China’s Agricultural Support Capacity and Dependence on Foreign Resources

Abstract

To more accurately answer the questions “who will feed China?” and “whether Chinese people can feed themselves?”, we proposed a concept of agricultural support capacity, defined as the population that can be fed by energy, protein and fat from food, respectively, according to nutritional intake standards. In this study, we established models to measure this, based on analysis of China’s agricultural support capacity and how this changes under self-sufficiency and open conditions, in addition to the degrees of external dependence. Our results show that, since 2007, even without foreign resources, the energy, protein, superior protein and fat obtained from domestic agriculture had been able to feed the Chinese. However, the use of foreign resources increased and strengthened China’s agricultural support capacity, in addition to improving food diversity, optimizing nutrition, assisting in the regulation of food surplus and deficiency, and providing feed for the animal breeding industry. For the past decade, China’s degree of external dependence on energy from cereals has been relatively low, however, the degrees external dependence on superior protein and fat has increased steadily at a certain rate and have been over the national food security warning level. Therefore, China still has great demand for agricultural products from other regions of the world.