Abstract
As self-sufficiency is no longer a practical policy goal for China, the Chinese government has shifted the focus from boosting annual grain output to ensuring grain production capacity and improving the overall competitiveness of the country’s agricultural sector. To achieve this objective, China is determined to address two major problems associated with its farmland. The first is fragmented, small-scale subsistence farms. The second is farmland degradation and pollution. Despite the central government’s resolve to scale up and clean up the country’s farmland, the impact of such measures on China’s food security and agricultural development remains widely debated. This chapter intends to review the government’s efforts to address these two major farmland problems via scaling up and cleaning up. It is also an attempt to examine the potential implications of these efforts for China’s own agricultural sector and the spillover effects on the global food system.
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Zhang, H. (2019). Scaling Up and Cleaning Up the Farmland. In: Securing the ‘Rice Bowl’. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0236-7_3
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