Urbanization is an inevitable process in human development. It represents a comprehensive increase in not only the scale of urban areas, but indicating more on a complicated perspective. Considering the influence brought by the application of the Hukou system, there is a great population shifting from rural areas to urban areas. Based on that, the scale of the social structure becomes more complicated and many problems affect the effectiveness of the food supply chain between regions. How to avoid waste of food resources and stimulate the food production industry. The type of inquiry that investigates a geospatial human development process can be considered as an exploratory inquiry. When talking about the urbanization process of China in recent decades, a topic that cannot be avoided is the inner population shifting brought by it. The key part of this process is to analyze the impact brought by the urbanization process, and the entry point of that is to take a deeper look at the internal connection between urbanization and food supply related issues. Because of the distance and interval between urban and rural areas, especially when considering the origin of various food production allocations, how to effectively distribute the food resources can be a critical problem. Other issues that are associated with that is to avoid waste under this huge social environment and how the needs from urban areas will impact the food production around.
Considering the rapid development of urban areas, there is a great gap between rural and urban. It leads to a gap within the communication between these two. This kind of situation sometimes creates a barrier between the needs from urban areas and the supply from rural areas. Also, for nowadays agricultural situations, when the farmers find out a special kind of production can bring a huge benefit, they are very likely to greatly improve the production quantity of that. However, in most situations, it does not bring them benefits. On the contrary, since the supply is increasing and much higher than the demand, the price will decrease.
Although Chinese acreage is the second largest of the whole world, the acreage of arable land is actually limited. Because of the complicated environmental and weather situations, some areas such as the desert and basin of Xinjiang, the area of them are huge, but they do not meet the requirements of grain agriculture. In fact, based on what data shows, China has only 8% of the world’s arable land. Which means that it is a heavy duty for China to feed about 20% of the worldwide population with only 8% of agricultural land. And considering the fast urbanization process which from some perspectives worsened the food security of China, the problem becomes more and more severe. Because of this rapid development in urban areas, it is very difficult to balance the resource allocation between rural and urban areas and causes a drastic decline in the quantity and quality of agricultural land, and the relationship between supply and demand also becomes not clear sometimes. According to the scientifical data, the developed eastern region of China lost cultivated land by 7% during 1995–2000 and 29.2% during 2000–2008. At the same time it also leads to the problem of the unbalanced development between the highly urbanized east region and the less urbanized inland. Also, because of the accelerated urbanization, there appears another major change in the patterns of food purchasing and consumption behavior especially in urban areas. Increasing income promotes an excessive customer behavior of food which potentially may cause food waste. These kinds of disparities do harm the food security system of China while indicating a hypothesis that the historical assumption of food security issues of China no longer fit the fast and expansive urbanization process.
As the urbanization process, the upcoming problem is how to balance the distribution of food between urban and rural areas. In China, the most developed cities are mainly allocated to the right side of Chinese map and along the sea, such as Guangzhou, Shanghai, Shenzhen. They all mostly focused on the East part of China. And back to the history of Chinese urbanization, it started from the Pearl River Delta. And the barycenter of agriculture, typically for grain production, moving towards the north and west part of China. Many researchers put a close attention to this disequilibrium of population and spatial distribution and the problem comes with that. A phenomenon that is very typical in current China, is that the price of many agricultural productions can be very high in big cities, such as Pearl River Delta. But at the same time, the whole food supply system always shows an unstable situation. A dead stock, especially for productions like fruit which has a short shelf life, is very popular in the food supply chain. That can be a huge waste for food.
And considering the channel of production to the market, the situation can be complicated for farmers. There is not an effective B2B channel for them. Which means that after processing through the franchisor, the profit finally received by the farmers is not a lot. The selling method is kind of limited for them, which actually requires help from government policy and subsidies. So for my method of the research, a significant breakthrough point is the effectiveness of the commute between rural and urban areas. For example, reliable data can be taken from the official website. Although this research uses spatial economic regression analysis, it can be considered as both spatial and temporal dimension. This research does not include a survey but does use secondary data. The origin of the data is reliable and valid since it was taken from the China Natural Resources Data Center, the National Basic Geographic Information Center, and so on. The liability and accuracy of data is the key part of the whole research process. The budget of this research may not be that high, but it definitely gonna be a constant long term process of research. The possible cost may include the transportation if there is a need for researchers to go to the place and do some research. Considering the special factors of agricultural research, some onsite research is needed.
