"simultaneous increase of three quantities" China's Grain is facing New problems

In 2014, China's annual grain output achieved "11 consecutive increases", basically maintained at more than 600 million tons, at the same time, China's grain imports are also growing rapidly. The reporter learned that last year, China's grain imports exceeded 100 million tons for the first time, while according to data released by the General Administration of Customs on the 8th, China imported 72.568 million tons of grain in the first seven months of 2015, an increase of 22.4 percent over the same period last year. With the "double increase" of grain output and import, the total amount of grain inventory in China has also reached an all-time high in recent years, with a serious backlog of corn and other grain varieties. China's grain shows a strange phenomenon of "three simultaneous increases" in production, import and inventory.

Some experts pointed out that the surge in grain imports is not due to the lack of domestic food, but the widening grain price gap at home and abroad is an important reason for the "three simultaneous increases" of grain in our country. Since 2012, domestic food prices have gradually begun to be higher than those in the international market. By June this year, the dutiable value of late indica rice in China was 51% higher than that of Thai rice, and wheat and corn were also 56% and 65% higher than the international market price respectively. In the face of such a huge price difference, grain processing enterprises are naturally more willing to purchase foreign low-priced grain, and correspondingly reduce the purchase of domestic grain, resulting in the continuous increase of domestic grain stocks.

Due to the rising cost of domestic agricultural production in recent years, in order to improve the enthusiasm of farmers to grow grain, the state has raised the minimum purchase price year by year, while the international grain price has continued to decline in recent years. At the same time, the appreciation of the RMB exchange rate and the drop in grain freight prices caused by the collapse in global energy prices have given rise to the upside-down of grain prices between domestic and foreign countries, production and processing fields.

Chen Xiwen, deputy head of the Central Rural work leading Group and director of the office, said that the simultaneous increase in output, import, and inventory has become a new problem facing China's grain, and it is of urgent concern. If this phenomenon is allowed to develop, it will have a negative impact on the healthy development of China's agricultural industry, farmers' employment and farmers' income growth.

At present, the mechanization rate of sowing and harvesting and the contribution rate of agricultural science and technology in agricultural production in China are increasing year by year, but due to the large number of farmers and small operation scale, agricultural labor productivity is still far away from developed agricultural countries. Some experts suggest that if China's agriculture wants to be strong, it must take the road of modern agriculture, develop appropriate scale operation through institutional innovation, and reduce the cost of agricultural production by improving the efficiency of scale and the level of science and technology. in order to get out of the dilemma of "simultaneous increase of three quantities".