A traveller's view of food production in China

Their children prefer the less onerous city life. They marry, have a child and send the child home to the father’s parents to be reared. These elderly grandparents recognise that if they again educate the child and allow him or her to finish high school they will lose the next generation and thus deprive themselves of any assistance in their aged years. Without the labour of those grandchildren they will drop into poverty and lose their land when they become unable to work their farms. Thus many rural children are kept in bondage by their grandparents.

Potatoes are a valuable source of energy, but importantly store well for long periods of time. In 1996 I entered into discussions with Dr Jimmy Botella, then Professor in charge of the Genetic Engineering Department at the Queensland University at St Lucia, Brisbane. He told me that much of his department’s work was financed by Malaysia, because the greatest problem facing Asian countries isn’t a shortage of food. The greatest difficulty in these regions is the ability to preserve foods without the refrigeration available in the developed nations.

He maintained that 80 per cent of Asian fruit and vegetables perished before reaching the meal table. His genetic research was aimed at extending the lifetime of products with the introduction of a “long life” gene so that they wouldn’t rot quickly.

Further north in the Shangrila valley, where the climate is considerably colder, the population rely on meat and milk from cattle or yaks. They grow barley and potatoes as their staple foods and to feed livestock including pigs, which are allowed free grazing throughout the warmer months. Here they are only able to grow one crop a year. At the end of May these crops were emerging from the soil. I would consider that regions such as this are particularly vulnerable to a disease-caused famine, as in the instance of Ireland’s former reliance on the potato as a staple food.

In May 2008 I was planning to spend two weeks in Sichuan Province, which is situated in western China, directly above Yunnan Province and abutting Tibet. Of particular interest to me is the Dujiangyan Irrigation Project 56km west of Chengdu, the provincial capital.

Since ancient times the Minjiang River had surged down from the mountains flooding the plains and silting the water courses. About 250BC the governor of the province directed the construction of Dujianyan. He employed a new method of channelling and dividing the water to harness the Minjiang River. He accomplished this by separating the project in to two main parts: the head work and the irrigation system. Since then, the Chengdu Plain has been free of flooding and the people have lived peacefully and affluently. The project is now honoured as the “Treasure of Sichuan”.

Sichuan is known for its pig industry. Last year the province raised 68.4 million pigs, accounting for one-ninth of all pigs raised across the country.

Provinces such as Sichuan have an abundance of food stuffs, but due to the rising incomes of the urban Chinese people there is growing consumption of meat. Increasingly, grain is diverted to protein production, especially the feeding of pigs. This intensive farming of pigs, many of which live in close proximity to their owners, has formerly led to outbreaks of swine fever. Not only can such diseases result in human contagion, they create the twin fears of epidemics affecting the wider population, and the possible loss of millions of pigs as a potential food source.

Since I wrote these words Sichuan Province experienced a massive earthquake and I had to cancel my visit to the region.

Reports from within China indicate that there will not be much disruption to farm production across the Sichuan Basin, because that region has a solid rock base. The huge areas of devastation were on the western, mountainous regions of Sichuan. Thus I consider it unlikely that the earthquake will have much impact on rice production in Sichuan.

Unable to visit Sichuan Province I travelled instead to Guangxi Province. Within China, rice is mainly produced in Sichuan, Jiangxi, Guangdong, Guangxi and Hubei. China was once an exporter of rice. Now it has begun to import rice although Guangxi remains a leading exporter of hybrid rice seed to other Asian countries.

Travelling in Guangxi I noted that farmers in some regions who had traditionally grown rice have, within the past five years, put many fields under permanent plantings of table grapes and fruiting trees. Increasing areas, which formerly grew rice, are planted with strawberries, climbing beans and peanuts.