China: Staring At Grain Imports

[phantom power]

The resurging "threat of China’s food security" may have induced more fatigue than alarm if it was not coming at a time of unprecedented scarcity of arable land, which is increasingly being converted to grow biofuels, and because of fresh challenges posed by global warming.

With its natural constraints -- it has to feed a fifth of the world’s population with less than one-seventh of the global farmland -- and its surging demand, China finds itself in the middle of a raucous debate about the future of global food security.

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"China is not a precipitator of the mounting increase in global wheat prices, but an important stabilising factor for it," Ding Shengjun, an official with the State Administration of Grain said in Beijing last week, responding to speculations that grain may follow the upward trajectory of oil. China’s unquenchable thirst for oil has been one of the main factors behind the surge of oil towards the sensitive 100 US dollars a barrel mark.

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Nevertheless, Chinese analysts have grown uneasy about the country’s increasing dependence on imports to satisfy demand for soybeans. Driven by its growing demand for meat in recent years, the country has emerged as the world’s biggest importer of soybeans and vegetable oil.

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