Strategic thinking on ensuring Food Security under the New normal

China's economic and social development has entered a new period. Under the new normal, China's strategic thinking on food security needs to be changed, mainly including the following aspects:

I. Food security concepts and objectives. It was suggested that the concept of traditional food should be abolished, pulses excluded from food, grain security should be the focus, and the concept of product security should be shifted to resource security. Grain safety mainly considers variety safety, main variety safety mainly considers ration safety, regional safety mainly considers marketing area safety guarantee, crowd target mainly considers ration safety of middle and low income people.

2. Domestic reserve policy. In order to reduce the reserve to a reasonable range, in view of the large number of people in our country, the food security reserve rate can be higher, but the reserve rate should not exceed 30% of the social consumption in that year.

Third, production policy should let the market play a decisive role in resource allocation. It is suggested that the temporary collection and storage policy should be abolished. Within 30% of the national target reserve, the government should purchase grain from farmers in limited quantities at target prices and distribute the purchase amount to grain farmers in proportion. These indicators can be transferred among farmers. After the target reserve is exceeded, when the market price is lower than the target price, the producer can be subsidized in cash according to the price difference of food commodity, and the low-income consumer can be subsidized conversely. On the basis of retaining the existing production subsidies for grain farmers, we will adjust the direction of incremental investment and subsidies for agriculture in the future, mainly for investment in high-standard farmland construction and transformation of medium-and low-yield farmland; investment in high-quality seed breeding, modern agricultural machinery and equipment, land pollution control and other projects; allocate part of funds to encourage and support farmers to adjust their planting structure and develop high-value-added agriculture; and provide technical training for farmers to enhance their farming skills.

4. Import and export policies. Under the new normal, we should replace agricultural resources, take out our advantages, namely labor-intensive agricultural products, and enhance export competitiveness; while reducing the export of land and water-intensive agricultural products, we should appropriately increase the import volume of such products. At the same time, under the Belt and Road opening strategy of the Silk Road, support going out and using overseas agricultural resources to produce agricultural products to serve the country. Encourage the export of domestic agricultural capital, combine the import and export of agricultural products with the export of capital, support domestic capital to engage in agricultural development overseas, and return grain and other agricultural products invested and produced overseas to China. To this end, we should adjust the policies on overseas agricultural investment and import and export of agricultural products.

5. speed up structural reform. Reform the state collection and storage system, mainly by state-owned enterprises to undertake the annual task of state collection and storage, gradually transition to social competition bidding, and finally realize the same treatment between state-owned enterprises and private enterprises. To this end, reform state-owned storage and processing enterprises, implement mixed ownership transformation, and attract domestic social capital to participate in the reform of state-owned grain enterprises. Encourage the development of private enterprises in the grain field, relax market access conditions, simplify registration procedures, provide policy-oriented financial support, and improve their market competitiveness.