China's Food Production Goals Are Impractical, Experts Say

A panel of leading authorities on Chinese food policy concluded last night that China's plans to increase its annual agricultural growth rate to 4 per cent by the year 2000 are impractical.

Dwight H. Perkins, professor of Economics and Modern China Studies, and a leading authority on Chinese agricultural development, began the discussion at Emerson Hall, which about 100 people attended.

Perkins discussed the recent change in emphasis of Chinese domestic policy from redistribution of income to economic development. The major problem the Chinese face now is keeping agricultural growth in pace with rapid industrial development, he said.

Stating that one of the major barriers to agricultural development is China's "fixed land endowment"--limited amounts of poor land--Perkins said China is more advanced than other underdeveloped countries.

The Chinese have already begun to use improved seeds and fertilizers, and now need new irrigation systems and land conservation techniques, he said. Such large-scale change will take many years, he added.

C. Peter Timmer '64, professor of Food and Agriculture at the School of Public Health, said China's hoped-for agricultural growth rate over the next 20 years would increase China's role in the distribution of world food supplies.

The government will have to continue to limit demand for food through rationing, however, if it is to approach targeted levels of growth, Timmer said.

Maintaining that the problem of food policy is one of distribution rather than of production, Nicholas N. Eberstadt '76, a research fellow of the Center for Population Studies, said, "Something approaching extreme poverty and hunger still exists in China today."

Enormous regional variations in food production contribute to uneven distribution, he said. With 17 per cent of China's people living below the base level nutrition standards, the average life span is about 60 years, he added.

However, when compared to other developing nations such as India--whose people have a life expectancy in the low 50s--China has had "some sort of success" in feeding its people, Eberstadt said.