China's summer grain harvest a record, but deep inefficiencies remain
Harvest hits 136 million tonnes this summer but production remains far behind the US, with farmers relying on triple the fertiliser
China's summer grain output hit a record high after 10 straight years of growth, the government says, although analysts warned of the toll farming was taking on the environment.
More than 136 million tonnes of grain, mostly wheat, was harvested, up 3.6 per cent from last year, the National Bureau of Statistics said.
The yield per hectare increased 3.5 per cent over last year, the bureau said. But productivity was only 5 per cent of that in the United States, said Professor Dang Guoying, a researcher at the Rural Development Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Even reaching that level required large amounts of fertiliser - with Chinese farmers using three times the amount Americans did, Dang said.
Last year China produced 602 million tonnes of grain, about a quarter of the world's total estimated by the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organisation. But the sector was far from globally competitive, as productivity was low and costs high, Dang said.
Most farms are small-scale, and farmers are focused on [the] short-term
A key obstacle is irrigation, which remains relatively primitive and accounts for about a third of farmers' labour costs.
