Seawater Rice, Which Yuan Longping Helped Develop, Is About to Be Trial-Planted. What Kind of Problem Is Food Security?

The thinking behind so-called self-sufficiency is not as simple as it sounds.

According to a May 7 report by The Paper, the test base of the Qingdao Seawater Rice Research and Development Center will soon harvest a new batch of seawater rice, and plans to plant it this year, for the first time, at five representative saline-alkali sites around the country. Zhang Guodong, deputy director of the center, said: "We aim to produce, by 2018, at least one nationally certified variety that can be promoted widely across the country."

"Seawater rice" means rice varieties that tolerate salt and alkali. Botanists normally list rice as a salt-intolerant crop. But research has found that salt tolerance varies enormously from variety to variety. Since China has nearly 1.5 billion mu of saline-alkali land, breeding a salt- and alkali-tolerant rice that can be grown at scale has long been one of the tasks of Chinese rice breeders.

In late 2014, Chen Risheng, a native of Zhanjiang, and the "Haidao 86" variety he discovered drew media attention. According to reports, in November 2014 Haidao 86 — which grows on high-salinity coastal tidal flats — reached a yield of 300 jin per mu, and was certified by the seawater rice expert panel of what was then the Ministry of Agriculture.

The Qingdao center is often mentioned alongside Yuan Longping, the man known as the "father of hybrid rice." At a signing ceremony in October 2016, Yuan said he would develop a seawater rice yielding 300 kilograms per mu within three years. Public reports also noted that Yuan himself spends at least three months a year in Qingdao working on seawater rice.

"If seawater rice is expanded to 100 million mu, at a minimum yield of 300 kilograms per mu, that would add 30 billion kilograms of grain a year — enough to feed another 80 million people, equal to the entire annual grain output of Hunan Province," Yuan said.

In China, yield per mu carries a great deal of meaning. In 1958, People's Daily ran a report claiming an early-rice yield of 10,000 jin per mu in Macheng County, Hubei Province. The rice yield records Yuan Longping kept breaking have also been read as a sign of national strength. Even Jack Ma, talking about the countryside, has said: "Mr. Yuan Longping pushed yield per mu to 1,000 jin, and the internet has to push yield per mu to $1,000."

All of it comes back to food security. In an interview, Yuan Longping said: "Those of us in agricultural research have to be willing to shoulder the load of ensuring food security." Zhang Guodong likewise believes seawater rice will do a great deal to safeguard food security in China and the world, to advance supply-side structural reform in agriculture, and to ease pressure on the red line for arable land.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization has a clear definition of food security: "all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs for an active and healthy life."

The definition is in fact quite strict. Take a country that has stockpiled a great deal of grain, but where the gap between rich and poor is so wide that many poor people cannot afford to buy food; or a country whose food supply chain is so narrow that it can supply only staple grains. Neither would count as meeting the conditions for food security.

In the Chinese context, food security is focused on two things: grain and staple food. Where the FAO speaks of "obtaining sufficient, high-quality food through domestic production or imports," China's priority is to "ensure basic self-sufficiency in grain and absolute security in staple food": "Only a country that stands on basic grain self-sufficiency can hold the initiative on food security, and only then can it keep control of the larger picture of economic and social development."

Wording like this makes it easy to equate food security with self-sufficiency, but the two are not the same idea. Food security is a goal. Ethically, it is also an obligation a government owes its citizens. A government that cannot guarantee its citizens enough food loses its own legitimacy.

Because countries are at different stages of development, they differ in how far they can deliver on that promise. Rich countries can think about balanced nutrition; poorer ones may only manage to keep their citizens fed. Official Chinese figures from 2018 put the number of people still living in poverty at 30 million, with GDP per capita of about US$8,582, 74th in the world.

But the question of whether food security should be reached through self-sufficiency — a question Chinese officialdom has long answered yes to — is now facing more and more doubt.

The insistence on self-sufficiency is a familiar note in China. Recently, after the US government barred American companies from selling chips to ZTE, a view has been gaining ground at home that China should master the core technology of chip production so that it is no longer at the mercy of others.

On food security, the Chinese government is just as anxious about the instability of depending on outside supply. People's Daily once published an article saying: "More than a billion Chinese people cannot live by buying their meals. Otherwise, at the slightest disturbance, there would be no grain to buy even with money, and the country would be left with no room to move." Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote much the same in his geopolitical book The Grand Chessboard: "Dependence on food imports would strain China's economic resources and make China more vulnerable to outside pressure."

The worry is not groundless. Between 2007 and 2008, a fall in global grain output, large volumes of grain going to energy rather than food, and a growing population together drove world grain prices up fast; at the end of 2007 they briefly hit a record US$10 a bushel (a unit of weight equal to 27.2 kilograms). Global grain reserves also fell to a low.

To handle the world food crisis and steady prices at home, many governments restricted grain exports. China canceled its grain export subsidies and, from 2008, began charging export duties on some grain products. Many countries hit by the crisis protested the protective measures taken by China and others, arguing they damaged free trade and worked against other countries' security.

