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Food security: China's success story

Pallavi Aiyar

China has hugely improved the availability of, and access to, food through a combination of a sound agricultural policy, development of rural infrastructure, and investment in research and development in the farm sector.

LESS THAN 50 years after some devastating famines, China has emerged as the world's third largest food donor. According to a report by the World Food Programme (WFP) released late last month, China donated 5,77,000 tonnes of food in 2005, mainly to neighbouring North Korea, placing it only behind the United States and the European Union on the list of global food donors.

The report's findings underline China's growing economic clout in Asia and show how far the country has come in ensuring its food security. With 1.3 billion mouths to feed and a land mass largely unsuited to agriculture (only around 14 per cent of the territory comprises arable land), China's achievements in vanquishing hunger are all the more impressive.

China reached its goal of 95 per cent self-sufficiency in food production around a decade ago, but as Huang Jikun, Director of the Centre for Chinese Agricultural Policy, points out, self-sufficiency does not automatically spell food security. On the parameter of self-sufficiency, China is, in fact, worse off today than 10 years ago. If one takes into account the country's burgeoning imports of soybean, which is officially classified as a grain in China, it is currently less than 90 per cent self-sufficient in grain production, five per cent less than in the mid-1990s.

Yet household food security has never been stronger. Koen Vanormelingen, Chief of Health and Nutrition for UNICEF in China, calls the country's efforts in fighting hunger and malnutrition "spectacular".

By contrast, India reached self-sufficiency in grain production years before China following the Green Revolution of the 1970s but even today it is home to 35 per cent of all underweight children in the world. According to UNICEF, India in fact has 57 million children suffering from malnutrition compared to only seven million in China.

In China, underweight prevalence in children under five was reduced by more than half from 19 per cent in 1990 to just under seven per cent in 2005. The under-five mortality rate also sharply dropped from 49 per 1000 live births in 1990 to 31 in 2004. Annabel Wang, spokesperson for the China Office of the WFP, points out that the country reduced the percentage of its population classified as "hungry" by a third in a single decade during the 1990s.

In India, however, successes in increasing aggregate food supply have not translated into benefits for the lower strata of the rural poor in terms of greater food security or greater economic opportunity and well being. The World Hunger Series report for 2006 highlights what it calls India's "silent emergency." It points out that although India has not suffered from a major famine since the1943 Bengal crisis, more people die each year of malnutrition in the country than those who lost their lives in 1943.

Dr. Vanormelingen explains that hunger and malnutrition are related to an amalgamation of factors including availability and access to food (traditionally known as food security), access to health services, and quality caring practices such as breast-feeding. These are, in turn, underpinned by broader structural issues such as poverty reduction, gender empowerment, and education.

China has hugely improved the availability of and access to food through a combination of a sound agricultural policy that has led to a gradual liberalisation of the sector, the development of rural infrastructure, and investment in research and development in the agricultural sector. Professor Huang describes how China has moved from a system where all the land was collectively owned and the entire food procurement and distribution systems managed by the government to a liberalised set-up where "efficiency rather than only equity" is seen as key.

Since 2001, the China State Grain Bureau, the equivalent of the Food Corporation of India, has been functioning as a corporation, separate from government and focussed on efficiency. He says that in the 1990s when China was still obsessed with self-sufficiency in grain, every province and every county in the country had quotas of grain that it had to fulfil regardless of the area's topographical features.

Today, Professor Huang continues, the focus is less on self-sufficiency and more on leveraging competitive advantages. He takes soybean as an example once again. In the 1990s, China imported no soybean at all despite a high demand and lack of domestic suitability for its cultivation. In contrast, last year China imported 26 million tonnes of soybean while it only produced 15 million tonnes domestically.

"The demand for soybean is growing but rather than meet it domestically we have realised it is better to import it. We should focus on what we are most suited to producing instead." Professor Huang points out that whereas China used to grow its own soybean while importing value-added products like soy oil, today it imports the bean and processes it domestically. This means China is creating more jobs within the country.

