Little-appreciated facts about China

The title of this blog, Century of Scarcity, summarizes a great number of clear trends in resource availability around the world. This post provides a good example. Thanks go to John Bryant Starr, whose 1997 book Understanding China first brought this one to my attention.

The land area of China is 9,700,000 square kilometers and change. Of this, about 1,200,000 square kilometers are under cultivation. Chinese officials consider this the minimum needed for food production. A comparison with US land area is in order. The land area of China and the US are almost exactly the same, and the US has slightly more land (1,600,000 square kilometers) under cultivation. However, the population of China is four times the US population, and growing. This suggests that agricultural self-sufficiency for China will be an enormous challenge. Professor Starr's book cites a study that suggests, in a worse case scenario, a Chinese grain shortage exceeding the world surplus.

In a recent article in the Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jun/23/china-food-shortage, Chinese officials are cited as saying that they are committed to self-sufficiency, and are increasing agricultural expenditures at a rate exceeding inflation. The bottom line, however, is the challenge posed by the small amount of arable land.

And as in most industrialized nations, arable land in China is diminishing! The Guardian article explains this clearly: "the growing problem of feeding the world's biggest population as cities expand into farmland and urban residents consume more meat and vegetables." Suitable land for housing will not be found in the Gobi Desert or the Himalayas. Housing developments will be built next to existing infrastructure, and as often as not, they are on former farmland.

The land situation in China exemplifies perfectly the "Century of Scarcity."