Despite weather challenges this year, China expects to harvest 102.6 million tonnes of wheat, about the same as last year.
Indeed, China’s National Grain and Oil Information Centre said this week that in addition to stable wheat production, it expects a slight increase in the corn crop, a 22 percent jump in soybean production, a modest increase in the rice crop and static rapeseed production.
The wheat forecast is perhaps most reliable because the crop will soon be harvested. Corn and soybeans are spring planted crops and we really won’t have a sure fix on them for several months.
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The soybean production increase, to 16.5 million tonnes, might appear like a lot, but is insubstantial in the context of edible oil consumption growth of four to five percent a year and soybean imports that have doubled since 2003-04 to 34 million tonnes.
Northern China is in the grip of a long-term drought. It is a surprise that the country can maintain production when its newspapers describe the drought as the worst in several decades.
For example, an important corn and soybean producer, Liaoning province, has had less than 20 millimetres of moisture in the first three months of the year, one-fifth the amount of last year.
Much of China’s cropland is irrigated, a lot of it with well water. That may save crops now, but how long can they keep it up?
New York Times reporter Jim Yardley wrote a story last September telling of how, as new skyscrapers soar above China’s booming cities, the aquifers below sink.
Withdrawals are greater than natural replenishment and water tables fall. Yardley said the water table is falling 1.3 metres a year in the area around Shijaizhuang, a city of more than two million people southwest of Beijing.
Scientists say the ground water reserves of the North China Plain would be drained within 30 years by industrial and population growth and agriculture.
The northern half of the country relies so much on groundwater because it has few rivers. China, which has 22 percent of the globe’s population, has only eight percent of its fresh water and the south has 81 percent of that.
The Chinese government has started work on an enormous project that will divert water from the wet south to the dry north at a cost of more than $62 billion.
But it must also battle industrial and urban water pollution, which threatens to make the south-north water diversion project a grand sewage diversion project.
The government also knows it must improve water use efficiency.
If China fails to manage its water resource, it will likely fail another goal in food self sufficiency. Although it is by far the world’s largest soybean importer, it is largely self sufficient in wheat, corn and rice. Without water, it will also become a major grain importer.
