China will maintain more than 90 percent of its self-sufficiency in grains during the coming decade by developing agricultural technologies and improving land use for food production, an agricultural expert said on Saturday.
In 2010, the country saw the seventh consecutive record grain harvest with production of 546 million tons. The government said current grain stocks exceed 200 million tons, with grain self-sufficiency standing at 95 percent for the last decade.
However, shrinking farmland and imbalanced use of that land poses challenges for the country's grain producers.
He Bingsheng, president of China Agricultural University, one of the country's leading agricultural economists, said that the demand for grain in 2010 had already exceeded the 580 million ton forecast made by many researchers for 2020.
"By 2020, our demand will be bigger. We still have 10 years for development, but the challenges and pressures are big too," he said.
"There's a greater concentration of (grain) output in production areas, and with water scarce in northern areas, sustainability (of output) is worrying," Chen Xiwen, deputy director of the Central Rural Work Leading Group, said in an essay published on the website of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' Rural Development Institute.
In addition to corn, imports of soybeans, cotton and other agricultural commodities revealed a substantial gap in China's domestic food market. In 2010, the country ran a deficit of more than $2 billion in agricultural trade, according to official figures.
