A Study On Our Country’s Food Security Under New Situations

The people are the foundation of a country, and food is what matters to the people. As basis of human existence, food is not only the most basic living material, but also important strategic material of national economic security, even closely associated with political security. China is the most populous country with a population of about 22% of the world, while arable land accounts for only 10%, food security has always been China’s the most important matter. To ensure food security is not only the basis of sustainable development of our country’s economy, but also the guarantee of social harmony and stability, and an important part of national strategy. With the deepening of integration into WTO, China’s food security is not only restricted by domestic factors, but also influenced by international food security situation.Entering the new century, thanks to the development of world economy, the progress of science and technology and the high attention of governments, the world’s agriculture has been developed rapidly. On the whole, the world’s food supply and demand in most years are basically balanced, the proportion of malnourished population is declining, and the world food security level is significantly improved. However, influenced by growing population, raising prices, the global financial crisis, global warming, drought, floods, and other problems, the world food security problems still exist.China is a country with large population and food consumption, it is difficult to completely rely on domestic production to meet the demand for food, so the import of food from the international market is an important means to adjust the gap of grain supply and demand, and it is necessary to protect China’s food security. However, once the import scale is too huge, it will cause the loss of production independent, finally seriously threatens our country’s food security. For many years, our country’s food self-sufficiency rate has remained above 95%, especially since 2004, grain yield has increased for 11 continuous years. But it is undeniable that agriculture remains a weak link in China’s economic development, there are many unsafe factors. In recent years, with the increase of agricultural production materials and labor costs, as well as fertilizer application reached the limit of land, the yield of grain is very difficult to increase significantly. In addition, due to limited arable land, disadvantaged irrigation conditions, natural disasters and extreme weather, the condition of agricultural production further deteriorated. Although the Chinese government has always attached great importance to food security, most of our agricultural policies belong to "yellow box" ruled by WTO, "green box" policies are very little while "blue box" policies even do not exist. Meanwhile, with the decline of the world grain prices in recent years, China’s grain import has increased, aggravating the competition between domestic and foreign grain. What’s more, with the costs of fertilizer, pesticide and labor continue to rise in our country, famers’income declined and their enthusiasm for grain decreased. As these problems will exist for a long time, China’s food security is facing severe challenges. Therefore, we must attach great importance to food security.The academic circle has studied a lot on the problem of food security. On this basis, the thesis analyzes the new situations, problems and influence factors of China’s food security in the new century, using the method of system analysis, the combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis, empirical analysis and comparative analysis, then it put forward relevant suggestions. This thesis can be divided into three parts. The first part introduces the domestic and international background, the research significance, the research methods of this thesis. Then it summarizes the studies domestic and foreign scholars have been carried out, finding that although the current studies are relatively full, there are still some shortcomings. Then it analyzes the relative theories, including industrial security theory, industry association theory, public goods theory, externality theory and cobweb theory. The second part discusses the status quo of China’s food security, the main problems we meet and the factors that affect food security using method of both empirical analysis and normative analysis. Then it forecasts China’s food supply and food demand and the import scale in next few years using the economic measurement model ARIMA, and analyses food balance accordingly. The third part puts forward the suggestions to ensure food security of our country, including importing grain moderately, improving food production capacity, adjusting food consumption structure, reforming food circulation system, improving international competitiveness, establishing good relationships with main export countries, setting up overseas production bases, making full use of WTO rules, and improving the farmers’enthusiasm, which is a critical method to ensure food security in our country.The innovations of this thesis are:First, it analyzes the international and domestic new situations and new problems of China’s food security, which make the article more practical. The prices of world grain continue to drop in recent years, increasing the size of China’s food import and leading to increased competition between foreign and domestic grain, while our country’s costs of chemical fertilizer, pesticide and labor continue to rise, reducing the enthusiasm of farmers to grow grain. This has become an important threat to China’s food security. Therefore, this thesis believes that to improve the enthusiasm of the farmers is the key to China’s food security under the new situation. Second, this thesis put forward a new idea to improve the grain circulation system and to ensure the food security by using "Internet+grain". However, due to the lack of adequate statistical data, the thesis inevitably has some inaccuracies or imperfections, especially in the use of ARIMA model to carry out food production and demand forecasting, the results may not be very ideal. Hope that I can use latest data to make more accurate analysis in future.