Urbanization and Chinese Food System
Introduction of Chinese Food Security Issue Associated with Urbanization
Chinese food security problem keeps receiving wide attention from worldwide. Food security is the fundamental requirement for people’s daily life, and considering China’s huge population and acreage, the problem that is associated with it can be complicated. The key factors that are associated with today’s Chinese food security problem is the rapid urbanization in recent years and the by-effects along with it. It is no doubt that China’s area of land is enormous, but it cannot be equal to its area of arable land. In the past six decades, China is experiencing a rapid and comprehensive development of the whole social and economical systems and caused a massive internal migration. The population and spatial shifting redefined the whole food security system. Under the social trend of rapid urbanization, the scenario of food has changed. Generally speaking, because of the large scale of urbanization, the reconstruction of China’s social and economic structure greatly influenced the food distribution, and the trend of spatial shifting。
**Pull and Push Factors of Chinese Internal Migration
First of all, because of the rapid development in recent decades, compared with rural areas, people always seem urban areas have much more chance. Those rural residents are attracted by potential opportunities and superior social services of urban areas, which leads to a great sifting in population size from rural to urban. Based on the data, from 1978 to 2016, China’s urbanization rate increased from 17.91% to 57.35%. It shows almost a tripled enlarge of urban population in about 40 years.
The scale of population shifting is unprecedented for China and causes various problems. When people talk about food security, they mostly refer to grain cultivation since grain is the main character in daily food supply. Considering the historical background, China has a long history of its farming culture. Only recently has it changed from an agrarian country to an industrial one, which means that there was a great amount of population once considered as an agricultural population. Infast few decades, most young people from rural areas are attracted by increasing opportunities, public facilities and services of the urban which causes an aged tendency of rural population. And because of the relaxation of the Hukou system, Chinese population mobility greatly increased. Along with the rapid urbanization, an increasing gap in regional development among eastern, central and western regions, which caused a significant inter-provincial migration in China. It is a potential problem that should be considered and set out to resolve, in order to make sure there are enough labor sources in future for rural agriculture. (Shen, 2013)
Disparities Between Rural and Urban
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 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. (Wang, 2019)
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 the 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 is very typical in current China, which 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. (CHRISTIANSEN, 2009)
Cause of the Dilemma of Dead Stock and Waste
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.
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.
Analysis of Research on Spatial shifting and Effectiveness of Agriculture
In one of these researches, for example, the researchers collected the data of grain output from the Statistical Yearbook published by the National Bureau of Statistics of China and used it in order to have a deeper understanding of the potential impacts of this unbalanced spatial shift trend. Through calculating the barycenter of grain production, it shows an overall increasing trend of chinese grain production. Based on the data analysis, as the barycenter moves northwards, typically the region of north bank of the Yellow River, grain production gradually takes the dominant status of agriculture for the whole nation. However, considering the dominant factors of grain production such as weather factors and water supply, this kind of spatial shifting trends actually lower efficiency of natural reproduction with higher risk of natural disaster for grain due to poor environmental conditions in those areas. On the contrary, some areas with proper natural conditions are not effectively used. This might be one of the greatest vulnerabilities of China’s food security. This research explored the spatial shifts and finally concluded that although China’s grain production seems like an increasing trend, it is actually under great risk since most of their production bases can be very vulnerable and exposed in drought and natural disaster. In order to meet this challenge that brought by urbanization caused spatial shifting, the researchers suggest Chinese government to improve current arable protection and enhance the national grain production system. (Wang, J., Zhang, Z., & Liu, Y., 2018)
Worldwide Impact
Chinese food security is a worldwide problem. Assume that China has no food self-sufficient, which means that it has to greatly rely on the world food supply market and severely consume that. This situation definitely will harm other countries a lot, especially for those developing ones. Thinking about the drastic urbanization of China in recent decades, ensuring self sufficiency of China’s grain agriculture has become the primary goal for worldwide food security topics. In Chinese process of urbanization, its goal is mainly focused on the revenue that is gained by the land. Based on the desires of pursuing a higher GDP, some land is actually being over developed. At the same time, there is also a huge amount of land that can not be used effectively. According to the data, in 2003, there were about 6800 economic development zones in China, covering 3.86 Mha area of which 1.3 Mha land resources were idle. Another critical point is that although the development speed of urban areas is fast, it is way too fast compared with the population growth in urban areas. During 2003 to 2013, the built-up area of urban regions increased by about 79%, while the urban population only increased by around 46%. The relationship between these two indexes is absolutely disproportionate. Which unveils the fact that there is a lot of land that is not really being properly used during the urbanization process. In other words, people can call it a waste of farming land. (Long, H., Ge, D., Zhang, Y., Tu, S., Qu, Y., & Ma, L., 2018)
Proper Data Science Method
There are many researches about Chinese urbanization and its influences on grain production. The general way they employees are 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.
The method I think is suitable for this situation is Gaussian Mixture Modelling. It is a type of clustering algorithm and each cluster is modelled according to a different distribution. This method consists of two steps, Expectation step and Maximisation step. This way allows flexible definitions and able to estimate the future trends from existing moments of the whole data set. In this case, it is a good way to analyze the data of this issue through using the data of the past few decades of Chinese food production which is associated with its internal migration and urbanization. Through this way, it is possible to predict and predict future trends of spatial shifting, food distribution, and so on.
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.
Relating to Human Development
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.
Reflection
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 the urbanization in order to encounter the spatial shifting and the ineffective usage of arable land caused by geospatial disequilibrium of grain production.
Citation
CHRISTIANSEN, F. (2009). Food security, urbanization and social stability in China. Journal of Agrarian Change, 9(4), 548-575. doi:10.1111/j.1471-0366.2009.00231.x
Long, H., Ge, D., Zhang, Y., Tu, S., Qu, Y., & Ma, L. (2018). Changing man-land Interrelations in CHINA’S farming area under urbanization and its implications for food security. Journal of Environmental Management, 209, 440-451. doi:10.1016/j.jenvman.2017.12.047
Qi, X., Liu, L., Liu, Y., & Yao, L. (2012). Risk assessment for sustainable food security in China according to integrated food security—taking Dongting Lake area for example. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, 185(6), 4855–4867. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-012-2908-2
Shen, J. (2013). Increasing internal migration in China from 1985 to 2005: INSTITUTIONAL versus economic drivers. Habitat International, 39, 1-7. doi:10.1016/j.habitatint.2012.10.004
Wang, J., Zhang, Z., & Liu, Y. (2018). Spatial shifts in grain production increases in China and implications for food security. Land Use Policy, 74, 204-213. doi:10.1016/j.landusepol.2017.11.037
Wang, Y. (2019). The challenges and strategies of food security under rapid urbanization in China. Sustainability, 11(2), 542. doi:10.3390/su11020542
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Jiang, T. (2008). WTO accession and food security in China. In CHEN C. & DUNCAN R. (Eds.), Agriculture and Food Security in China: What Effect WTO Accession and Regional Trade Arrangements? (pp. 183-202). ANU Press. Retrieved February 27, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt24hd73.15