Only a decade ago food was so scarce that the threat of starvation was an everyday fact of life for tens of millions of Chinese. Today shop windows are filled with chickens and ducks, and open-air markets are overflowing with fresh vegetables. But if even the casual visitor to China in recent years could see that agricultural sufficiency had come at last to a country historically plagued by famine, few Westerners truly appreciate the magnitude of that achievement or understand how it came about. Under Deng Xiaoping's regime, the Chinese have become the most efficient farmers in the world in terms of output per acre. They feed more than a billion people, or 22% of the globe's population, on only 7% of its arable land.
The story of China's stunning improvement in farm production is comprehensively told in a new 462-page book called Feeding a Billion (Michigan State University Press; $30). Its authors are Sylvan Wittwer, director emeritus of the Michigan State University Agricultural Experiment Station, and three Chinese farm experts: Professor Sun Han of Nanjing Agricultural University, Professor Yu Youtai of Northeast Agricultural College in Harbin and Wang Lianzheng, vice governor of Heilongjiang province. Wittwer, the principal writer, made five trips to China during the past seven years and received unstinting cooperation from the Communist authorities in undertaking an in-depth study of Chinese farming methods. What he found, writes Wittwer, was a "hallmark of success in food production and agricultural reform."
Wittwer and his co-authors maintain that most of the progress took place after 1978, when Deng began economic reforms by breaking up collective farms and introducing market incentives into agriculture. Since that time, per capita food consumption has risen by almost 50%.
The Chinese accomplished this feat by melding traditional methods with innovative modern technologies. As the Chinese would say, they "walked on two legs." For all its advances, Chinese agriculture is still strikingly labor- intensive; the backbreaking practice of hand planting is almost universal. Yet China is now using modern chemical fertilizers in addition to time-honored natural ones. More and more acreage is being covered by transparent plastic sheeting that warms the soil, conserves water and guards against bad weather. Veterinarians use the ancient technique of acupuncture, but increasingly they work with laser beams instead of needles.
These methods would probably not have been used so extensively and successfully were it not for the dollop of capitalism that the Chinese have added to their 38-year-old Communist society. The state continues to own the land, but the large old communes are essentially gone and individual peasant families are now responsible for looking after plots. Although broad policies remain centralized, says Wittwer, "the peasant contracts to deliver ((to the state)) a certain amount of an agricultural commodity that he produces at a fair price. In return, he is free to produce -- by himself or with a group -- as much more as he can and, to a certain extent, sell it for whatever price he can get."