China is plowing nature into farmland

China is making a 180 degree turn in its reforestation policy. For the past twenty years, the country has been under the spell of reforestation against the advancing desertification. Suddenly the internet is full of videos of parks and forests being plowed into farmland. Rode? China's dangerous dependence on grain and other food imports from abroad.

"Let's turn forests into farmland!" is the slogan that suddenly pops up everywhere on Chinese internet channels. For anyone who knows anything about the recent past, this is the world turned upside down, writes Courrier International. In the past twenty years, the Chinese government has done exactly the opposite: converting farmland into forest. Now the country is expanding its agricultural area at the expense of its forests.

Desertification
This reforestation policy was mainly prompted by the advancing desertification. A problem that has been going on for decades, costing China more than 54 billion yuan (€6,8 billion) annually and directly or indirectly affecting nearly 400 million people - nearly 30% of the country's 1,4 billion population - according to the National Forestry and Grassland Administration (NFGA).

More than a quarter of China's land area is affected by desertification. In 2019, desertification in China amounted to 2,57 million square kilometers, 26,81% of the land area. In 1999, this amounted to 2,7 million square kilometres. Pushing back the deserts is due to the ambitious Three North Shelter Belt Program. That program included eight phases to be completed between 1978 and 2050; it is also called the Great Green Wall. It is a forestation plan that covers 350.800 square kilometers in 13 provinces. There, a 'great wall of trees' is being planted to retain desert sand, absorb carbon dioxide and prevent soil erosion. The Netherlands has almost 42.000 square kilometers; it is therefore an area that is more than eight times the size of the Netherlands.

turn around
China often responds with drastic measures. The latest turnaround is not the first and will not be the last. Successive leaders alternated between more agricultural land to increase food self-sufficiency (Li Peng, 1987-1998), more reforestation, to combat overproduction, and for environmental reasons (Zhu Rongji, 1998-2012), more forests, to green developments in China (Xi Jinping since 2012) and now more agricultural land again.

Thinking the country has become too dependent on grain imports, especially those from the United States, Chinese leaders are now trying to reclaim farmland by clearing the forests, suggests Courrier International. That is not easy, describes Wang Dan, a Chinese pro-democracy activist and director of the Dialogue China think tank, in the Sunday Guardian. For example, the green belt around the western Chinese city of Chengdu, on which tens of billions of yuan have been spent, was razed to the ground to become 3 hectares of farmland within 100.000 years. Numerous "agricultural controllers" across China have forced farmers to stop planting industrial and commercial crops and use their farmland to grow grain. Hectares full of tobacco leaves, bamboo, fruit trees and ornamental trees have now disappeared.

'Administrative interference does not end well'
"The food crisis in China is more serious than the outside world thinks," says Wang Dan. Not only have the corona pandemic and the war between Russia and Ukraine seriously affected the availability of food in the global supply chain, China's relationship with the international community has deteriorated in recent years. The heavy-handed implementation of 'turn forests back to farmland', he says, could be a preparation for food shortages that the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party apparently foresee in the near future.

Wang Dan thinks that the central management of the concern to grow enough grain is missing the mark. "The problem is the system of resource allocation. That is not an agricultural problem, but a political one." According to Wang Dan, administrative interference in Chinese food production is not going well. He refers to the examples provided by the American political scientist James C. Scott in his book Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed: Germany, the Soviet Union, Brazil, Tanzania. But especially to the Holodomor (1932–33) in Ukraine and the three-year famine in China (1959–1961) caused by the Great Leap Forward, "both of which were caused by the central interference of communist authorities with normal agricultural production and their continued use of force to prevent peasants from saving themselves after the famine."

According to Wang Dan, smart free farmers can save China from starvation better than officials with a lot of power to sow grain everywhere.

This article is part of the content collaboration between Boerenbusiness en foodlog.

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