China's Grain Economy: The Challenge of Feeding More than a Billion (review)

This book attempts to address the question: is China able to cope with the challenge of feeding its more than one billion people? This is certainly an issue of great importance to China and other major grain-trading countries. However, it is clear from reading this book that finding the answer poses quite a challenge to scholars both within and outside China.

China's grain sector has been a topic of interest both before and after Lester Brown posed the world-shaking question, "Who will feed China?"¹ Being the world's largest producer and consumer of grain, China has the potential to generate an immense impact on the world market. This potential has stimulated many studies, based on different theoretical approaches, including that of this book, to China's grain economy. While these studies have produced diverse predictions on the magnitude of China's future grain imports, they are almost unanimous in the conclusion that China will become a net importer of grains in the first decade of the twenty-first century. China's Grain Economy further confirms this finding.

The intent of the authors of this book is to develop economically meaningful models for grain supply and demand that take into account the special features of China's grain supply and demand and the impact of government policies, thus providing the basis for more reliable projections of the development of China's grain economy. The book begins with a comprehensive review of China's agricultural policies and agricultural development, in chapter 2. In chapter 3, the authors work out theoretical models of grain supply and demand, which extend the work of previous studies by examining some of the unique features of China's grain economy, such as subsistence in the rural sector and food rationing in the urban sector. In chapters 4 and 5, supply and demand models are estimated by utilizing data from various sources. The results are then combined in chapter 6 to make predictions on the prospects of China's grain market in 2000 and 2010. The last part of the book is a summary in which the authors offer a qualitative assessment on the likely impact of reforms on the land-tenure system and the development of rural township enterprises.

For those with only a limited knowledge of China's grain economy, this book is valuable in terms of providing extensive information on how China's grain policies have been evolving and on the underlying factors that lead to changes in policies and institutions. It also contains valuable information on the sources of relevant data and sheds light on data-quality issues, which are a continual problem for researchers in this field. The theoretical models developed in this book are fairly comprehensive and insightful, although there are some missing discussions on topics such as the adjustment of state and private stocks and the linkages between domestic and international markets. By presenting key assumptions clearly and vigorously, the book provides future researchers with a good starting point for formulating new, testable hypotheses and new models. The predictions shed some light on how China's grain economy is likely to develop in the long term. The text is written in clear language and the content is easily understandable to a wide range of readers. Overall, the book is a useful reference for those interested in the issues relating to China's grain economy.

On the other hand, this book studies China's grain economy mainly at the sectoral level and devotes insufficient attention to the objectives and roles of major players in the grain market, including producers, consumers, local leaders, state grain-marketing enterprises, state trading firms, and national policy-making and implementing bodies. In reality, these players interact with each other, and this in turn determines the performance of the grain market and the effect of grain policies. It is not unusual...