China's food economy to the twenty-first century: Supply, demand, and trade

The goal of this article is to help establish a more comprehensive, transparent, and empirically sound basis for assessing the future growth of China's food supply and demand balances. We hope this article will shed light on the debate on China's future grain balance, identify the kinds of structural transformations and policy decisions that might cause large grain deficits, and show the circumstances under which China might maintain its current status as nearly self-sufficient. To meet this goal, this article first examines China's current grain balance sheet and history of grain imports and then reviews previous efforts to project China's growth of grain supply, demand, and trade. Our own assessment of the future grain economy begins by investigating a series of factors, beyond income and prices, that may affect grain demand and supply. We develop a supply-and-demand projections model, which includes a series of important structural factors and policy variables, including urbanization and market development on the demand side and technology, agricultural investment, environmental trends, and institutional innovations on the supply side. After reviewing the baseline assumptions, we present the results of the baseline projections and examine alternative scenarios using different rates of growth in income, prices, wages, population, and investment in research and irrigation.