Wu Guangqiang

jw368@163.com

FOR thousands of years before China embraced the reform and opening-up policy in the late 1970s, hunger haunted the nation that started farming 4,000 years ago.

Filling a hungry stomach was the top priority for most people, which led to the prevalence of the greeting: Have you had your meal yet?

Now in my mid-60s, I still retain painful memories of hunger. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, China experienced a nationwide famine caused by a combination of natural disasters and man-made mistakes.

Though food supply had never been ample, with everything distributed on the ration book, before the hunger attack, general urban residents were able to be fed with basic food.

The sudden famine caused tremendous damage to the disaster-prone country. My family also felt the suffering. I was about 7 years old then, an age in bad need of nutrition, but for a while I had to do with a watery bowl of millet gruel, meat and oil being rarities. I recall my elder brother and sisters saving a small bite from their bowls to my bowl. One of my sisters came down with hepatitis as a result of malnutrition.

Thanks to China’s unwavering efforts to feed its billion-plus people in the ensuing years, the scourge of hunger has been basically expelled, at least for the majority of the population. Since the adoption of the reform and opening-up policy, Chinese consumers have been no longer content with the satisfaction of hunger and their focus is shifting from eating more to eating better.

With the memory of huger fading away, complacency is creeping through some people’s mind. Some consider agriculture a backward industry with low efficiency. A controversial “economist” repeatedly called for the repeal of the policy of the “1.8-billion-mu-arable-land” red line. The red line refers to the Central Government’s policy of maintaining China’s minimum area of arable land at 1.8 billion mu (120 million hectares).

Proponents for downsizing China’s agriculture cited the international division of labor, free trade and cost efficiency, to support their argument.

But multiple factors point to the ruthless truth: depending on foreign supply of food for 1.4 billion Chinese people will put China in great peril.

As President Xi Jinping puts it, under any circumstances, Chinese people must hold firmly their own “rice bowl” filled with Chinese rice.

Feeding such a large population is never an easy job. As the earliest grain growers, Chinese farmers developed complicated farming techniques, invented a variety of agricultural tools, and made full use of irrigation, animals and weather forecasts to increase output. But hunger was never eliminated, because the population was too large to be fed without revolutionary reforms.

China went through a series of historic events before the creation of an agricultural miracle. The founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 laid a solid foundation for the nation’s development on the basis of national independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity, and social equity. Land reforms in 1951 eliminated the landlord-gentry class and farmers became masters of their own land. After 1979, the household contract responsibility system was implemented nationwide, greatly boosting farm productivity. In 2006, China abolished the centuries-old agricultural land tax for the country’s 800 million farmers. In 2009, China allowed farmers to lease, sub-contract, exchange and swap their land-use rights.

China’s agriculture is rapidly transforming from a traditional sector, which was labor-intensive, of manual labor and weather-affected, to a modernized sector, characterized by mechanization, large scale and increasing intelligence. More and more auto machines and drones are working day and night on behalf of humans.

As a result, China manages to feed 21 percent of the world’s population using 9 percent of the world’s arable land. China ranks first in worldwide farm output, primarily producing rice, wheat, potatoes, tomatoes, sorghum, peanuts, tea, millet, barley, cotton, oilseed and soybeans.

But given China’s huge population and treacherous international relations, it will be a fatal mistake to fill China’s “rice bowl” with foreign “rice,” however great or cheap the “rice” is.

Trump’s reckless trade war and U.S. sanction against ZTE have awakened us. In the eyes of bullies, there are no such childish phrases as free trade, equality or credit.

Food security is our lifeline.

(The author is an English tutor and freelance writer.)