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The change in policy has given farmers powerful new incentives to use age- old Chinese agricultural techniques. For a thousand years longer than in Western Europe, the Chinese have fertilized their fields. They now use everything from animal waste and human fecal matter to butchery leavings and pond mud. The Chinese regard the West's failure to make use of excrement as "extreme extravagancy," says Wittwer. Shunning all manner of wastefulness, they feed livestock not valuable grain but materials of little other value. Algae and other aquatic plants, for example, have become a major source of both fertilizer and feed.
Fisheries are a masterpiece of efficiency: the Chinese encircle them with mulberry bushes. The leaves are eaten by silkworms, whose droppings fall into the ponds and feed the fish. Various species of fish ply the different depths of the ponds, which also support ducks and provide water for pigs.
In the laboratory, Chinese scientists have been unusually successful in developing hearty strains of crops. Several hybrid rice varieties yield up to five tons per acre, as much as 180% more than a standard American strain. The Chinese have also improved crop yields by pioneering the biological control of insect pests, using ducks, frogs and even other insects. Farmers employ wasps, for example, to control stinkbug infestations of fields.
For all their praise of Chinese agriculture, Wittwer and his colleagues concede that an abundant food supply for the growing population is by no means assured for the coming decades. One-third of the cultivated land, they note, is too saline, dry or eroded for maximum crop yields. National grain production, after years of rapid increases, has started to level off. Chinese leaders realize that to make further gains they may have to turn increasingly to more advanced farming technology, from sophisticated erosion-control methods to still wider use of chemical fertilizers.
Ironically, that may necessitate a partial reversal of the Deng reforms. Small plots will have to be recombined into larger collective farms. The trick will be to rebuild communal farms without destroying the new incentives that have made individual farmers so productive. Specifically, the incomes that farmers make will have to rise with the level of production. Only by maintaining its delicate new balance between Communism and capitalism can China hope to feed its next billion people.