Chinas grain production: a decade of consecutive growth or stagnation?

Some progressive writers have argued that while China's agricultural privatization achieved short-term gains, it did so by undermining longterm production facilities such as the infrastructure and public services built in the socialist era.1 Environmental scholars have questioned the sustainability of the Chinese agriculture. In a report published in 1995, Lester R. Brown raised the question: "Who will feed China?" He argued that the Chinese population's changing diet, shrinking cropland, stagnating productivity, and environmental constraints would lead to a widening gap between China's food supply and demand, a gap the world's leading grain exporters would not be able to fill.2