China’s new problems of food security revealed by the Food Equivalent Unit

Abstract

China's food security has a great influence on the world, and has always been the top priority in China. In recent years, as the concept of food security is evolving into one of nutrition security and the importance of food diversity is increasing, research based on nutrition security and broad food systems are increasingly needed in today’s China. Thus, not only grain for human consumption, but also animal foods have been integrated into the Food Equivalent, which is used to analyze China’s current agriculture system and reveal the water resource distribution. The results indicated that the average animal food consumption has risen by 78.6%, and now China’s daily supply of animal food per capita has reached about 50% of that in the USA and 80% of that in the South Korea. So there exist an obvious disparity in animal food supply between China and these two countries. It is impossible for the China’s current agricultural system to achieve the level in the USA. Under China’s current agricultural system, the consumption proportion of feed grain had surpassed the consumption of food grain, increased sharply from 33% in 1992 to 67% in 2011. However, the growth potential of total grain output is approaching an upper limit, so the continued growth of feed grain demand exerts great pressure on the China’s food supply. The discordance of the spatial distribution of water resource and virtual water revealed that China’s current agriculture system had a low efficiency in being able to achieve food and nutrition security. China’s current “grain farming” cannot meet the demand of increasing nutrition and appropriate resource utilization. The implementation of grassland agriculture appears feasible and necessary for saving feed grain, providing a large number of high-quality animal foods and appropriate water resource utilization.

Keywords

food security / nutrition security / food equivalent unit / grassland agriculture / China

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Acknowledgement

Special thanks go to the anonymous reviewer who kindly helped the authors to amend the manuscript to an acceptable level of English. The research was supported by the key consultative project “Ecological security of grassland and food security in China” by Chinese Academy of Engineering (2012-ZD-7) and Program for Changjiang Scholars and Innovative Research Team in University (IRT13019).

Supplementary materialThe online version of this article at http://dx.doi.org/(doi:) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Compliance with ethics guidelines Huilong Lin, Ruichao Li, Cangyu Jin, Chong Wang, Maohong Wei，Jizhou Ren declare that they have no conflict of interest or financial conflicts to disclose.

This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by the any of the authors.

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Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg