Deluges and strict lockdowns in China have disrupted farming in a way that country’s winter wheat harvest next month remains one of the big uncertainties in a global economy that is already struggling with high commodity prices.
If the Chinese harvest is bad in the coming weeks, it could drive food prices up further, compounding hunger and poverty in the world’s poorest countries, reported the New York Times.
Flood last autumn in China has left the soil waterlogged. The wheat due to this reason is not able to take root easily. In addition to this, Ren Ruixia, a 45-year-old farmhand said that the coronavirus lockdowns imposed by the Chinese government have also delayed the arrival of fertilizers.
This adequacy of food supplies has long been a top issue in China. The legacy of Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), was marred by disastrous agricultural experiments that led to tens of millions of people dying of famine in the early 1960s. Many stern rules wreaked havoc in China. One of them was maintaining the national target for acres under cultivation.
Rules required that a large share of the country’s acreage, 463,000 square miles, larger than Texas, be farmed. Rural villages are sometimes bulldozed to maintain the national target for acres under cultivation. (ANI)