August 20, 2008

 

 

China is closing in on its goal of increasing its national grain output to assure grain self-sufficiency, thanks to development of agricultural technologies , experts said.

 

Experts are forecasting that with the rising yield per units, China will reach its target of ensuring self-sufficiency in a wide range of grains and other foods in the near future, the China Daily reported.

 

Zhang Lubiao, a senior official of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS), told the newspaper that China must continue to satisfy 95 to 100 percent of its own consumption of major grain products to ensure national food security.

 

The latest figures from the National Bureau of Statistics showed the total output of summer grain in 2008 amounted to 120.41 million tonnes, up 2.6 percent from the year before, an increase for the fifth consecutive year.

 

The yield per mu (0.06 hectare) reached 299.5 kg ( or 4.5 tonnes per hectare), up 2.5 percent from the same period last year, marking the record high based on available figures for the past five years.

 

Agricultural experts said the increase was mainly a result of improvement in the yield per unit rather than expanding planting areas. As China has limited arable land, the only way to achieve its self-sufficiency targets was to develop agricultural technologies to improve yields, he said.

 

The CAAS is the country's most authoritative agricultural research institute, which is directly affiliated to the Ministry of Agriculture.

 

Zhang said there is plenty of room for China to improve agricultural technologies.

 

He said CAAS is working hard to develop new strains of high-yield seeds of various crops, including wheat, rice, corn and soy, and is trying to introduce those high-yield seeds and other advanced technologies.

 

China's "super hybrid rice" for example, produced a yield of 19 tonnes per hectare in trial plots last year. Experts said the technology, once extensively applied in large areas throughout the country, is expected to produce a yield of 12 tonnes of rice per hectare, a 71-percent increase from the current average yield in China and up 300 percent from the yield per unit in other countries.

 

CAAS have also developed "Aibai wheat" (dwarf sterile wheat) technology to help improve the efficiency of cultivating high-yield seeds by shortening the time of seed breeding.

 

Other areas of research involve transforming saline-alkali soil into arable land and importing "genetic resources" from other countries in South America and Europe to crossbreed high-yield seeds.

 

CAAS is also gearing up to cooperate with other countries to improve the efficiency of irrigation and harvesting. New technology could cut down wastage at harvesting, currently from 5 to 10 percent to about 3 to 5 percent, CAAS said.