must persist in the transformation of ecological agriculture and adopt a multi-pronged approach to ensure safety on the tip of the tongue.