Last batch of UN food aid for China

In the late 1970s the members of 18 households in Xiaogang Village, Fengyang County, in southeast China's Anhui Province, distributed the land of the village to each household spontaneously. They decided to hand over the tax grain the following year and keep the surplus grain for themselves. This was in response to several decades of hunger, and, sure enough, there was a bumper harvest the following year. After handing over the tax grain, the peasants kept the surplus grain for themselves, solving the problem of food and clothing that had troubled them for many years. It was no longer necessary for the peasants — led by the village secretary — to go to the cities to beg for food after the Spring Festival.

The Central Committee of the CPC respected the people's wisdom, and soon adopted measures to recognize the reform, and promoted it in the rural areas all over China by promoting the household contract responsibility system with remuneration linked to output. It took 22 years for the per capita grain output in China to increase by 11 kilograms — from 307 kilograms in 1956 to 318 kilograms in 1978. However, it took only six years for per capita grain output to increase by 74 kilograms from 318 kilograms in 1978 to 392 kilograms in 1984. The big problem of feeding the people was unexpectedly solved in just five to six years.

Despite meeting with some opposition within the CPC, the Central Committee promulgated five documents in succession in the first half of the 1980s to vigorously push forward the rural reform. The household contract responsibility system with remuneration linked to output has been implemented nationwide since then.

Deng Xiaoping once said, "No matter what happens, things can be managed so long as people can eat their fill." While he was in office, he helped solve the problem of food and clothing for most of the Chinese people.

Deng's successor Jiang Zemin also attached great importance to the food issue, regarding it as the key to rural work. During his first term of office the total grain output reached 492.5 million tons in 1997, with the per capita grain output of 398 kilograms exceeding the world's average.

China's grain production did not go smoothly, however; there were some setbacks. As the old saying goes, "Low prices for grains hurt peasants while high prices for rice hurt consumers." Although the grain output increased year by year under the new system, the grain price dropped, and the peasants' enthusiasm for farming was dampened along with the increase in the grain output because the relevant reform was not in place. As a result, the grain output decreased over a period of time. At the time Brown gave his warning about China, China's grain prices were not stable and peasants did not receive much in the way of tangible benefit from grain production.

Hu Jintao has attached still more importance to grain production since he became the top leader of the CPC and the PRC. He asserted that China had entered an era when "industry supports agriculture in return," and put forward the slogan of "balancing urban and rural development, and boosting rural development through urban development." The Central Government increased the investment in agriculture, rural areas and peasants, at the rate of over 300 billion yuan each year. In 2008 the investment amounted to over 800 billion yuan.

The Central Committee of the CPC also issued six documents in succession to unify the thinking within the CPC and vigorously promote the reform in the rural areas. For example, in the first document of 2004 it was pointed out that efforts should be made to stick to the policy of taking less, giving more and being flexible to reverse the trend of the widening gap between urban and rural residents in income.

The first document issued in 2005 stressed strengthening the construction of agricultural infrastructure, speeding up scientific and technological advances in agriculture and improving the comprehensive agricultural production capacity. The emphasis of the first document issued in 2006 was on balancing urban and rural economic development, and that of 2007 was on increasing investment in agriculture, actively pushing forward modern agricultural construction, enhancing rural public services and deepening the comprehensive reform in rural areas.

The five programmatic documents issued in the era of Deng Xiaoping addressed the issues of putting in place the household contract responsibility system with remuneration linked to output and solving the issue of providing peasants with food and clothing. The six programmatic documents promulgated so far during the presidency of Hu Jintao tackled the issues of how to further deepen the reform in the rural areas and how to help the peasants become better off.

To encourage peasants to plant more crops the Chinese Government abolished the agricultural tax in 2006. The tax had been collected for 2,600 years. In addition, in recent years the Chinese Government has also started to give subsidies to peasants. On behalf of the Central Committee of the CPC, Hu Jintao also announced that the policy concerning peasants' land would remain unchanged for a long time to come. This is another important step following Jiang Zemins' announcement that the policy would not be changed for 30 years. Peasants can use their own land without the worry that their land will be encroached upon during the urbanization process.

Ten years after Brown sounded his warning, in 2004 a Canadian ship called the "Blue Dream" anchored at Shenzhen in southern China. The ship was loaded with 43,000 tons of wheat donated by the United Nations for relieving poverty in China. This was the last batch of relief grain sent to China. Such aid had been provided by the United Nations to China for 26 years. The director of the China Office of the World Food Program (WFP) said the decision to halt grain aid to China had been taken because of the soaring output of grain grown by China itself.