Who Will Feed China?

The National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2025 report basically predicts that China will be the new America (see JKSlothrop's earlier blog). I've been saying that shit for years now. I don't mean to sound alarmist, but let me tell you about one very alarming scenario, and this isn't just a possible scenario, it is in fact, already happening.

In 1988 Worldwatch Institute co-founder and author Lester R. Brown began to talk and write about the convergence he saw coming between China's growing food needs and her leveling-off ability to increase food production. In 1994 he published his article Who Will Feed China and pointed out how the trend of industrialization in China would inevitably lead to her becoming a food-importing country.

As the industrialization trend of replacing farmland with factories and roads continued, China's population mounted. And in 1995 something happened that had never happened before in the history of the world -- something scary. That year, the most populous nation on Earth had to import food to feed herself, and it sent shocks through the world's grain markets.

Over the next twenty years, Brown predicts, China's need for imported grain will grow from a few million tons to over 200, and perhaps as much as 300 million tons. Yet, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, grain exports of all the food-exporting countries of the entire world in 1994 were less than 230 million tons. And those exports are helping to feed over 100 nations which have become food importers: only a few dozen export, and only Canada and the United States export grain in any significant quantity.

Further, the ability of Canada and the United States to grow enough food for export is tenuously balanced on the shifting whims of weather.

When China becomes hungry over the next few years, her need for food will rock world food prices, according to Brown and others. We're already starting to see this phenomenon right here in our own community of Las Vegas. As prices rise worldwide, those countries unable to cover the rising cost of food will tip over into famine as China, now a goods-exporting powerhouse, can raise the money to pay for her food.

Food may well become the commodity that's scarce long before oil dries up. Unfortunately, however, so few people in the most affluent parts of the world -- who have the financial and political power to be most effective in doing something about this -- have any real understanding of the situation.

Clearly, the Chinese are willing to pay almost any price not to be dependents in the coming decades.