Seen from the other side: had China not been fully self-sufficient at the time in corn, wheat and rice, its three main grain crops, prices that were already climbing fast inside China might well have shot up faster still, shaking the stability and development of society as a whole.

Yet China's case for grain self-sufficiency was never only about protecting its own interests. It was also an answer to the "China food threat" argument coming from abroad.

In 1994, the American Lester Brown published the essay "Who Will Feed China?" Brown argued that China's ever-growing population and its shortage of water could put heavy pressure on the world's grain supply. Taking China's demand for eggs as an example, he wrote: "If China's hens each lay 200 eggs a year, China will need 1.3 billion hens to meet its people's demand. But reaching that would take an extra 24 million tons of grain a year — as much as Canada's entire grain exports."

In reply, the Chinese government's 1996 white paper The Grain Issue in China said: "China's import of small quantities of grain will absolutely not threaten world food security, and the so-called international 'China food threat theory' is groundless," and "China solving its grain problem on its own can only help improve world food security and strengthen the stabilizing factors in world grain trade."

In that white paper the government set out its direction for the following 20 years: "Relying on domestic resources to achieve basic self-sufficiency in grain is China's basic policy for solving the problem of grain supply and demand. China will work to raise domestic grain output and, under normal conditions, keep the grain self-sufficiency rate at no less than 95%, with net imports no more than 5% of domestic consumption."

Raising grain output, and feeding a growing Chinese population, is not a goal you reach simply by urging farmers to plant more grain. Agriculture is an enormous problem, tangled up with land tenure, the way labor is organized, state grain procurement, farm technology and much else. Yuan Longping's hybrid rice, which raised yields per mu sharply, is only one piece of it.

Of all the factors bearing on food security, the one analyzed most is the institutional one. The historian Yang Kuisong, examining the famines of the 1950s, wrote: "By 1955 there had plainly been severe spring famine, deaths from starvation, extreme grain shortages and widespread social panic, yet the central leaders in charge of economic and operational work failed to see the causal link between what was happening and grain procurement." Abnormal deaths jumped from 263 in 1953 to 10,012 in 1956.

The economist Justin Yifu Lin published an article on China's grain problem in 2003: "The rural reform of 25 years ago (that is, 1978) put the household contract responsibility system in place of the collective production-team system, and between 1978 and 1984 agricultural output grew by an average of 7.7% a year, while farmers' incomes grew fast too, at an average of 13.4% a year."

As the dividend from institutional reform faded, the forces pushing China's grain output up changed as well. In 2015, output reached 1.24287 trillion jin, the 12th straight year of growth. But in the view of Cheng Guoqiang, a researcher at the State Council's Development Research Center, "that figure offers an illusion and a psychological comfort. In fact, in both fiscal and ecological terms, it has already gone beyond what our definition of food security can bear."

The unbroken rise in output, he explained, "has come at the price of more fertilizer and pesticide, farm development pushed to its limit, and a sacrificed environment."

"By 2013, moderately to severely polluted farmland in China had reached about 50 million mu; the share of farmland exceeding pollution limits was 19.4%, covering 350 million mu. Fertilizer use per mu of Chinese farmland is roughly three times that of developed countries, yet only about 30% of it is taken up in a single season, more than 20 percentage points below developed countries. Only about 33% of pesticide is taken up, 20 to 30 percentage points below developed countries, and about 140 million mu of farmland nationwide is contaminated by pesticide, badly impairing the soil's capacity to clean itself."

At the same time, critics argue that China's self-sufficiency-minded grain policy has turned into trade protection by another name. Its point is to protect farmers' incomes, but it has blocked China's farm produce markets from working efficiently.

In 2007, to encourage corn planting in the main growing regions and safeguard national food security, the state set up a temporary corn stockpiling system, buying corn at a fixed price. To protect farmers, that purchase price rose year after year. But from 2011 world corn prices began to fall, until international corn was cheaper than Chinese corn.

By market logic, the state should then have switched to buying corn abroad — but that did not fit the policy of self-sufficiency. Under the stockpiling system the state went on buying domestic corn, and ended up with an expensive pile of it and more than the country could use. By 2015 the national corn stock stood at 250 million tons, close to half of the country's entire annual grain output, and storing it cost the budget 63 billion yuan a year.

In 2016 the state scrapped the temporary corn stockpiling system. Corn output began to fall, planted area shrank by more than 50 million mu, and stocks dropped below 200 million tons. Chinese officials called the move a form of agricultural supply-side reform, letting the laws of the market take over the running of farming.

Huang Jikun, director of Peking University's China Center for Agricultural Policy and a fellow of The World Academy of Sciences, has pointed out that misjudgment in the early 2000s — putting too much weight on food security — produced a string of policies that should never have been introduced. "The farm subsidy policies and price-support policies that came later had very negative effects."

