Farmland shrinkage largely owing to China's rapid urbanization is threatening China's grain production and could result in food shortages, state media reported yesterday.
"The amount of land dedicated to grain production is expected to continue shrinking in the years ahead, but [farm lands] will still have to produce a minimum of 500 million tonnes to feed China in 2010," the China Daily said.
Urbanization and government plans to turn farmland into forests means vast areas of arable land would "irreversibly shrink" in the near future, Yang Jian (
In the next five years, China's total grain-producing land area will be reduced at a rate of 0.18 percent per year, the ministry predicted.
Arable land has already shrunk by 8 million hectares between 1999 and last year, the Ministry of Land and Resources said earlier this year.
To reach the national production target of 500 million tonnes in 2010, 103 million hectares of farmland must be preserved, Yang was quoted as saying.
China used 104 million hectares to produce 484 million tonnes of grain last year, the report said. At the predicted rate of land shrinkage, the amount of land in 2010 will be just enough acreage to meet that target, it said.
"To maintain domestic grain supply ... arable land must be strictly protected," the report said.
Across China, farm lands are often arbitrarily seized by local government officials and property developers, then converted to either industrial or commercial use.
China's grain production rose 3.1 percent for the first time last year after five years of falling yields. China's falling yields have resulted in rising grain prices on global markets as the nation imported more grain and other food stuffs.
With shrinking acreage, falling water tables and a growing population, some grain experts have predicted that China will not be able to raise yields per hectare and the nation will remain a net food importer in the coming decades.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency