ABSTRACT
Food security has always been the top priority on the Chinese government’s agenda for historical and political reasons. However, China’s food vulnerability and insecurity did not catch the world’s attention, not even during the most severe famine in human history, which took about 30 million Chinese lives in the late 1950s [Lin, 1990:1229]. Only since the mid-1970s, when the Chinese economy gradually opened up and more information became available to outsiders, have researchers and politicians paid attention to the food situation of the most populous country in the world. Owing to the rapid economic development during the last two decades, the consumption pattern in particular has changed dramatically. Consumers are moving away from a cereal-based diet towards highly valued livestock products. The rising food demand and sheer market size in China have brought great concerns among researchers and politicians about world food availability. China’s development poses serious questions to the world, like ‘Can China feed itself?’ or ‘Will China starve the world?’. This is an obvious question since the world food market is tiny when compared with China’s demand. Any change in China’s food trade policy may challenge the stability of global food markets. In response, the Chinese government asserts that China will not starve the world and can feed itself in the future. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), in revised calculations in 2001, estimated that China had 362 million metric tons of wheat, corn, rice and other cereal grains, while at the same time, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) also quadrupled its estimation of China’s wheat reserve. Researchers are trying to project the Chinese food economy and its implications for world trade. Several dozens of alternative projections on this topic have been made during the last two decades. Given the complexity of projecting China’s food economy, a large variance of results exists. The aim of this article is to review the most influential projection models by comparing their research methodology and projection results in
order to provide insights into their differences and to suggest improvements for further research.
