China’s harvest set to drop

Press, 28 December 1985, Page 15

China’s harvest set to drop

NZPA-AP Peking China’s 1985 grain harvest is expected to drop about 13 per cent to the lowest level in three years 'because of severe weather and reduced acreage, the Government said.

The official Xinhua news agency said the crop should reach the 1982 level of 354 million metric tonnes, down 53 million tonnes from last year’s bumper harvest of 407 million tonnes.

If verified, the reduction in tonnage will be nearly the largest since the founding of Communist China in 1949, matched only by Mao Tse-Tung’s disastrous “great leap forward,” when grain output fell 57 million tonnes between 1958 and 1960.

Thanks to last year’s record crop, China achieved self-sufficiency for the first time and became a net

grain exporter, although consumption by its 1.03 billion people is low by world standank

Diplomatic analysts said China still has grain reserves from 1984 and is not expected to boost imports from the United States, Australia or Canada. The 1985 harvest still would be’the fourth largest in the country’s history. The most serious consequences could be political, they said. A Communist Party Politburo veteran, Chen Yun, a central planning advocate, criticised Deng Xiaoping’s market-force reforms at a big party conference in September and forecast that “grain shortages will lead to social disorder.”

Since then, economists have debated what acreage should be devoted to grain,

which Mao called “the key link” but which Deng’s reformers give lower priority. Acreage was reduced 4.7 million hectares this year, Xinhua said.

“Their biggest problem may be how to tell people production dropped without making it sound serious,” said one Western diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity. “In the past, they have always praised themselves to the heavens for increases.”

“I don’t think this presents a serious threat to the reform movement but instructions will be going out to make sure to keep grain stocks up,” the diplomat said.

The Government already has acknowledged that the run of four bumper grain harvests was over. It said summer floods in the north-

east provinces of Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang wiped out 10 million to 12 million tonnes while drought affected Sichuan, Hunan and Hubei in the south. The State Statistical Bureau forecast in October that the crop would be less than 385 million tonnes. But neither official indications nor foreign experts predicted so sharp a reduction. Xinhua said its report was based on information from the Agriculture Ministry, where a spokesman, Feng Yulin, confirmed the forecast but declined to disclose details. The statistical bureau said it was still checking the accuracy of the harvest figure, which will be published next year. ' Grain output rose 33 per cent between 1978 and 1984 after Deng reintroduced

private plots and launched a cash contract system. State quotas were replaced last spring by contracts binding farmers to grow set amounts at fixed prices with the remainder sold on free markets.

After last year’s glut, prices were low and many peasants concentrated on cash crops such as vegetables and melons.