Agriculture in China has for many years ranked first in the world in terms of crops planted. This country has traditionally grown wheat, tea, rice, potatoes, tomatoes, cotton, oilseeds, and other crops. In all, agriculture employs more than 300,000,000 people, as it is one of the largest industries in the country.
Despite the huge amount of crop production in China, there is a problem with food, so we have to buy food from other countries. This is natural, because it is problematic to feed almost 1.5 billion people, especially considering the specifics of the country.
There is not much fertile soil in China, and those that are available need irrigation and are constantly exposed to natural disasters: hurricanes and droughts. Nevertheless, the country’s government is successfully meeting the challenges of providing the domestic market with food through the development of agriculture, the use of advanced technology and the support of its producers.
Switching from a plant-based to a meat-based diet
Before 1990, most people in China ate mainly plant-based foods. Today the situation has begun to change dramatically. Meat food was a delicacy. The Chinese ate mostly land-grown foods based on rice, corn, and wheat. Thus, people were forced to survive, but the situation today has changed.
Now there are more than 70 kilograms of pork for every Chinese person a year, and this figure is constantly growing. The main problem for the state has been the cultivation of crops that are used to feed livestock and poultry.
China’s main agricultural problem
China has always been an agrarian country. Most of the population lived in the countryside, and people were forced to farm there, as there was simply no other work. But times have changed: the development of the economy, in particular manufacturing, led to the fact that already in 2011 the number of rural and urban population reached the same level.
State support for agricultural producers
China’s government policy is aimed at supporting agricultural producers, and these are not empty words, but real actions. If we compare average exchange prices for leading agricultural crops such as wheat, corn, rapeseed and soybeans on European, Argentinean and Australian exchanges, they are 39% lower than the prices on Chinese exchanges. This confirms that the government buys the products of its own agricultural producers at prices more than a third higher than the world prices. This is how the government not in words, but with the help of finances supports the development of agriculture in China.
Active government support is also expressed through a system of targeted subsidies and control of food imports. The labor-intensive methods of crop cultivation are constantly being modernized.