There are many researches about Chinese urbanization and its influences on grain production. The general way they employ digitalization and further data analysis. Through constructing abstract factors like climate and natural disasters into indexes and analyzing the relationships between them, which in order to predict the future trends. However, things may not be that simple since it can be a complex adaptive system, which refers to a complex nonlinear system. It has been seen as a nonlinear one system since for this kind of system, it is hard to predict in detail. It has emergent properties and tends to have greater complexity. Based on this idea, all of these research methods can be used only as a reference. When thinking about appropriate research methods, co-evolution is a significant factor as adapting changes together as a greater and much more complicated system. It is a very effective way of development since all changes are reasons to each other. This way, development can be faster and much more sustainable.
Through methods that have been learned before, a good way to analyze this kind of problem is to employ machine learning. Inspired by the first method from the research paper, Considering the geospatial data features, the focusing area of this passage is in the north east part of China and around Beijing, which is the capital as well as the economic and political center of China. It is a very important feature to narrow down the research area. So I decided for this method to mainly work on The Huang-Huai-Hai Plain, also known as HHH. It is a typical Chinese farming area, and was predicted as one of the fastest growing areas under urbanization all over the. world. HHH is close to the capital Beijing, and works as a significant food production area of China. So geospatial data analysis can be a typical case and worth of study. For its research method, after locating the stud area, the author obtained the land use data which classification in 2000, 2005, 2010 and 2015. The dataset contains 6580 town-level resident population data and population density sampling data in the HHH. And this database has also been taken from the research I learned before. This research processes the data through the machine learning method, which is an effective way of study that uses computer logrism to improve the experience through repeat analysis of data. This way originated from a steady basis of artificial intelligence and can lead to a deep learning process. The land-use data of it is obtained from Landsat TM and ETM true color composite image after geometric rectification and supervised classification. When running the logrism process, data analysis can still be helpful in this machine learning method. It can be effective when taking into consideration factors such as transportation and transferring of information between rural and urban areas. An effective way to analyze the problem from a comprehensive perspective is to digitize those factors into numbers and put them into a logistic system. After the process of machine learning and enough data analysis, it is possible to express how effective it could be for the whole process of allocation of grain productions.
There are such kind of reasons for the jury or foundation to consider my research plan. This topic is worth studying, and the potential benefits of it can bring a possible future that the Chinese agricultural production gets into a new phase in which people can use less money and gain more products. Also, for the producers, they can maximum their net income in order to facilitate their productions. Also, since the commutation between supply and demand is more effective, a great amount of waste and dead stock can be avoided. When comparing these two methods, both of them have advantages. However, although both of them are working on the same issue of the urbanization process of China and its related problems such as population shifting and so on. And both researchers use geospatial data science methods. But compared with the first one, the second method is kind of broad. The analysis of the second paper is very significant in the background of great China, but the first one is focusing on the HHH area which is also close to the capital Beijing. It is more focused on the area of the topic of this project. And the reason for choosing Beijing and its surrounding area is that it can be considered as the economic and political center of China. Which also means that the urbanization process can be present very well in this area. Also, based on the research, during the great internal migration time period, there are generally three great migration directions, which are Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shanghai. Because of the political significance of Beijing, there is reason to believe that the result can be representative.
Development is an unavoidable trend for human beings, however, it is hard for people to find the balance within this process. The social system can be extremely complex and there are always much more influential factors than people thought. The issue of Chinese food security is a typical example of that. The speed of development is not necessary in direct proportion to the success of it. Urbanization of China as a human development process tends towards greater complexity and away from equilibrium, especially on the food security issue. It actually can be a very typical example of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s insight of economic development. Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen is a Romanian mathematician, statistician and economist. He holds the idea that humans should stop pursuing the development of the economic system. Instead of GDP, people should focus more on social well being. Human’s actions now create a great consumption of the world. He called this idea degrowth which emphasizes more on happiness, calmness, and so on. Back to the process of urbanization, although it superficially seems like a process of pursuing well beings, it is actually an excessive development which has great potential risks. If people are eager to have effective further development, an ensured environment is needed. In addition to this, there is another idea called resist fatalism, which indicates that people should not accept whatever outcome of the revolutional progress. If this thesis has been applied to the issue of Chinese food security issues that are associated with its urbanization, it indicates that people should not accept all the results of this process. In this case, the decrease in arable land and ineffective waste should be avoided.
For final reflection, based on all above, it actually brings out another significant question of human development that is worth further seeking for an answer. How should people balance the development and the potential negative effects of it. In this case, in order to ensure the sustainability of food supply in the long term, Chinese people should improve the relative policy and measures of urbanization in order to encounter the spatial shifting and the ineffective usage of arable land caused by geospatial disequilibrium of grain production.