by multipletext.com Who Will Feed 1.3 Billion Hugry Chinese (1)? 28 Dec 2008 You know Chinese account for 20 percent of the global population. Would you like to poise for a moment and picture the huge difference to the world between two scenarios: in one Chinese are well fed and able to feed other nations; in another Chinese are in starvation and need the world to feed them? Fortunately by now we are in the first scenario, but the situation could reverse in a very short space of time if the Chinese authority adopts a proposal made by a private but high profile economic research centre. The centre is headed by an old man surnamed Mao who is said to be a professor and has a long track record of sharing his dreadful wisdom with the rest of Chinese. A few days ago Professor Mao held a news conference in Beijing and announced a new research finding by the centre: there is no direct link between the size of cultivated land area China has and the amount of the crop output China can yield each year. Based on this consumption, he challenged the wisdom of China's policy that prohibits 120 million hectares of highly productive cropland to be used for urban development. "There are enough food produced by other countries and available for purchase at international market," exclaimed Professor Mao, earnestly, which makes his news conference a bit like sales promotion for the largest wheat export country in the world, namely the United States. (The biggest wheat export natoins: rochedalss.eq.edu.au/wheat.htm) But is our world really such a wonderful place where there is abundant food for everyone to share all season round? If so, why Haitian mothers would make mud pies to feed their families? Maybe it's because they are too poor, and according to the Law of the Jungle commonly held in the West and religiously followed by Professor Mao, they are the losers in social selection, and losers ought not to expect too much from life. But how about those affluent nations with plenty of hard currency to spend? Will they also be affected by global food crisis? And after all, does the world still have a chance to experience global food shortage from time to time? The following passages, from a news report titled Biggest Grain Exporters Halt Foreign Sales (by Javier Blas in London, Isabel Gorst in Moscow and Lindsay Whipp in Tokyo) published on Financial Time in Aprial 15, 2008 (www.ft.com), may provide some hints to the question:
Now here is another question: is it possible that food security researcher, Professor Mao, is totally ignorant of the facts? If this is the case, he must have faked his professional qualifications. But if this is not the case, then why he deliberately misled his fellow countrymen, as he frequently did in the past, in such an idiotic way? Many Chinese believe he has no choice, because his research centre is funded by Ford Foundation, thus there is a direct link between the level of his income and the amount of the fund that Ford Foundation is willing to transfer into his bank account. Ford Foundation of the United States is well known for its special links to CIA, in fact, many in America and abroad view it as a public face of the secret agency. The following are excerpts with Chinese translation from articles that explore the special relationships between the two:
Below are some typical responses from online Chinese viewers to Professor Mao's findings: oldfrend (xinhuanet.com) It's almost like to say, hi, you don't need to build your own military equipments; when war comes, you can always buy them from other countries. 太糊涂，这样的认识相当于认为“国家不需要建兵工厂，战时可以向其它国家购买武器”一样。 基石 (xinhuanet.com) All over the world, millions people have starved to death. Yet under such circumstances, Mao XX would call for easing restriction that prohibits new urban development on existing agricultural land. I just wonder if this guy is too naive or too creepy. 韩国花巨资卖不到粮食，没办法，跑到马达加斯加租地自己去种粮食。日本也一样，为解决粮食问题而在澳大利亚租地自己去种粮食。全世界每年有上百万人因没粮食而饿死。这样的情况，这个叫茅XX的败类是真的不知道还是装无赖? vkuj (china.com) He said there is no direct link between agricultural land and food, I would like to ask him if he dares to confirm there is no link between the total size of the agricultural land and the total amound of the food produced? How come someone would be so vicious that he would want to trap his own countrymen into starvation? 耕地和粮食产量之间没有直接的关系，那么与总量有没有关系？天下怎么会有这么恶毒的人，是不是想把国人饿死才开心？ 经济裁判 (xinhuanet.com) The total size of China's agricultural land area ranks the forth biggest one after the United State, Russian and Indian while we have the largest population in the world. When the per capita stock of agricultural land is concerned, it is less than 0.1 hectare, barely half of the world average, 5.5 percent of that in Canada and 5 percent of what it is in India, among 190 countries in the world, China ranks 126th. We've already have 664 counties with per capida argricultural area below the critical point of 0.8 according to the standard set up by the UN, and the size of cultivated land in China has reduced to only 120 million hectare in total. 中国耕地面积在世界上排第四，仅次于美国、俄罗斯和印度，但是咱们国家人口太多，平均到每个人头上，才拥有耕地1.4亩，还不到世界人均耕地面积的一半。再看加拿大，它的人均耕地是我们的18倍，而印度是我们的20倍。我国人均土地面积在世界上190多个国家中排在110位，耕地面积排在126位，草地面积排在76位，森林面积排在107位。目前咱们国家已经有664个市县的人均耕地在联合国确定的人均耕地0.8亩的警戒线以下。全国的耕地面积已经下降到18亿亩。 Prev: Chinese
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