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How China banishes hunger and feeds its 1.3b people
By Zhou Zhou |
November 7, 2009, Saturday
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Print Edition
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"HUNGER?" Wang Yaya, 15, considers its meaning: "I'm craving lunch at 11am, and my stomach is growling in the long queues at KFC."
A middle school student in Xinzhou, a small city in Shanxi Province, Wang is puzzled by the word "hunger."
Yaya is one of the new generation of Chinese to whom "hunger" equates with dieting and to whom the country's many famines are only known through history lessons.
China has dragged the vast majority of its 1.3 billion people out of hunger within only one generation. ActionAid, a global anti-poverty agency, released a report on October 16 saying China and Brazil topped the scorecard in the fight against hunger.
Visiting Beijing in October to celebrate 30 years of cooperation between the UN World Food Program (WFP) and the Chinese government, Sheila Sisulu, deputy WFP executive director, said: "One reason I am here is to see first-hand by myself to find and inquire how it happened."
Wang Yanan, the grandmother of Wang Yaya, was born in 1949, and remembers going hungry as a child.
"Father earned the family's bread by hard work, and he had the largest portion. We kids usually had a dollop of thin gruel and some sorghum bread. We hung our heads and suppressed our urge to look at the scrambled egg that was cooked for Dad," she says.
Wang was the eldest of five children when each person received rations of 14 kg of grain a month, barely enough to fill the belly.
In the 1970s, the government began to adopt the family planning policy that has prevented an estimated 400 million births over the last 30 years.
Hania Zlotnik, director of the UN population division, said China's family planning policy made an important contribution to world population control and set a good example for other countries. "In the past, one bread-winner supported seven people, but now a couple supports one child. What a difference," says Wang.
Population control is not a cure-all, though. One of the most effective weapons in China's fight against hunger has been technical and policy support for agricultural development.
The minimum grain purchase price is implemented to encourage grain planting, guaranteeing grain supplies and incomes for farmers. Intensive cultivation has also ensured that China, with just 62 percent of the farmland area of the United States, produced 38 percent more grain.
The hybrid rice species initially cultivated by scientist Yuan Longping, yielded 20 percent more per unit than other rice plants. About 60 percent of the country's total rice production is reliant on hybrid technologies.
In the last 10 years, China's self-sufficiency rate in grain has remained above 95 percent.
According to the UN Occasional Paper on Food Prices Issues in the People's Republic of China, cereal prices in China are "insulated from global market trends" due to the government's emphasis on "self-sufficiency and price stability."
However, feeding children is a long-term task. China had 17.37 million births in 2007, and it must face the challenges of climate change and soil degradation. Hunger is fading from the collective Chinese memory, but the belief in preparing for foul weather in fair times remains.
(The author is a Xinhua writer.)
A middle school student in Xinzhou, a small city in Shanxi Province, Wang is puzzled by the word "hunger."
Yaya is one of the new generation of Chinese to whom "hunger" equates with dieting and to whom the country's many famines are only known through history lessons.
China has dragged the vast majority of its 1.3 billion people out of hunger within only one generation. ActionAid, a global anti-poverty agency, released a report on October 16 saying China and Brazil topped the scorecard in the fight against hunger.
Visiting Beijing in October to celebrate 30 years of cooperation between the UN World Food Program (WFP) and the Chinese government, Sheila Sisulu, deputy WFP executive director, said: "One reason I am here is to see first-hand by myself to find and inquire how it happened."
Wang Yanan, the grandmother of Wang Yaya, was born in 1949, and remembers going hungry as a child.
"Father earned the family's bread by hard work, and he had the largest portion. We kids usually had a dollop of thin gruel and some sorghum bread. We hung our heads and suppressed our urge to look at the scrambled egg that was cooked for Dad," she says.
Wang was the eldest of five children when each person received rations of 14 kg of grain a month, barely enough to fill the belly.
In the 1970s, the government began to adopt the family planning policy that has prevented an estimated 400 million births over the last 30 years.
Hania Zlotnik, director of the UN population division, said China's family planning policy made an important contribution to world population control and set a good example for other countries. "In the past, one bread-winner supported seven people, but now a couple supports one child. What a difference," says Wang.
Population control is not a cure-all, though. One of the most effective weapons in China's fight against hunger has been technical and policy support for agricultural development.
The minimum grain purchase price is implemented to encourage grain planting, guaranteeing grain supplies and incomes for farmers. Intensive cultivation has also ensured that China, with just 62 percent of the farmland area of the United States, produced 38 percent more grain.
The hybrid rice species initially cultivated by scientist Yuan Longping, yielded 20 percent more per unit than other rice plants. About 60 percent of the country's total rice production is reliant on hybrid technologies.
In the last 10 years, China's self-sufficiency rate in grain has remained above 95 percent.
According to the UN Occasional Paper on Food Prices Issues in the People's Republic of China, cereal prices in China are "insulated from global market trends" due to the government's emphasis on "self-sufficiency and price stability."
However, feeding children is a long-term task. China had 17.37 million births in 2007, and it must face the challenges of climate change and soil degradation. Hunger is fading from the collective Chinese memory, but the belief in preparing for foul weather in fair times remains.
(The author is a Xinhua writer.)
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