US-China cooperation is key to global food security

although the food crisis that swept the world in 2008 has passed, global food prices are still high, and nearly 0.9 billion people are still threatened by hunger. Population growth, economic and social development and resource constraints determine the long-term global food security pressure. It is predicted that the world will have a 2.3 billion additional population by 2050, which alone will require a 70% increase in global food supply.

Driven by industrialization and urbanization, the demand for animal-derived foods in developing countries has grown strongly, which in turn has led to an increase in the demand for feed grains. On the other hand, land desertification, shortage of fresh water resources and environmental pollution have seriously restricted the sustainability of global food production. Thus, food security is perhaps the most serious challenge that humanity will face. How to better ensure global food security has become an urgent issue facing the world. The key to solving the global food problem lies in Sino-US cooperation.

Solving China's Food Problem

as the most populous country in the world and the most vulnerable to famine in human history, China's food problem is, to a certain extent, a global food problem. For a long time, China has insisted on grain self-sufficiency as its fundamental policy of food security, and is committed to increasing domestic grain production. However, with the rapid growth of food demand, the growth of domestic food production has been significantly lagging behind. The growing food gap has led China to import large quantities of food from the international market. Among them, the United States is China's largest food supplier. Considering China's huge imports, no country in the world except the United States has the ability to meet China's needs.

China and the United States are highly complementary in agriculture, and a good foundation has been laid for agricultural cooperation between the two countries. As China's food gap increases, China's food supply will be more dependent on the United States. For a long time, the surplus of agricultural products has been plagued by American agriculture. More than 1/3 of the agricultural products produced in the United States are used for export. The Chinese market has become the largest export market of American agricultural products. China's agricultural imports from the United States will increasingly become the key to alleviating China's domestic food problems, and will also greatly promote the development of American agriculture. In addition, the cooperation between China and the United States in agricultural investment, food safety, education and technology will also benefit agricultural development and food security.

Although the food crisis of 2008 was directly caused by bad weather, financial speculation, food energy and government overreaction, the neglect of agriculture in the past few decades is the root cause. The long-term downturn in international food prices has caused many countries in the world, especially most developing countries, to lose interest in promoting agricultural development. The serious shortage of agricultural investment, especially in agricultural science and technology, leads to the slow and even retrogression of agricultural development. Therefore, in order to better ensure global food security, countries around the world must increase investment and support in agriculture and revitalize agriculture.

A thriving world agriculture is the most powerful guarantee of global food security. As the largest agricultural economy in the world, the agricultural development of the United States and China will affect and even determine the world agricultural economy to a great extent. First of all, the two countries should pay more attention to their own agricultural development, increase policy and financial support for agriculture, especially increase investment in agricultural education, science and technology, and strengthen agricultural cooperation with each other and other countries, so as to realize the second green revolution in world agriculture.

Many developing countries, especially those in Africa and South Asia, which are threatened by famine, have great potential to increase food production, but they are seriously lack of capital, technology and infrastructure areas, so they are unable to effectively develop their agriculture. The United States and China have the responsibility and ability to help these backward countries develop their agriculture. China and the United States can work together to lead international aid, refocus aid on promoting agricultural development, increase agricultural investment in poor countries, and support and encourage the transfer of advanced agricultural science and technology.

Addressing global climate change

many of the resources to increase food production are already stretched, making global food security a huge challenge. However, climate change will make the task of overcoming these challenges even more difficult, as it will reduce the productivity of most existing food systems and undermine the livelihoods of people already vulnerable to food insecurity.

Although the international community has realized the seriousness of global climate change, due to the serious differences between developed and developing countries, the international community's cooperation on climate change has rarely been effective. In this context, China and the United States, as the two largest carbon emitters in the world, represent the interests of developed and developing countries respectively. Both China and the United States play a key role in the global climate change response framework. If China and the United States can first join hands to take strong measures to deal with climate change and carry out effective cooperation, it will play an exemplary role in the world and promote the efforts of the international community to deal with climate change.

The 2008 food crisis also exposed the fragility of the world's food system. Since the end of World War II, the world food system has been centered on the major food exporting countries led by the United States. The system of managing and restricting international food trade is basically an extension of the domestic agricultural policies of the United States and other developed countries, with the purpose of serving the agricultural interests of developed countries. Such a food system has many serious flaws. In order to encourage food exports to solve the problem of food surplus in their own countries, the United States and Europe provide high subsidies to their own agriculture, while other countries have set up various barriers to food trade in order to protect their own agriculture and farmers and resist food dumping in the United States and Europe.

In the end, agriculture has become the most protected industry, and agricultural trade barriers have become the biggest obstacle to the process of world trade liberalization. The reason why the Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations has not been successful for more than ten years is that developing countries and the United States and Europe cannot reach a consensus on agricultural subsidies and agricultural trade barriers. The current world food system mainly protects the interests of food exporting countries such as the United States and Europe, while ignoring the food security problems of many food importing countries.

Cooperation between China and the United States will be key to reforming the world's food system. First, China's increased imports of U.S. food products will benefit U.S. farmers greatly, which will effectively promote U.S. agricultural subsidy reform. This could lead to progress in the Doha Round. Secondly, as a major food importer, China's continuous integration into the global food system will change the relationship between world food production and consumption. The broad cooperation between China and the United States and the strengthening of food trade relations have the potential to promote a new world food system. This new world food system will not only take care of the interests of a developed food exporting country such as the United States and Europe; it will also provide more protection to developing countries represented by China and food importing countries. For example, the new world food system will constrain the trade behaviour of food-exporting countries.

In addition, China and the United States can also improve the transparency of the bulk commodity market, regulate the futures market, biofuels, agricultural information sharing, food crisis early warning, and jointly build a global food strategic reserve to carry out effective cooperation. In the era of in-depth globalization and trade, no country can be immune to the world food crisis. International cooperation is the only way to ensure world food security. Effective cooperation between China and the United States will be the key to ensuring world food security. The cooperation between China and the United States in the field of food security can also lay a good and solid foundation for the cooperation between the two countries in other fields, and then promote the bilateral relations between the two countries.

The writer is Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

associate Research Fellow, China Program, Lajarenan Institute of International Relations

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