Chapter 11 4. Is there any truth to what Brown said?

In 1994, an American put forward a sensational opinion: China will become a burden to the world because of the shortage of food.He predicted, not without horror, that the next century will be a century of hunger, and China will suffer the most.According to his calculations, "If China's population growth is only considered, China's food demand in 2030 will increase to 479 million tons. In other words, even if China's economic development does not increase the per capita consumption of meat, eggs, and beer, China's grain production is also expected to drop by 20% to 272 million tons, resulting in a shortage of 207 million tons of food. This figure is roughly equivalent to the total global grain exports (200 million tons) in 1994."

He further pointed out: "However, China's newly affluent millions of people will certainly not give up their demand for a further increase in the consumption of livestock and poultry products. If the per capita grain consumption rises to 400 kg in 2030, then China's total demand for grain The volume will reach a frightening level (614 million tons). In this case, China’s grain import gap will reach 369 million tons, which is almost twice the current world grain export volume.” For such a large food gap, he believes that no country can afford it. "Even if China can afford it, the world cannot supply it, no matter how high the price is..." Therefore, he believes that China's food shortage will inevitably cause the world to food shortages. "In the case of international economic integration, the rise in China's food prices will lead to an increase in world food prices; China's shortage of arable land will become the world's shortage of arable land; China's water shortage will also affect the entire world."

The speaker was Lester R. Brown, director of the Worldwatch Institute in the United States.He first grew tomatoes on a farm in southern New Jersey, and later served as the director of the United States Agency for International Agricultural Development and an adviser to the Secretary of the United States Department of Agriculture.He holds degrees from several prestigious universities in the United States, including a doctorate in economics from the prestigious Harvard University. In 1974, he founded the World Watch Institute and served as its director.In view of his role in promoting the global environmental movement, he has won the "United Nations Environment Award", "Blue Planet Award", "MacArthur Foundation Talent Award", etc., and his papers and manuscripts are permanently collected in the Library of Congress.

According to Brown, he began to pay attention to China's food prospects in 1988, and published papers and books on "Who Will Feed China" in 1994. Brown's prediction caused a sensation all over the world, making many people turn their attention to China, which has just solved the problem of food and clothing.However, if analyzed comprehensively and rationally, Brown's forecast is obviously biased. Not to mention the Chinese, even the US Department of Agriculture, where he once worked, is also skeptical of his forecast. On July 22, 1995, when Mr. Brown visited China, he also admitted that he did not know much about the situation in China, and that some views were too extreme and needed to be corrected.

However, although Brown's general prediction of China's grain problem is wrong, his specific analysis of China's grain production and consumption is worthy of our serious study. According to Brown's research, five major factors affect the balance of China's grain supply and demand. One is population growth.In 1982, China's population reached 1 billion, making it the largest population in the world.Its population is expected to reach 1.5 billion by 2017, which is equivalent to the total world population in 1900.Although the population growth rate of Chinese people is slowing down now, the population peak will appear in 2045, with a total of 1.66 billion.This means that in the next 40 years, China will add about 12 million people to the world every year on average.According to Brown, "China's population burden today is occurring in a very different era than it was a century or two ago. There is no place that is sparsely populated and still habitable, and no country or group of countries would be willing to accept 12 million Chinese per year." In countries such as Britain, Ireland, Germany, Italy and Spain, the population pressure in the early development process has been properly resolved through immigration.Many of them went to the New World, like the descendants of the Irish who immigrated to the United States, surpassing the mainland of Ireland; similarly, the descendants of Hispanics in Latin America surpassed the mainland of Spain.Obviously, China no longer has this possibility, but can only digest its own growing population on its own.

The second is the reduction of cultivated land.Not only is China one of the countries with the least per capita arable land in the world, but its arable land area is shrinking sharply.From 1990 to 1994, the area sown with grain dropped sharply from 90.8 million hectares to 85.7 million hectares. In the past four years, the sown area of ​​grain dropped by 5.6 percentage points. At the same time, the total population increased by 59 million, an increase of 4.9 percentage points. This reduction led to a rapid decrease of 10.5% in the sown area of ​​grain per capita.However, China is currently in the stage of industrialization, and a large amount of cultivated land will inevitably be occupied by new factories, houses and roads.

