New Food Policy Systems in China

Abstract

The food policy for people's living is most fundamental in each country. In China which has population more than 1,100 million, the food policy, especially for self-sufficiency, has the importance. Although the production contract system and the rise of government's purchasing price have stimulated the will to produce for farmers, it made the scale of enterprise small. Furthermore, as after 1984 the discontinuation of government's purchasing policy led a decline of relative dominance in economical activity in agriculture, the food production after then decreased to the level of 400 million tons per year, and even the balance between the demand and supply of food has been lost. Moreover, the population increase in the rural districts causes sarplus labor there, and it makes incomes low for laborers in these districts, compared with those in the urban districts. To obtain the fundamental information for solving these problems, I attempted to analyse the relationships between food production and its demand in China, and clarified effects of the changes in food policy on the demand-supply relationships of food in China. From this study, it is concluded that the general rule of demand-supply relationships is held in China. Finally, I gave a suggestion in this paper that food self-sufficiency as well as improvement in living standard in rural districts has to be taken as the present important policy.