Features of Ensuring Food Security of the PRC at the Modern Stage

Abstract

The historically established colossal disproportion between the population of the country and the fertile lands has determined the direction of China’s state policy in this area for many years. Substantial financial support from the state for agrarians and the growing chemicalization of agriculture helped to overcome malnutrition and hunger by the end of the first decade of the 21st century. At the same time, achieving a high level of self-sufficiency in food of its own production is only one of the steps on the way of the PRC to ensuring national food security. In recent years, it has been characteristic of adjusting the vector of efforts from the formal availability of food to increasing its economic accessibility for wide sections of the population. The downside to the intensification of the Chinese agro-industrial complex was the aggravation of environmental problems and, as a result, the reduction of acreage due to soil degradation. This factor allows us to predict an increase in the country's dependence on food imports in the long term. Thus, China’s orientation towards the maximum possible self-sufficiency in food presents new challenges for the state, the answers to which are yet to be found.