MOOSE JAW, Sask. – It was a startling question posed by agricultural economist Tom Wahl.
“Will China starve the world?” he asked, as he began his remarks to a recent conference on the future of prairie agriculture.
That seemingly strange question is based on the notion that with China’s growing population, expanding wealth and limited resources, it will literally buy up all the world’s tradeable food resources in future decades, while other poorer food-deficient countries are left begging.
“The prediction has been made that China will overwhelm the world’s food supply and starve the world,” said Wahl, an economist from Washington State University.
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China’s population is forecast to increase from 1.2 billion to 1.6 billion by the year 2050. That means the country will have to feed an additional 400 million people.
Meanwhile, its wealth as measured by gross domestic product, is increasing by 10 to 15 percent annually, compared to a global average of three to four percent, and is expected to grow at a rate of at least seven to 10 percent annually.
Other countries come through
But happily for other food-importing countries, Wahl said, China will not starve the world.
That’s because the predictions focus on China and ignore what’s going on in the rest of the world. As demand from China grows over the next few decades, Wahl said, prices will increase, as will production and exportable supplies.
“Market prices will increase and no one will be worse off,” he said. In fact, as China imports more wheat, Canadian and U.S. wheat farmers will be the main beneficiaries.
Jim Simpson of the University of Florida said despite China’s burgeoning population, it’s difficult to predict whether the country will become self-sufficient in food production over the next half-century.
Per capita food consumption is relatively good, and there are vast areas of uncultivated arable land. Chinese agriculture is very inefficient and any improvements could go a long way towards providing self-sufficiency, he said.
China’s beef industry produces 12 kilograms per head of inventory, compared with 107 kg in the U.S.
Jim Morris, general manager of Saskatchewan’s hog exporting agency SPI International, said beef consumption in China has increased by 32 percent annually in the 1990s, poultry 21 percent and pork nine percent. He described the figures as “astronomical” by North American standards.
Simpson added if China is to continue to gain food self-sufficiency, it must maintain its present authoritarian political system. In its current state of development, with 55 ethnic groups and lots of internal dissension, the country could easily fall apart if it moved too quickly to a democratic system.
“I am firmly convinced that China needs very strong centralized control,” Simpson said.
