ABSTRACT
The central economic issue facing China throughout its modern history reflects the elemental challenge of providing enough food for its population. At the end of the 1950s, it was the collapse of grain production that halted industrialisation and forced a wholesale, if temporary reorientation of economic priorities in favour of the farm sector. Thereafter, population pressure continued to highlight the critical importance of agriculture, especially the food sector. Between 1955–1957 and 1974–1976, average per capita output of grain hardly changed, even though yields showed quite impressive growth. 101 Although post-1978 reforms transformed this situation, 102 agricultural and food issues have remained strategic economic preoccupations of successive Chinese governments. For their leaders, mindful of the catastrophic famine of 1959–1961 and nervous of excessive dependence on imported American food supplies, the old adage – ‘agriculture is the foundation of the economy; grain is the cornerstone of that foundation’ – has meaning even in a context in which recent grain output growth has generated a comfortable cushion above subsistence requirements. This is the background to a continuing commitment to a strategy of basic domestic food self-sufficiency. A keen awareness by Chinese leaders of the social, even political, implications of agricultural impoverishment is another critical dimension to their continued emphasis on the role of the farm sector in China’s future development. 103
