Читать книгу The State of China Atlas - Robert Benewick - Страница 39

Agriculture provides a declining share of China’s GDP. While this decline is in line with trends in other industrializing countries, ensuring a continuing and adequate food supply for the population presents the Chinese government with a particularly daunting logistical challenge. Government investment has targeted agricultural modernization in an attempt to revive rural confidence and productivity. Animal husbandry (mainly factory farming) and production of corn for animal feed and crops vital to the food processing industries are booming, in large part due to the increased emphasis on meat and dairy produce in the Chinese diet. The amount of grain produced for human consumption was in decline, but is now climbing back towards its mid-1990s level. In 2007, as a result of the harmonization policy, a 2,600-year-old agricultural tax was abolished, along with a host of other taxes imposed on the rural population. The following year, the government discussed a new land-tenure policy designed to encourage smallholders to create larger and more productive farms through land-lease arrangements. Such a move would affect up to 800 million people still classified as farmer-peasants.

see also page 112

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