A drought in China is threatening food production, and the government has ordered local authorities to take all available measures to ensure crops survive the hottest summer on record.
On Tuesday, four government departments issued an urgent joint emergency warning, warning that the autumn harvest was under “serious threat”. He urged local authorities to ensure that “every unit of water … is used carefully” and called for methods including staggered irrigation, diversion of new water sources and cloud seeding.
A record heat wave combined with a months-long drought during the usual flood season has wreaked havoc in normally water-rich southern China. It has dried up parts of the Yangtze River and dozens of tributaries, drastically affecting hydroelectric capacity and causing blackouts and power rationing as electricity demand peaks. There is now concern about the future food supply.
Even Pay, a Trivium China analyst specializing in agriculture, said his immediate concern was fresh produce.
“The types of fresh vegetables that supply the local markets where people buy their produce every day – this is the category that is least likely to be in a major irrigated area and is not likely to be strategically prioritized in a push national to protect grain. and oil feeds,” he said.
Crop losses would also affect supply chains and exacerbate supply problems, Pay said, as a Chinese city’s supply of produce was often grown near that city but would have to be sourced from further and it could rot on longer journeys.
Pay said the concerns were mainly domestic and the food categories that would affect global markets were “remaining fairly safe”. But he said attention should be paid to canola if the drought still continued when crops are planted in the fall.
China now relies more on its own corn production, 4 percent of which was grown in drought-stricken Sichuan and Anhui, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine dramatically destabilized global supplies.
Pay added: “I think we’re going to start seeing reports of farmers being affected. A lot of pig farmers have improved over the last few years… There are large vertical intensive farms, and if the AC is cut [the pigs] they won’t be in good shape.”
Pay was relatively upbeat about the measures announced on Tuesday and his call for tailored local solutions. The order to divert water sources would likely help areas where water is inaccessible, he said, and grants have already been announced.
“But now we’ve had 35 days in a row of heat advisories. We have dry season water levels, or below typical dry season water levels. The conditions are very, very extreme and there’s no there is no doubt that there will be some crop loss.”
Tuesday’s notice heavily emphasized that it came from the highest levels of government, titled in part “emergency notice on the full implementation of the spirit of General Secretary Xi Jinping’s important instructions.”
“This is a really important signal to localities that there is a high degree of political will behind the push to do everything possible to support farmers and ensure crops can be saved,” Pay said.
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It was also a sign of pressure on China’s Communist Party to prevent rising food prices and inflation as it prepares for its five-year congress meeting in the coming months.
“It’s signaling to the markets, to anyone with concerns or who is thinking about stocking up on food, that, hey, everyone is mobilized and we’re going to do our best,” Pay said. “It’s also telling the local provincial and county governments that they need to come out and see them to do something even if nothing can be done.”
China has pledged on the climate crisis to peak its carbon output by 2030, but, along with some European countries, has recently shifted coal output to avoid a global energy crisis.
Pay said China was making great efforts in adaptability. He said the failure of hydropower in Sichuan, where it provides 80% of the power supply, would likely lead to a fossil fuel-driven response in the short term ahead of efforts to boost other renewable sources that had struggled to compete with hydropower cheap
“What’s happening this summer will be the base case for what looks like a climate emergency, and we’re likely to see a lot of research and policy redesign … and a lot more attention to water availability.”
Additional reporting by Xiaoqian Zhu