The UN’s food agency warned on Tuesday that a severe drought was threatening the wheat crop in China, the world’s largest wheat producer, and resulting in shortages of drinking water for people and livestock.
China has been essentially self-sufficient in grain for decades, for national security reasons. Any move by Beijing to import large quantities of food in response to the drought could drive international prices even higher than the record levels recently reached.
“China’s grain situation is critical to the rest of the world — if they are forced to go out on the market to procure adequate supplies for their population, it could send huge shock waves through the world’s grain markets,” said Robert Zeigler, the director general of the International Rice Research Institute in Los Banos, Philippines.
The state-run media in China warned on Monday that the country’s major agricultural regions were facing their worst drought in 60 years. On Tuesday, Xinhua news agency said that Shandong Province, a cornerstone of Chinese grain production, was bracing for its worst drought in 200 years unless substantial precipitation came by the end of this month.
World wheat prices are already surging and have been widely cited as one reason for protests in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world. A separate UN report last week said global food export prices reached record levels last month. The impact of China’s drought on global food prices and supplies could create serious problems for less affluent countries that rely on imported food.
With US$2.85 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, nearly three times that of Japan, the country with the second-largest reserves, China has ample buying power to prevent any serious food shortages.
“They can buy whatever they need to buy and they can outbid anyone,” Zeigler said.
China’s self-sufficiency in grain prevented world food prices from moving even higher when they spiked three years ago, he said.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said on Tuesday that 5.16 million hectares of China’s 14 million hectares of wheat fields had been affected by the drought. It said that 2.57 million people and 2.79 million head of livestock faced shortages of drinking water.
Chinese state media are describing the drought in increasingly dire terms.
“Minimal rainfall or snow this winter has crippled China’s major agricultural regions, leaving many of them parched,” Xinhua said. “Crop production has fallen sharply, as the worst drought in six decades shows no sign of letting up.”
Xinhua said that Shandong Province, in the heart of the Chinese wheat belt, had received only 1.2cm of rain since September. The report did not provide a comparison for normal rainfall for the period.
The FAO, in its “special alert” on Tuesday, said the drought’s effects had been somewhat tempered by government irrigation projects and relatively few days of subzero temperatures. The agency went on to caution that extreme cold, with temperatures of minus 18°C, could have “devastating” effects.
Kisan Gunjal, the FAO food emergency officer in Rome who handles Asia alerts, said by telephone that if rain came soon and temperatures warmed up, then the wheat crop could still be saved and a bumper crop might even be possible.
On Tuesday, Chinese meteorological agencies were warning of frost for the next nine nights in the heart of Shandong Province, with temperatures falling to as low as minus 6°C. They forecast little chance of precipitation over the next 10 days except for the possibility of a light rain or a dusting of snow, which came on Thursday.
Gunjal said the special alert on China was the first that the FAO had issued anywhere this year. There was only one last year, expressing “grave concern” about food supplies in the Sahel region of Africa, notably Niger.
Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) made separate visits to drought-stricken areas last week and each called for “all-out efforts” to cope with the water shortage.
Typically, world food reports barely mention China, partly because many details of the country’s agriculture production and reserves are state secrets. However, China is enormously important to the world’s food supply, especially if something goes wrong.
The heat wave in Russia last summer, combined with floods in Australia in recent months, has drawn worldwide attention to the international wheat market, because Russia and Australia have historically been big exporters.
However, China’s wheat industry has existed in almost total isolation, with virtually no exports or imports, until last year, when modest imports began. Yet it is enormous, accounting for one-sixth of global wheat output. The FAO’s statistical database shows that in 2009, the last year for which data are available, China produced almost twice as much wheat as the US or Russia and more than five times as much as Australia.
Currently, the ground in the country is so dry from Beijing south through the provinces of Hebei, Henan and Shandong to Jiangsu Province, just north of Shanghai, that trees and houses are coated with topsoil that has blown off parched fields.
China’s national obsession with self-sufficiency in food includes corn, another crop that is grown and consumed almost entirely in China with minimal imports or exports. Little known outside of China, the country’s corn industry grows one-fifth of the world’s corn, according to FAO statistics. China’s corn crop is mostly in the country’s northern provinces, where the drought is worst now.
Gunjal said the success or failure of the corn crop, as well as the rice crop, would depend mostly on rainfall this spring and summer, not the shortage of rain this winter.
Winters tend to be dry in southern China, the world’s largest rice-producing region. However, this winter is drier than most. Hong Kong received only 53 percent of its usual rainfall in December and 22 percent of its usual rainfall last month, according to the Hong Kong Observatory.
China had about 55 million tonnes of wheat in stockpiles as of last summer, Gunjal said. That was equal to about half the annual harvest.
China is already the world’s largest importer of soybeans, which are oilseeds, not a grain. China buys soybeans mainly for use as animal feed, because the Chinese diet is shifting toward more meat.
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