The third is the shortage of water resources.In the middle of this century, relative to the demand, China's water resources are still relatively abundant, and both surface water and groundwater can fully meet the needs of the country's 500 million people.However, with the growth of population, the increase of irrigation, the affluence of life and the process of industrialization, water consumption has increased by as much as 6 times today, and the balance between supply and demand of water resources has been lost.Much of China is currently plagued by water scarcity, with demand for water exceeding what rivers and aquifers can sustain.Undoubtedly, China will continue to maintain a high-speed industrialization momentum, but it will not only face the problem of occupying a large amount of cultivated land, but also face the dilemma that industrial and domestic water will occupy irrigation water.Ultimately, these problems will accelerate the continued decline in China's grain production.

Fourth, consumption increased.With the development of China's economy, people's living standards will inevitably be greatly improved.An important aspect of the improvement of living standards is the improvement of dietary structure, and the most prominent is the increase in the consumption of livestock and poultry products.The dietary structure of the Chinese is mainly based on starchy grains such as rice, which provide more than 70% of the calories they consume.Now, Chinese people's dietary structure has become richer, including meat (pork, chicken, beef, mutton), eggs, milk, butter, cheese and ice cream.Changes in food patterns that accompany rising incomes are common in all societies.Obviously, China will consume more meat, and China must find more food for this purpose.This is because consuming more meat means more grain – 2kg or more of grain turns into 1kg of chicken, 4kg of grain turns into 1kg of pork, and 7kg of grain turns into 1kg of beef.Coupled with the consumption of alcohol, China's food consumption is bound to rise sharply.In fact, the food consumption level in some coastal areas has approached or even reached the level of developed countries in the world.

Fifth, the improvement of cultivated land productivity has been very limited.In a country where the area of ​​cultivated land is no longer increasing, such as China, the future increase of grain production can only rely on the improvement of land productivity.And this is not easy in China, because China's current land productivity has reached a very high level.China's food crops are mainly rice, wheat and corn. Thirty years ago, China's average rice yield per unit area was only half of Japan's, but by the early 1990s, China's average rice yield per hectare had exceeded 4 tons per hectare, greatly narrowing the gap with Japan.From 1977 to 1984, the total grain output soared from 199 million tons to 306 million tons, and the output increased by more than half in just seven years. This achievement is unmatched by any other major grain-producing countries.And this achievement mainly relies on the heavy use of chemical fertilizers.Before the reform, the amount of chemical fertilizer used in China was far below the critical point of diminishing returns of chemical fertilizers. Now, the level of chemical fertilizer application has reached a very high level, and it is difficult to expect to use chemical fertilizers to stimulate food production.Chinese wheat also has a similar phenomenon.From 1950 to 1980, the United States produced far more wheat than China, but in 1978, China's agricultural reforms increased wheat production and made it surpass that of the United States.However, due to water shortage, the amount of irrigation in northern wheat production areas has decreased, and it has gradually become difficult to increase production.Although the yield per unit area of ​​corn is only 60% of that of the United States, few countries can achieve the production level of the "Corn Belt" of the United States.The U.S. Corn Belt has deep soils, favorable temperatures and lengths of sunshine, and nearly optimum rainfall.Therefore, China's crop yields will certainly increase in the coming decades, but not by much.In fact, the annual increase in yields for some crops may have been less pronounced.

Although the conclusion of Brown's analysis of China's grain problem is wrong, the obstacles he pointed out that affect China's grain development are objective.If we can't better solve these obstacles, China's grain production will be difficult to develop greatly, and the situation predicted by Brown may not be impossible.However, Brown believes that China has no way to overcome these obstacles, and we will use a large amount of data and materials to prove in the future analysis that as long as we attach great importance to agricultural production and food issues, China's food problem can be completely solved. Solve it by your own efforts.Therefore, instead of denying Brown's prediction, we should study some of Brown's valuable analysis seriously.And whether China will have the embarrassing situation predicted by Brown that it cannot support itself depends on our future efforts and measures on the food issue.In a word, the decision is in our own hands!

