TITLE:
China’s Agricultural Support Capacity and Dependence on Foreign Resources
AUTHORS:
Yan Zhang, Xiaohui Yang, Hong Zhang, Li Ma
KEYWORDS:
Agricultural Products, Support Capacity, Energy, Nutrients, Degree of External Dependence
JOURNAL NAME:
Food and Nutrition Sciences,
Vol.9 No.1,
January
17,
2018
ABSTRACT:
To more accurately answer the questions “who will feed China?” and “whether
Chinese people can feed themselves?”, we proposed a concept of agricultural
support capacity, defined as the population that can be fed by energy, protein
and fat from food, respectively, according to nutritional intake standards.
In this study, we established models to measure this, based on analysis of
China’s agricultural support capacity and how this changes under self-sufficiency
and open conditions, in addition to the degrees of external dependence. Our
results show that, since 2007, even without foreign resources, the energy, protein,
superior protein and fat obtained from domestic agriculture had been
able to feed the Chinese. However, the use of foreign resources increased and
strengthened China’s agricultural support capacity, in addition to improving
food diversity, optimizing nutrition, assisting in the regulation of food surplus
and deficiency, and providing feed for the animal breeding industry. For the
past decade, China’s degree of external dependence on energy from cereals
has been relatively low, however, the degrees external dependence on superior
protein and fat has increased steadily at a certain rate and have been over the
national food security warning level. Therefore, China still has great demand
for agricultural products from other regions of the world.