Can America feed China?

AFTER A REMARKABLE EXPANSION of grain output from 90,000,000 tons in 1950 to 392,000,000 tons in 1998, China's grain harvest has fallen in four of the last five years, skidding to 322,000,000 tons in 2003. This drop exceeds the total grain harvest of Canada. Production of each of the three grains that dominate China's agriculture--wheat, rice, and corn--has plummeted, but wheat, grown mostly in the water-short north, has dipped the most. With wheat stocks diminishing and domestic prices climbing, Chinese wheat buying delegations have visited several grain-exporting countries. Recent purchases of some 5,000,000 tons in Australia, Canada, and the U.S. have set world wheat prices on an upward trend.

Yet, these price rises may be only the early tremors before the real quake. China's harvest shortfalls of recent years have been covered by drawing down its once massive stocks of grain, but these soon will be gone, forcing it to cover the entire shortfall with imports. China's wheat harvest fell short of consumption in 2003 by 18,000,000 tons. After wheat stocks have vanished within the next year or so, this entire shortfall will have to be bolstered by imports. In some ways, China's rice deficit is even more serious. Trying to cover its rice shortfall of 20,000,000 tons in a world where annual rice exports total a mere 26,000,000 tons could create economic chaos. With a corn shortfall of 15,000,000 tons and stocks already largely depleted, it soon will have to import corn as well

The handwriting on the wall is clear. While grain production is dropping, demand is climbing, driven by the addition of 11,000,000 people per year and by last rising incomes. As incomes increase. China's citizens are moving up the food chain, consuming more grain-fed livestock products such as pork, poultry, eggs, and, to a lesser degree, beef and milk. The fall in grain production hugely is due to a waning of the grain harvested area from 90,000,000 hectares in 1998 to 77,000,000 in 2003. Several trends are converging here, including the loss of irrigation water and grainland to desert expansion, conversion of cropland to nonfarm uses, shift of grainland to higher value crops, and a decline in double-cropping due to the loss of farm labor in the more prosperous coastal provinces.

Water tables are dipping throughout the northern half of the country. As aquifers are emptied and irrigation wells go dry, farmers either revert to low-yield dryland fanning or, in the more arid regions, abandon it altogether. In the competition for water, cities and industry invariably get first claim, leaving farmers with a shrinking share of a shrinking supply. Losing water often means losing land.

Farmers are forfeiting real estate for other reasons as well. Expanding deserts, such as the Gobi, which is consuming 4,000 square miles of new territory each year, are devouring farmland. Paying farmers in the north and west to plant their grainland to trees in an effort to halt the advancing deserts is another factor reducing the grain area.

Urban expansion and industrial and highway construction all are gobbling up the land available for crops. The enthusiasm for establishing development zones for commercial and residential building or industrial parks in the hope of attracting jobs is taking big chunks of cropland. Cars, too, are exacting a toll. Every 20 cars added to China's automobile fleet require the paving of one acre of land, roughly the area of a football field, in parking lots, streets, and highways. The 2,000,000 new cars sold in 2003 require the paving of an area equal to 100,000 football fields.

in a country where farms average an acre and a halt, a shift is under way to higher value fruits and vegetables to boost income. In each of the last 11 years, the area in fruits and vegetables has increased. In the more prosperous coastal provinces, the migration of farm labor to cities has made it quite difficult to double-crop land. For example, the once widespread practice of double-cropping winter wheat and summer corn depends on quickly harvesting wheat once it ripens in June and immediately preparing the seedbed to plant corn. Many villagers no longer have enough labor to make this quick transition.

Reversing the fall in grain production will not be easy. Each of the contributing trends has a great deal of momentum. Turning around any one of them would take an enormous effort. Reversing all of them is inconceivable. If newly adopted economic incentives should coincide with unusually favorable weather this year, a modest upturn in grain production might be possible, but it likely would be temporary.

China is the first major grain-producing country where a combination of environmental and economic trends have combined to reverse the historical growth in production. This decline in a country containing more than one-fifth of the world's population undoubtedly will trigger global effects. For instance, China's likely need for such imports of grain comes at a time when world stocks already are at their lowest level in 30 years and U.S. farmers are losing irrigation water to aquifer depletion and cities.

When China turns to the global market, it will (out of necessity) turn to the U.S., which controls nearly half of world grain exports. This presents an unprecedented geopolitical situation where 1,300,000,000 Chinese consumers who have a $120,000,000,000 trade surplus with America--enough to buy the entire U.S. grain harvest twice--will compete with our consumers for focal, likely driving up prices.

Moving grain from the U.S. to China on the scale that China will likely need means loading two or three ships every day. The long line of cargo vessels laden with grain that soon may stretch across the Pacific Ocean will bring the two countries closer together economically, but managing this flow of grain to optimize the benefits for the people of both nations will not be an easy task. In fact, look for this situation to become one of the major U.S. foreign policy challenges of the 21st century.

Lester R. Brown, Ecology Editor of USA Today, is president of Earth Policy Institute, Washington, D.C., and author of Plan B: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble.

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