Brown's concern about China's food issue is largely not about the Chinese people, but because he is worried that the Chinese will grab food from their bowls. He believes that China will soon become a food importing country.The large amount of its imports will trigger an unprecedented rise in world food prices.He believes that China's grain shortage in the future will be between 207 million tons and 369 million tons, while the current total grain export in the world is only 200 million tons.With such a large food gap, not only no country can afford it, even if all the food exported from the world is given to China, there will still be less.Therefore, he believes that China will become a great burden to the world, and the crisis in China will be transformed into a crisis in the world.He even believes that: "The real contradiction in the world at present is not in Somalia and Haiti, which are plagued by poverty, as we usually imagine, but in China, which is experiencing rapid economic development." Because Brown wrongly estimated China's grain situation, he not only exaggerated China's grain shortage without any basis, but also came to the conclusion of China's crisis theory. China is by no means a burden on the earth, and China will never cause a food crisis in the world. This will be what we will discuss later.In this regard, Brown also believes that his prediction is one-sided and extreme.However, one of Brown's words is objective and worthy of our attention, that is, once a large food shortage occurs in China, no country can help, and no one can feed a population of more than one billion. After 40 years of brilliance in world food production, the steady growth momentum of marine and terrestrial food production has also stagnated, especially after the catch of marine fisheries rose from 22 million tons in 1950 to 100 million tons in 1990, and now basically There is no hope of further growth.The total grain output was 631 million tons in 1950, and rose to 1.78 billion tons in 1990, an increase of 1.149 billion tons. In most years of this period, the growth rate of grain was higher than the growth rate of population.However, since 1990, the growth rate of grain has slowed down significantly.According to Brown's prediction, the total grain output will only increase by 369 million tons in the next 40 years, that is, an average increase of 9 million tons per year.Facts have partially proved the accuracy of its predictions. Since 1990, the world's total grain output has not increased, and the total grain output in 1994 was even slightly lower than that in 1990.At the same time, from 1987 to 1994, world grain reserves fell from an all-time high of 465 million tons to 298 million tons, a 20-year low. Brown further analyzed that with the increase of the world population and the deterioration of the environment, it is difficult to have a large increase in food exports, while the demand for food imports is increasing significantly. In 1950, North America was the only region with a large grain export surplus. In fact, the 23 million tons of grain exported by North America basically offset the 22 million tons of grain imported by Western Europe.At that time, Asia had just started to import food, but it was only a small amount (only 6 million tons) compared with Europe. This pattern changed over the years, and by 1990, North America was still the world's leading grain exporter (110 million tonnes), but imported mainly to Asia (81 million tonnes). .Latin America shifted from a small surplus to a net import of 10 million tonnes of grain, with imports including Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela and other smaller countries, which just offset Argentina's exports.During this period, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, similar to Africa, also began to import large quantities of grain.By 1990, they were 35 million tons and 25 million tons respectively. Brown also analyzed the situation of food exporting countries such as Australia, Canada, Argentina, Thailand and even the United States one by one. Most of these countries face land and water constraints, and some countries are serious.Therefore, since the 1990s, although the grain output of these countries has continued to increase due to the development of science and technology, the export volume has decreased significantly.Moreover, there are still many countries in the world that need more food than China. Even if the food production of these exporting countries doubles, there will still be serious food shortages in the future. In 1990, 10 countries including India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan imported 32 million tons of grain, roughly 1/6 of the global total. By 2030, assuming that the dietary structure and agricultural production of these countries have not improved, Its imports will also reach 190 million tons.That's six times the amount they currently import, and nearly as much as the world exported in 1994 combined. Obviously, no one can feed China except China itself. This is a problem that we must be very clear about.The world food market, which is already experiencing food shortages, can no longer provide food to China, a large country with a population of more than one billion. China can only solve its own food problem by itself.It is naive and unrealistic to simply focus on the world grain market.Historical experience and lessons tell us that we must base ourselves on food self-sufficiency, and the status and prospects of world food development also require us to base ourselves on food self-sufficiency.Therefore, Jiang Zemin, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and President of the State, has repeatedly emphasized: "The food problem of the 1.2 billion Chinese people can only be solved by themselves, and they can also be solved by self-reliance." , it is bound to be controlled by other food exporting countries. If there is any disturbance, we may be constrained, and the phenomenon of starvation will occur as a result. This is not impossible.In this regard, Zhu Rongji made it very clear.During an inspection of China’s rural bases, Zhu Rongji emphasized that: As a populous country accounting for one-fifth of the world’s population, China’s grain must be based on the country and must not depend on others. This is related to the self-reliance of the country and the safety of the nation. shake.The international grain market is controlled by a few countries, and the United States accounts for half of the world's total exports.Monopoly is easy to form a "strategic weapon". In the mid-1980s, the import volume of the former Soviet Union once reached 50 million tons. The United States once imposed an embargo, which is a good example. So, from this perspective, Brown's statement that "no country or group of countries can feed China" makes sense.China's food problem can only be solved by itself, and no one can help.And as long as we take a series of measures to develop food production, China's food problem can be completely solved by our own efforts. From this, we can draw the conclusion that whether the Chinese people will be hungry or not depends on our attitude towards the food problem and the measures we take.In other words, the initiative is in our hands, and the right to make decisions is also in our hands! In order for us not to go hungry in the future and for our future generations not to go hungry, strengthening food production and reforming the food distribution system have become our top priority!