Xi Jinping’s new term “big food concept” sparked heated discussion | Leader of the Communist Party of China | Xi Jinping | China’s food crisis

[New Tang Dynasty News, Beijing time, April 24, 2024]Following “new quality productivity”, the leader of the Communist Party of China, Xi Jinping, recently invented a new term “big food concept”, which triggered heated discussions. Netizens ridiculed that Xi “points out the direction for food” and that his “big food concept” tells people that grass, bark, mice, etc. can all be eaten, implying that China may face a food crisis.

The People’s Daily, the official media of the Communist Party of China, published an article on April 21 saying that Xi Jinping emphasized “the need to establish a big food concept.” In April this year, during an inspection in Guangdong, Xi said: “To solve the problem of eating well and ensure food security, we must establish a big food concept, ask for food from the land and the sea, cultivate the sea, animal husbandry and fishery, build sea pastures, and “blue water” “Colorful Granary”.

Last month, Xi also said during an inspection in Hunan: “Adhere to the big agricultural concept and the big food concept, actively develop characteristic agriculture and agricultural product processing industry, and improve the level of agricultural industrialization.”

So, what exactly is the “big food concept” that Xi calls? The report quoted Xi as saying that the big food concept requires diversifying the sources of food, maintaining quality and quantity, and ensuring food security.

Qin Weiping, an independent economist living in the United States, told Radio Free Asia, “Xi Jinping’s formulation, in my opinion, is actually a very subtle way of telling everyone to pay attention to food security, or in other words, to eat without being selective. Don’t be too picky. You can eat it, don’t just eat the four traditional staple foods.”

After Xi Jinping came to power, he reiterated the issue of food security many times, saying that “the Chinese people’s rice bowls must be firmly in their own hands at all times, and the rice bowls mainly contain Chinese food” and so on.

However, China’s food mainly comes from imports. On January 23 this year, the Information Office of the State Council of the Communist Party of China held a press conference and introduced that China will import 160 million tons of grain in 2023, an increase of 11.7% year-on-year. Among them, the annual import volume of soybeans will be 99.41 million tons, an increase of 11.4% over the previous year. , accounting for more than 60% of all grain imports.

Qin Weiping said: “What the CCP government cares most about is actually the security of its governance, and what is most closely related to the security of its governance is actually food security. If a serious food crisis breaks out in the future, it may have a big impact on their regime. .

Recently, news broke that nearly 10,000 tons of corn had disappeared from a grain depot in Hebei Province in two years, which attracted attention. A public account on the X platform commented, “It seems that the grain depot did not catch fire in time this time! For more than ten years, this corruption has become more and more corrupt! No wonder they are promoting the ‘big food concept’.”

Yokogawa, a current affairs commentator living in the United States, believes that “there is definitely a food security problem because arable land is reducing very quickly.” China’s urbanization is a main reason for the reduction of arable land, thus threatening food security.

Yokogawa said that to fundamentally solve China’s food problem, the first is to rely on the market economy, and the second is to realize land privatization. China implemented public ownership and planned economy in the 1950s and 1960s, which eventually led to the Great Famine. After the Cultural Revolution, the authorities implemented household-based production quotas, allowing farmers to voluntarily carry out semi-privatization. As a result, the problems of food supply and diversification were quickly solved. Because as long as there is a food gap, it will be filled by the market immediately.

Yokogawa believes that Xi Jinping’s so-called “big food concept” cannot solve China’s food problem. “He wants to use the means of planned economy to solve problems that only market economy can solve.”

In addition, China’s food safety issues are becoming increasingly prominent. At this year’s “3·15” party, there were 20 topics discussing problems in the food industry, including using dog food raw materials to make sausages, etc., which attracted great attention from the outside world.

Yokogawa believes that the main responsibility for China’s food safety issues lies with the government: “The first problem is that the government has not fulfilled its responsibilities; the second problem is that because the government does not comply with all laws, food (safety issues) are no longer No one abides by the legislation. This is not a separate issue, it is related to the destruction of the legal system in the entire society.”

Xi Jinping coined the new term “big food concept”, which also aroused ridicule from netizens on overseas X platforms. Some people ridiculed Xi for “pointing the direction for food.” “Everything like grass, tree bark, mice, etc. can be eaten.” “The translation of (big food concept) is that everything that cannot be eaten to death is food. If you are not sure, let everyone try it and decide.”

(Comprehensive reporting by reporter Luo Tingting/Editor in charge: Wen Hui)