The Coming Chinese Famine?

When the good times were rolling in the real estate market in China, the government often displaced farmers in order to give the land to developers.  Many of the ghost cities have been built upon once arable land.  The amount of arable land in China has shrunk dramatically in recent years.  For a country with 1.4 billion people to feed, maintaining farmland seems like a sensible idea.  With approximately 4x the population of the United States, it has less arable land.  China is a food importer and has been stock piling food recently.  China has almost 70% of the world's corn reserves, 60% of the rice, and 51% of the wheat.  China has ad campaigns about cleaning your plate and has banned food channels on social media that waste food.  Recent massive flooding has not been good for the harvest.  Well, government numbers show it is great, but who trusts such news from China?

ADVChina discussed this topic recently as well.  In their travels throughout China, Winston and Matthew went to some rice fields and found reckless use of pesticides.  In the upcoming Olympics, athletes have been warned not to eat local food as it could result in a failed drug test.  Ground water contamination is extremely bad (80 to 90%, depending on rural or urban).  Those with money have their food imported.

China has suffered a disastrous famine in living memory.  The Great Chinese Famine (1959-61) saw anywhere from 15 million to 55 million die of starvation.  This was not a matter of bad weather.  It was Mao Zedong's implementation of the Great Leap Forward, which included a variety of destructive policies.  One of the most noteworthy was the successful effort to kill birds, presuming that birds had a large impact on grain harvest.  Indeed they did, but in the opposite way predicted.  When the birds were exterminated, the locust populations - which birds eat - thrived and devoured the harvests.  Many Chinese were told to make iron and steel rather than farm.  And then there were the farming techniques imported from Russia, which only a couple decades earlier had starved 4 to 7 million Ukrainians in the Holodomor.

That the Chinese government might once again inflict a famine on its population through bad policies is not hard to believe.