China announced Thursday huge tariffs on fertilizer exports and said agricultural land was in rapid decline due to industrialization.
China's official communist news agency Xinhua News announced that export tariffs on fertilizer would increase by 100%.This will cause a virtual shutdown in the export of fertilizer from China.This is necessary to preserve fertilizer for suffering Chinese agriculture.
The fertilizer is widely used in rice,corn and wheat growing which is essential to feed the 1.3 billion Chinese.China also hopes to control rapidly rising domestic agricultural costs and inflation.
"Agricultural costs [in China] are going through the roof.Land prices,the cost of money,the relative cost of labor,fertilizer,a shortage of seeds," said Paul Schulte,of Lehman Brothers in Hong Kong."Yet rising agricultural prices can be a windfall for those with economies of scale."
The China News agency also said the amount of farmland has decreased to crisis levels.
Western observers said the two announcements on the same day are an effort to prepare the world for a food shortage crisis in China.
故事：
Food shortage occurs when food supplies within a bounded region do not provide the energy and nutrients needed by that region's population.Food shortage is most easily conceptualized as a production problem - not enough food is grown to meet regional needs - but constraints on importation as well as storage can also cause or contribute to food shortage.Food shortage is also created where food is exported from areas where production is adequate or even abundant.Historically,the great hunger of Ireland (1845-1847) and the famine of Bengal (1944) have been attributed more to British political decisions to export locally produced grain supplies without compensating imports than to production shortfalls per se (Woodham-Smith 1962; Sen 1981).
Even when production shortfall is the primary cause of insufficient supply,the ecological and political reasons for production problems vary widely.They range from natural disasters such as drought,flood,or fungus,to political disasters such as civil conflict,to misguided economic policies such as price controls- all of which discourage production of essential foods.
In all situations of food shortage,many within the region's population are hungry; but in every food-short region,others still enjoy adequate access to food.Equally,although many are food secure in areas of adequate food production,some still go hungry.These variable patterns of hunger result not only from skewed food distribution within regions based on differential political and economic resources,but also from selective marketing,and from non-market political policies of food extraction or assistance..