On food security, Huang Jikun's view is that China does not have a food security problem at all. Food security, and the security of water and land resources, must be handled in a global setting, he argues, not on China's own limited stock of land. His research shows that if China's food self-sufficiency rate falls by 4 to 5 percentage points over the next 15 years — down to about 90% — food security would not be threatened.

That, in fact, is what many scholars have been recommending in recent years. Equating food security with self-sufficiency for so long has left Chinese farm policy with many problems. Lowering the self-sufficiency target somewhat and leaning more on global trade, they argue, would be a better way to solve them.

Ke Bingsheng, president of China Agricultural University, told Caixin that food security is a question of supply and demand, and that since the market can adjust supply and demand, it can adjust food security too. Ning Gaoning, chairman of COFCO Corporation, told the 2015 China Development Forum that free trade is the only way to solve global food security.

Scholars who take this line usually cite Amartya Sen, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in economics. In 1981 Sen published Poverty and Famines, arguing that famine is caused not by the world running short of food but by inequality in the way food is distributed.

FAO figures show that since the 2014/15 season the world has produced slightly more grain each year than it has used, and world grain stocks have risen every year. In that sense Sen's conclusion opens a new way to think about the world food problem: "Even though the world not having enough food can leave someone facing famine, that is only one of many possible causes. Whether a famine has anything to do with food supply is a matter for investigation of the facts."

In 2013 China made a small adjustment to its grain policy. Cheng Guoqiang read it as a move "from protecting everything to protecting the essentials: basic self-sufficiency in grain and absolute security in staple food, with moderate imports written into the food security strategy for the first time — calling for more active use of international farm markets and farm resources to adjust and supplement domestic grain supply." The Financial Times read it as China giving up its ideological commitment to self-sufficiency.

Even so, it is clear that at the policy level the officials who handle agriculture do not fully agree. In its 2016 coverage of the Two Sessions, Caixin wrote: "Chen Xiwen, deputy head and office director of the Central Rural Work Leading Group (now chairman of the National People's Congress Committee for Agriculture and Rural Affairs), once said that of China's current grain supply, about 100 billion jin was 'ineffective supply.' But Han Changfu, the agriculture minister (now minister of agriculture and rural affairs), said at a Two Sessions press conference on March 7 that having a bit too much grain 'is a good thing.'"

The Economist, writing about Chinese food security, argued: "Some leaders seem to understand that the goal of self-sufficiency has to be pursued more flexibly … But the Communist Party has always taken pride in its rural roots and does not want to stir up trouble in the countryside. So whenever it senses that domestic producers are under threat, the government goes on putting up barriers against imports."

The side that insists on self-sufficiency may now have another bargaining chip. In 2017 China imported 32.85 million tons of soybeans from the United States, at a cost of US$13.94 billion. As the trade war between the two countries escalated, China announced a 25% tariff on American soybeans.

To cover the shortfall, several provinces and cities in northeast China have not only turned to Brazil and Canada for imports but recently issued urgent orders to expand the area planted with soybeans. Li Guoxiang, a senior researcher at the Rural Development Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told National Business Daily that beyond fixing the structural imbalances of the past, "the other aim is to cut dependence on imported soybeans, which matters over the long term for reviving the rural economy."

Figures released in May by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs state: "It is estimated that in 2017/18 China's soybean planted area will be 7.783 million hectares, up 8.1% on the previous year, with total soybean output of 14.55 million tons, up 12.4%." Set against the trade war, this reads less like a ministry forecast than a target that has to be met.

Grain self-sufficiency will clearly get harder for China from here. In December 2016 national grain output fell, ending 12 straight years of growth. The National Bureau of Statistics blamed a decline in both planted area and yield per unit. The deeper causes, as described above, run through land tenure, the organization of labor, state procurement, farm technology and environmental protection. There is no simple fix.

With the prospects for institutional reform still unclear, farm technology like Yuan Longping's seawater rice has been loaded with higher hopes. Ke Bingsheng of China Agricultural University argues that food security rests not on protected prices but on better agricultural infrastructure and on technical progress.

Seawater rice has met with doubts of its own. Xing Junwu, a scholar who has long studied saline-alkali agriculture, wrote in China Science and Technology News: "Seawater rice claims it can deliver the grand vision of growing rice on 1.5 billion mu of saline-alkali land and feeding an extra 200 million people. That shows they do not grasp that saline-alkali land is caused by drought and lack of water. In fact, if there were water, rice would have been planted long ago across these vast saline-alkali regions."

Public reports say Yuan Longping's seawater rice is irrigated with water at a salinity of six parts per thousand. Xing Junwu calls that no more than "irrigation with slightly brackish or salty water blended with a little seawater," adding that "so-called 'half seawater' should have a salt content of at least fifteen parts per thousand."

Wang Feng, director of the Rice Research Institute at the Guangdong Academy of Agricultural Sciences, told The Paper: "But there is still plenty of good farmland that nobody is farming properly — so how many people are going to go and plant saline-alkali land, where conditions are worse?"

Cover image: a still from the film Food, Inc.