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Food self-sufficiency and natural hazards in China

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Abstract

China’s role in the global grain market is expected to expand with increasing demand for food and feed, both within and outside the country. Unforeseen crop failures caused by natural hazards might also be instrumental. This paper uses agricultural production (rice, wheat, maize, tubers, soybeans, and other grains) and natural disaster data (floods and droughts) for 31 provinces in China for the period 1995–2008 to examine the self-sufficiency of China’s domestic harvests. It aims to answer three questions: (1) Is the size of China’s current grain stock adequate as a buffer against seasonal crop failures of the same magnitude as in the past? (2) On a single province basis, does a diversity of grain crops reduce the risk of production shocks due to natural hazards? (3) Which regions are less likely to be affected by natural hazards and should therefore be set aside as agricultural land in order to meet future food self-sufficiency targets? The results show that if the worst crop failures of all provinces between 1995 and 2008 were to happen in the same year, a “theoretical worst-case scenario”, China’s cereal harvest might drop by 140 million tonnes. Therefore, their current grain stock of 120–200 million tonnes is sufficient to buffer China’s cereal supplies against 1 year of production problems. Provinces with a high degree of grain crop diversity over the 13-year period were less affected by floods and more affected by droughts. Food self-sufficiency was the highest in moderately diverse provinces. Key agricultural regions relatively less affected by natural hazards included parts of the North China Plain. In addition, China began to increasingly depend on three provinces in the drought-prone north-east region for attaining grain self-sufficiency. Policies need to enable farms of all sizes to adapt to change and to contribute to food self-sufficiency.

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Acknowledgements

The support of the UK Nature Environment Research Council (NERC) Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is gratefully acknowledged. The work was part of the QUEST-project and the programme of the ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy. Parts of this paper were presented in Leeds, 2–4 April, 2009, as ‘No noodles in Beijing’ at the IX European Conference on Agriculture and Rural Development in China (ECARDC). I am grateful to Evan Fraser, colleagues at University of Leeds and two anonymous reviewers whose comments have improved this paper.

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  1. Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy, School of Earth & Environment, University of Leeds, LS2 9JT, Leeds, UK

    Elisabeth Simelton

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Simelton, E. Food self-sufficiency and natural hazards in China. Food Sec. 3, 35–52 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-011-0114-7

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