Food is a key issue the for the Chinese government. Arguments that people have never had it so good under the Communists carry little weight if the people actually aren't, and The Great Leap Forward, though played down by official Party propaganda, is a stain yet to be washed clean from the collective memories of the Chinese who lived through it.
True, the populous has been lived out of abject poverty with remarkable speed since the "reform and opening up" in the 1970's. Now, none of that should detract from the food miracle that China has enacted since it began its transformation into an industrial powerhouse in the late 1970s. This 2013 report from the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) brims with data on this feat. The nation slashed its hunger rate -- from 20 percent of its population in 1990 to 12 percent today -- by quietly turbocharging its farms. China's total farm output, a broad measure of food churned out, has tripled since 1978. The ramp-up in livestock production in particular is even more dizzying -- it rose by a factor of five. Overall, China's food system represents a magnificent achievement: It feeds nearly a quarter of the globe's people on just 7 percent of its arable land.
Providing food and providing money could be two government aims that ultimately prove to be incompatible. Urbanization drives and demand for real estate for factories means that the amount of land available for farming is shrinking, and the farmland that already exists is hopelessly contaminated. Official government reports in the pisspoor state of the soil in China gave such embarrassing results that the government refused to release it, and soil conditions in China are an official state secret.
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