WINNIPEG – Despite China’s massive purchases of wheat this year, farmers and exporters shouldn’t count on that to continue, says a senior World Bank economist.
China will buy an estimated 12 million tonnes of wheat in 1994-95, according to the International Wheat Council, making it by far the world’s biggest market. That includes five million tonnes from Canada.
The increase in imports is largely designed to control food prices, the wheat council said in a recent report. Local shortages, internal transportation problems and a reluctance by farmers to sell have sent domestic grain prices skyrocketing.
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But Donald Mitchell, a commodity analyst for the World Bank, said this year’s jump in imports to nearly triple the level of a year ago is not a harbinger of things to come.
Not a huge importer
“I would suggest China is probably not one of the wild cards in the deck,” he told Grain World 1995, a market outlook conference sponsored by the Canadian Wheat Board. “They’re probably not going to become a huge importer in the near future.”
He said the days of rapid growth in total food demand in China are a thing of the past. Per capita food consumption levels are adequate for most consumers and population growth rates are projected to remain relatively low.
Grain consumption grew at a rate of 5.2 percent in the 1970s, then slowed down to 2.3 percent in the 1980s, despite a period of economic expansion.
“If grain demand did not increase during the 1980s when economic growth accelerated, then when will it?” said Mitchell.
He said China has been a success story in agriculture, boosting its food production by two-thirds from the early 1960s to the late 1990s.
Grain production has grown by 2.8 percent per year since 1980, while consumption has grown by 2.2 percent. As a result, the country has shifted from being a net importer of 14 million tonnes of grains in 1980 to a net exporter of two million tonnes in 1994.
Mitchell said China’s diet, measured in calories per capita, is well above the United Nations estimated daily requirement and not far behind countries like Japan, South Korea and Singapore.
“This suggests little scope for overall increases in calories consumed,” he said, adding that future dietary changes will likely involve a shift away from direct cereal consumption to meat, fruits and vegetables.
However another speaker at the conference took issue with Mitchell’s assessment of the adequacy of the Chinese diet, saying per capita calorie numbers are misleading because food is distributed so inequitably in China.
“There are rich and well-fed people but there are also terribly poor and starving people,” said Vaclav Smil, a geographer and population specialist from the University of Manitoba.
