How China became world’s third largest food aid donor by promoting family farms
By Jet Hermida on Jul 22, 2009 in Agriculture and Globalization, Family Farming, Farm Technology, Food Security, Hunger and Poverty, News Clippings
HungerWednesday again and we highlight this interesting article from Celias about how “China ended its dependence on food aid, but almost overnight.. became the world’s third largest food aid donor.” And China got to this by dismantling collective farms and replaced them with family farms. Wow! Another convincing proof that family farming is the way to go!
In April 2005, the World Food Programme and the Chinese government jointly announced that food aid shipments to China would stop at the end of the year. For a country where a generation ago hundreds of millions of people were chronically hungry, this was a landmark achievement. Not only has China ended its dependence on food aid, but almost overnight it has become the world’s third largest food aid donor.
The key to China’s success was the economic reforms in 1978 that dismantled its system of agricultural collectives, known as production teams, and replaced them with family farms. In each village, the land was allocated among families, giving them long-term leases on their piece of land. The move harnessed the energy and ingenuity of China’s rural population, raising the grain harvest by half from 1977 to 1986. With its fast-expanding economy raising incomes, with population growth slowing, and with the grain harvest climbing, China eradicated most of its hunger in less than a decade–in fact, it eradicated more hunger in a shorter period of time than any country in history.
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