What does food security mean to China? What are the factors that threaten Chinas food security?
Zheng: For China, food security basically requires that the country has enough food to go around, or that its self-sufficiency rate of grain remains above 99 percent. China is among the countries with the most critical food security situation in the world. Given the size of the Chinese population, it cannot rely on imports, because this would greatly drive up world prices. China’s demand for grain is growing. For one thing, China’s population is increasing. For another, a large percentage of the rural population has migrated to urban areas, and thus their diet has changed greatly. Urban residents consume much more meat then rural ones. As meat production is grain-fed, meat-based diets cost more grain than rural residents’ traditional vegetable-based diets. However, although China’s current self-sufficiency rate of grain is around 99 percent, the growth of grain output does not meet that of grain demand. The rapid urbanization around the country has caused a decrease of cultivated land,
