Exclusive:High Quality Development of Grain Industry
WANG Yiting, WEN Shurong, GUO Wenshuai, ZHONG Yu
Food security is an important foundation for national security. From 2012 to 2023, China's grain output increased by 13.59%, and generally the contribution of per unit yield improvement to grain production increase was much higher than that of area. Among them, the increase of rice and wheat production mainly relied on the increase of per unit yield, while the increase of corn and soybean production mainly came from the expansion of arable land; the output increase mainly relied on the increase of per unit yield in the main production areas and the production-marketing balance areas, while it relied on the expansion of arable land in the main marketing areas. At present, China's food security is faced with the challenges of stabilizing the farmland area and increasing per unit yield. On the one hand, because of the accelerated occupation of quality cultivated land due to urbanization, there is an obvious trend of "non-grain production of cultivated land and non-agricultural transformation", and the potential for development of cultivated land reserves is limited; on the other hand, the growth rate of grain yield per unit has gradually slowed down; in particular, there is a big gap in the yield per unit of corn and soybean between China and other countries such as the United States and Brazil. In the future, the construction of agricultural infrastructure should be speeded up to ensure stable yields despite drought or excessive rain; the breakthroughs of core key technology research should be made to further improve the agricultural science and technology; quality urbanization should be pursued to promote the sustainable development of agriculture; the cultivation of new agricultural operators should be accelerated to optimize the service technology system; the protection and utilization of cultivated land should be further strengthened, and the idle arable land and saline alkaline soil should be put into use again.