Guest essay by Eric Worrall

China is not having a good year. Following China’s largely self inflicted Covid-19 disaster, and months of extreme rain pushing floodwaters against the structurally questionable Three Gorges dam, failure of which could wash away China’s industrial and agricultural heartland with a 31 billion litre inland tsunami, reports are now appearing claiming there is a looming Chinese food shortage.

China corn video stokes food security fears amid coronavirus pandemic, flooding and drought

Beijing criticises local move to ban mobile devices from granaries, says investigation shows no problem with corn quality

Suspicions about quantity and quality of corn stockpiles arose due to a recent jump in market price and record purchases from United States

Orange Wang
Published: 8:23pm, 3 Aug, 2020

China’s state agency in charge of its strategic grain stockpiles has sparked concern over the quality of national grain reserves, particularly corn, after a local unit moved to ban all photo-taking devices from its granaries.

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The device ban followed the online posting of a video showing a pile of corn from a Sinograin warehouse in Zhaodong, a county-level city outside Zhaozhou, in mid-July.

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The ban on carrying mobile phones into granaries further fuelled online speculation that the state-owned grain reserve agency could be hiding a deterioration in the quality of stockpiles and was moving to prevent exposure.

Much of the grain appeared to be mouldy and mixed with bits of dirt and other foreign matter. The clip circulated on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform.

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Read more: https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3095862/china-corn-video-stokes-public-food-security-fears-amid

China is importing unusual quantities of food.

China Food Crisis? Rising Domestic Prices And Large Import Purchases Send A Signal

Sal Gilbertie
Contributor
35,674 views|Jul 28, 2020,05:34pm EDT

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Above average rainfall and rising floodwaters are not just threatening to compromise China’s gargantuan Three Gorges Dam; rain and flooding are already disrupting rice, wheat and other crop production in the provinces all along the entire Yangtze River.

Perhaps this is why China, which holds just over half of the world’s wheat inventories and is the globe’s second largest producer of wheat (behind the European Union), has already imported more wheat in the first half of 2020 than it has in the first half of any year in the past decade. In the month of June alone, China’s single month import volume of wheat from all sources was the highest in seven years.

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Read more: https://www.forbes.com/sites/salgilbertie/2020/07/28/china-food-crisis-rising-domestic-prices-and-large-import-purchases-send-a-signal/

Obviously it is difficult to confirm anything about China, particularly when what you are trying to confirm is bad news. The rotting corn video ban might just be a heavy handed official trying to conceal a local issue at a single storage depot.

But if flooding and wet conditions have severely impacted China’s agricultural sector, there is a risk ongoing Chinese food purchases this year could trigger a substantial global food price spike.

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