The food crisis in China is more serious than what the outside world thinks. It is entirely possible that there will be a new famine in China
Recently, the Chinese government launched the deployment of the 2023 national comprehensive agricultural administrative law enforcement “stabilizing food supply” special operation, namely, the implementation of “returning forests to farmland” in localities nationwide. A large number of trees once planted under the policy of “returning farmland to forests” were cleared overnight, returning the forestland to farmland. For example, the green belt built around the western China city of Chengdu, after spending tens of billions of yuan, was razed flat. The same area is planned to become 100,000 acres of farmland within three years. In addition, a large number of “agricultural control” officers, assisted by local officials and police, have been sent to the fields to force farmers to stop planting industrial and cash crops and switch their arable land to growing grain. From videos circulating on social media, it appears that the local farmers’ non-food crops are being forcibly razed by farm control officials nationwide, strongly against the farmers’ wishes. For example, on 23 April 2023, police and agricultural control teams eradicated more than 6,000 acres of tobacco leaves in Nanning, the capital of the southwestern province of Guangxi. In addition, many industrial and cash crops such as bamboo, fruit trees, and decorative flowers were also razed, causing farmers to suffer substantial losses.
The political campaign comes from a directive issued by the central government at the beginning of this year. On 13 February 2023, the central government issued the first directive, stressing the importance of stable production and supply of grain and other critical agricultural products, firmly adhering to the “red line” of 1.8 billion acres of arable land. Some observers believe that the outbreak of the Covid pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war in recent years have severely impacted the global food supply chain. Against this background, food security has once again become an important issue of concern for policymakers. In addition, China’s relationship with the international community has been deteriorating in recent years, and the widespread implementation of “returning forests to farmland” may also be a preparation for potential food shortages in the future.
But will this political campaign style approach really work? I have serious doubts. In my opinion, I am afraid that the food crisis in China is more serious than the outside world thinks, and it is entirely possible that there will be a new famine in China. One of the reasons is that expanding the area under cultivation will not solve the root of the food problem. The problem is the system of resource allocation, which is not an agricultural problem but a political one. According to Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen’s research, famines in modern societies have not only been caused by food shortages, but more importantly by the injustice of the food distribution system, i.e. the lack of institutional protection of people’s legitimate rights. While many famines did occur after a decline in food production, others occurred at the peak of food production, such as the 1974 famine in Bangladesh, where food production was 13% higher than the previous year and per capita food production was 5.3% higher. Local farmers were unable to sell their labour to gain employment because of the previous floods, and thus their chances of obtaining food through trade were greatly reduced. It seems that the real issue is not whether there is an adequate supply of food, but whether people have access to it. When people’s right to be free from hunger is not guaranteed, it does not matter how abundant the food supply is. Sen further concludes that in modern history, there has never been a famine in a democratic society with an independent opposition party and a free media, and where there has been a famine, it has never been due to a lack of food.
The second reason for the risk of famine in China is that administrative interference in food production does not end well. The American political scientist James C. Scott, in his renowned book “Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed,”* eloquently illustrates his thesis with the failed precedents of Germany, the Soviet Union, Brazil, Tanzania, and other countries at top-down state planning projects that can only lead to disaster. The most obvious examples are the Holdomor [great famine in Ukraine in 1932-1933]** and the three-year great famine in China in 1959-61, both of which were caused by the Communist authorities’ administrative interference with normal agricultural production, and their continued use of force to prevent farmers from saving themselves after the famine (forced grain collection, preventing farmers from fleeing the famine, etc). From the over simplistic policy remedy of returning forests to farmland, it can be seen that Xi Jinping’s approach to solving economic problems is still in the form of mass movements. The various disasters of the Mao era were the result of administrative interventions that ignored economic laws and basic human nature, and this old thinking will greatly limit the Communist Party’s options in facing crises.
- “Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed” is a book by James C. Scott critical of a system of beliefs he calls high modernism, that centers on governments’ overconfidence in the ability to design and operate society in accordance with purported scientific laws. The book makes an influential argument that states seek to force “legibility” on their subjects by homogenizing them and creating standards that simplify pre-existing, natural, diverse social arrangements. Examples include the introduction of last names, censuses, uniform languages and standard units of measurement. While intended to facilitate state control and economies of scale, Scott argues that the eradication of local differences and silencing of local expertise can have adverse effects.
** Holodomor (death by hunger in Ukrainian) refers to the starvation of millions of Ukrainians in 1932–33 as a result of Soviet policies. The Holodomor can be seen as the culmination of an assault by the Communist Party and Soviet state on the Ukrainian peasantry, who resisted Soviet policies.
Wang Dan, a Chinese pro democracy activist, who was one of the main organisers of the Tiananmen Square protests, is currently the director of the Dialogue China think-tank.
Translated from Chinese by Scott Savitt.