Role of infrastructure

He adds that the excellent infrastructure China developed in the 1990s played a key role in improving food security as a whole since it allowed for the timely movement of commodities between provinces and between food surplus and deficit areas. The fact that China has instituted research and development centres in virtually every county to work on developing high yielding varieties of crops has also helped, he says.

However, China's agricultural policy on its own would be insufficient to meet the challenges of fighting hunger, admits Professor Huang. Like Dr. Vanormelingen, he highlights the more general achievements of China in poverty reduction. Nearly two-thirds of the Chinese population was classified as "poor" in the late 1970s according to the World Bank standard of a dollar a day. Today less than 10 per cent counts as "poor" using the same classification.

"China has made comprehensive progress on all fronts: poverty reduction, literacy, and gender empowerment," says Dr. Vanormelingen. The one caveat, he says, is that health services are still under par; nonetheless preventative practices are solid. Nearly 80 per cent of Chinese women give birth in hospitals and immunisation and salt iodisation programmes are very effective, he says.

Today, on every parameter for basic education, China is far ahead of India. In 2000, only 47 per cent of all children managed to complete grade 5 of primary schooling in India, as opposed to 98 per cent of Chinese children. The pupil-teacher ratio for primary education in China is one teacher for every 20 students compared to one teacher for every 40 students in India. According to World Bank estimates, youth male illiteracy in India is 20 per cent. In China it's less than one per cent.

Moreover, China has made strong progress in ensuring gender equality in education. According to the Chinese Ministry of Education, from 1990 to 2000, the illiteracy rate among women fell from 32 per cent to 13.5 per cent. The primary education girl-boy ratio in China in 2002 was 90 per cent.

According to Anjana Mangalagiri, Programme Officer in charge of Education at UNICEF's Beijing office, education in China is more politicised than in many other countries, resulting in a strong political commitment to meet targets such as those set out by the U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals.

"China is under the constant scrutiny of the global eye so it has to be very careful, unlike India which as a democracy gets off more lightly," she says. Given its one-party political system, China has to go further in convincing would be investors and the world in general of its progressive credentials.

This makes the government very figures-driven, anxious to meet the goals it has created for itself, such as achieving universal compulsory nine years of education.

Moreover, Beijing has also been quick to realise the economic benefits of a productive labour force. "Education is strongly related to productivity here. For example, the government wants to increase the size of its soldiers because it has read reports linking stunting to intelligence," says Dr. Vanormelingen. Adds Ms. Mangalagiri, "In China, an illiterate population is seen as a burden on the economy and the Chinese do not want parasites."

China's communist history with its emphasis on gender equality and basic education for all meant that China has for long led other developing countries on these parameters of social progress. Since the initiation of economic liberalisation there have in fact been concerns that many of the achievements of the Maoist era in health and education are being rolled back.

Indeed China has gone from being one of the world's most equitable, if poor, societies to one with a massive income divide. Economic and trade liberalisation has meant a painful adjustment for tens of millions of workers laid off from restructured state-owned enterprises and for many in the countryside who suddenly lack health insurance and other basic services guaranteed during Maoist times.

Yet China's basic groundwork in terms of the development of its human capital is sound enough to ensure that the country is ahead of schedule in achieving the U.N.'s millennium development goals in both education and nutrition. Moreover, rising grain prices and the scrapping of some social security benefits have been offset at a macro-level by increased opportunities for off-farm work. Professor Huang points out that since 2003, more than 50 per cent of the income of rural households comes from off-farm work in various factories and enterprises.

In India, there is much envy of China's six-lane highways and glistening malls. China's world-class infrastructure in indeed worthy of emulation. But China's achievements in education, gender empowerment and food security for households, the result of a mix of sound economic policy and political will, are equally imitation worthy.

It's not enough for India to achieve Chinese-level GDP growth rates of 9 and 10 per cent. Before it can have any illusions of "overtaking" China, it must feed and educate its children who are currently worse off on the whole than even those in Africa.

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