China Faces a Rice Bowl Dilemma After Covid
The risk to food supply chains is reviving a push for self-sufficiency. That comes with an environmental cost.
Food challenges: a Wuhan supermarket in February.
Photographer: Shen Bohan/Xinhua/Getty
Empty supermarket shelves in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic have put grow-your-own back on the world’s agenda, and nowhere more so than in China, where ensuring food supplies for its huge population has been a political priority for decades. Simply diversifying imports may not satisfy hawkish voices. Emphasizing domestic production, though, will extract a heavy toll for a country with a fifth of the globe’s people, but roughly a 10th of arable land and less than 6% of water resources.
For a nation scarred by famine, it’s hard to overstate the importance of food security. That was true long before 1994, when U.S. environmental pioneer Lester Brown drew international attention to the potential consequences of scarcities by asking who would feed China when it boomed. Officials fear inflation as a potential cause of social and political instability — not without reason, given that rising prices helped provoke the Tiananmen Square protests. Agricultural imports, of course, have a tendency to become tangled in diplomatic spats.