BEIJING -- China will no longer chase bumper grain harvests and instead make safer foods a priority and boost imports as it bids to tackle its rural environmental problems, government officials says.
The shift in emphasis suggests authorities are willing to forgo their obsession with agricultural output growth. Achieving bumper harvests has long been considered a political necessity for the world's most populous country, particularly after Mao's 1958 "Great Leap Forward" industrialization campaign led to widespread famine.
"In our current grains policy, one of the most important ideas is to speed up the transition in the way we boost grain output," says Han Jun, deputy director of the Office of Central Rural Work Leading Group, the country's top decision maker on rural policy.
"In the past, we were exhausting our resources and environment in pursuit of yield, and now we have to focus equally on quantity, quality and efficiency and particularly the quality of grain output growth, environmental protection and sustainable development," Han says.
He says China had recently published its sustainable development plan for agriculture, which will cap water use as well as reduce the use of chemical fertilizer and pesticides in its agriculture production.
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China's huge grain reserves should help ease the transition and reduce the risk of food shortages, Han says. His speech was carried on www.sina.com .
China should remain self-sufficient in cereals given its huge population, while making full use of international markets for farm products that are in short supply.
Qian Keming, chief economist at China's agriculture ministry, says the country could achieve an 85 percent self-sufficiency ratio by 2020, which was lower than the controversial 95 percent rate that Beijing has been aiming to maintain over the past few decades.
China's grain production should be capped at 610 million metric tons, rather than the previous level of 650 million metric tons, which is close to the country's maximum capacity and puts its resources and the environment under strain, Qian says.
Ning Gaoning, chairman of the China National Cereals, Oils and Foodstuffs Corp. (COFCO), told the Saturday forum that China could open up more to agriculture trade. As well as growing amounts of rice and wheat, China is also consuming more protein-rich food, which means it needs extra supplies, he says.
