Research On Food Consumption And Nutrition Of China's Rural Residents

Since reform and opening-up, the field of food consumption and nutrition of China's rural residents has made enormous achievement, Engel coefficient drops notably, food consumption expenditure increases progressively, food consumption structure is optimized day by day, and nutritional condition gets great improvement. However, because of the dual structure of towns and countryside at long-term in China, there are a lot of unique development characteristics of food consumption and nutrition in rural areas. So, it is necessary to carry on special systematic research on this field.At first, the paper reviewed the development courses of rural resident's food consumption and nutrition since reform and opening-up from four respects which are food consumption expenditure, food consumption structure, nutritional condition, health status on the basis of a large number of relevant data. Then, the paper carried on a deep comparative analysis to the disparity between the urban and rural areas and the difference among different rural areas of food consumption and nutritional condition, and the present characteristic of rural resident's food consumption and nutrition was summarized as " Two high, Three low " which means high grain meal pattern, high degree of serf-sufficiency, low developmental balance degree, low socialized intensity, low degree of consumption structure.The factors impelling the forming of these characteristics were various. This paper analyzed this problem from such respects as economic factor, policy factor, natural factor, social factor, etc. thus coming to a conclusion that the economic factor was the main decisive one, and income and price were the most direct influential factors to rural residents' food demand.After compared with the target of food consumption and nutrition, the present disparity was mainly lieing on the lower protein intaking amount and high-quality protein proportion arising from insufficiency of high-quality animal food consumption. Then, it carried on statistical analysis to income and price elasticity of the main food using the fixed elastic demand function model finding that the demand of grain and vegetables were insensitive to the changes of income and price, and the income and price elasticity of animal food were relatively high especially the eggs, meat and aquatic products. The time-series forecasting model results indicated that the rural resident's grain consumption volume would drop continuously and vegetables could not appear growth by a relatively large margin, but the consumption volume of meat, egg, milk would increase continuously in the coming 10 years. So the disparity would shrink progressively. Therefore, the nutritional condition of the rural residents would be improved continuously, but we should avoid the rising of rate of chronic disease caused by nutritional out-of-balance.Finally, the paper put forwards several policy recommendations in the field of promoting resident's consumption capacity, adjusting and optimizing the structure of agricultural industry, dwindling the disparity between urban and rural areas, perfecting the food consumption market, ensuring poor people's food and nutrition supply etc. for the purpose of nutrition improvement.