By SPIEGEL Staff
In an effort to restore calm, Wen says that China is able to meet most of its demand for rice from domestic supply, and that the government even has 40 to 50 million tons in emergency reserves. But there is still a gap between supply and demand of about 10 percent, which means that the country must import rice for 130 million people. This has become extremely difficult, because the key exporting nations, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam, have restricted their exports to prevent their supplies from being depleted by hoarders and their own people being left hungry.
Since January, China has also blocked grain exports by imposing new duties. Using export quotas, subsidies for farmers and price controls, Beijing hopes to safeguard the domestic food supply. The government even monitors fields by satellite to prevent them from suddenly and illegally being turned into building land.
But none of this can be effective in the long term. China and India, faced with growing populations and shrinking agricultural land, are increasingly dependent on food imports from abroad. Beijing has calculated that it needs 120 million hectares (296 million acres, or an area about the size of South Africa) of arable land to feed the country. The amount of land currently available for farming is only slightly above that figure, and fertile fields are disappearing beneath concrete daily.
And because almost all halfway fertile land is used for agriculture, the soil eventually becomes depleted of nutrients. China already consumes a third of world fertilizer production. This drives up prices, and at some point even fertilizer is no longer effective on over-farmed land.
"Most increases in productivity with such rudimentary means have already been exhausted," says Jonathan Anderson, an agricultural expert with Swiss bank UBS. In northern China, the soil is already so poor that the authorities have ordered farmers to keep their livestock in stalls to prevent further erosion of pastures and excessive rainwater runoff.
China is busy seeking solutions for all of these problems. Experts from the Trade Ministry have proposed that Chinese agricultural operations invest directly in Southeast Asia and Africa, where they could establish farms to satisfy the country's demand for grain. Although surplus harvests are a rarity in Africa, Chinese experts are already training local farmers in ways to improve their crop yields.
More than 10 years ago, Chinese farmers took over a dozen large farms in Zambia. They enjoy generous support from the government in the capital Lusaka, pay few taxes and are expected to bring innovation to and stimulate local agriculture.
In Uganda, the government of President Yoweri Museveni has provided 400 Chinese farmers with about 4,000 hectares (9,867 acres) of cropland. "We bring along experience and modern machinery," says an enthusiastic Liu Jianjun, the chairman of a Chinese-African economic alliance. "And we have high-quality seed that is far more productive than domestic varieties."
The Asians, who are by no means merely pursuing altruistic development objectives in Africa, hope that their efforts will eventually pay off. At home, new cities are swallowing up huge chunks of land, displacing millions of farmers. Indeed, it would suit China well if as many people as possible were to emigrate. There are already 750,000 Chinese working in Africa today.
In contrast to China, India enacted market reforms in the 1990s that led to hundreds of thousands of farmers becoming dependent on multinational corporations. They were led to believe that genetic engineering would solve their problems and, as a result, many switched from food crops to useful plants like cotton. But the plants were susceptible to pests. In addition, the new crops required expensive special fertilizers and, in some cases, the purchase of new seeds every year. This drove tens of thousands into financial ruin and even suicide.
India is still a long way from overcoming acute poverty. Seventy percent of all Indians live in villages and remote hamlets, most of them in poverty. They produce hardly any more grain than in the 1970s, when the country declared for the first time that it was self-sufficient. But India's population has doubled since then.
Since January, food prices have risen by 40 percent in India, and inflation is at 7 percent. For Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the situation is so dire that it poses an acute threat to his coalition government. The government subsidizes palm oil and imported grain, and grain futures transactions are prohibited. As a result, a hunger crisis is not to be expected for the time being.
Meanwhile, Maoist groups like the radical Naxalites have benefited for years from the plight of farmers, and have even established alternative administrations in a growing number of districts.
India is also trying to secure food imports through bilateral agreements, with Kazakhstan, for example. In addition, the country plans to "invest heavily in Africa," as Prime Minister Singh has said. Besides, politicians in New Delhi have been almost as quick to resort to trade restrictions as neighboring countries. In early March, they imposed a ban on exports of almost all types of rice. As a result, the current harvest, one of the best in years, is being kept off the world market. Rice, the most important staple food for about 4 billion people in Africa and Asia, is already selling for more than $1,000 (€625) a ton in some cases.
Speculators and major producers are the ones who are currently benefiting the most from new conditions in the marketplace: from the reduction in supply caused by export bans, from the feverish hoarding of available products and from the changes in India and China that are increasingly shaping the global market. And there is no solution to these problems in sight.
Now that rice has become so expensive, it has aroused completely new kinds of greed. In Thailand, for example, the crop is disappearing from fields.
The thieves, who come under the cover of night, are thorough. A farmer in Sing Buri Province, for example, arrived at his rice field early one morning to find that the entire field had been harvested. It must have been the work of a team, and they must have used tractors, he says. "When the prices are low, we don't make enough money, and when they are high we get robbed," he complains.
As a last resort against rice thieves in Sing Buri, farmers have taken matters into their own hands. Some recently started spending nights keeping watch on their fields -- to ward off local profiteers of the worldwide food crisis in person.
RÜDIGER FALKSOHN, JENS GLÜSING, HORAND KNAUP, PADMA RAO, THILO THIELKE, WIELAND WAGNER
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
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