📶 Oct. 7, 2023: NBC News > “Food security is very important to China,” said Tim Benton, a professor at the University of Leeds in England and the director of the Environment and Society Center at Chatham House, a London-based think tank. - #China

Oct. 7, 2023, 2:00 AM PDT

By Janis Mackey Frayer and Henry Austin

www.nbcnews.com

“Over the last 20 or 30 years the requirements for large-scale urban populations eating more ultra-processed food and a greater range of food means that their self-sufficiency ratio, in terms of how can they feed themselves, has dropped from a percentage in the high 90s to about 66%,” he said.

Benton added that President Xi Jinping and other leading figures in the ruling Chinese Communist Party would remember growing up during the Great Leap Forward, a disastrous attempt in the late 1950s and early 1960s by then-leader Mao Zedong to rapidly industrialize Chinese society that led to millions of deaths from starvation and the brutal purges of the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution.

As a result, Benton said, there is a recognition that in a “very authoritarian state, the ability to keep everybody happy ultimately rests on food security.” If there were to be another significant famine, he said, “the center of the party would feel at risk.”

More recently, he said, the war in Ukraine, tensions with the West and extreme weather have reinforced “this basic issue that they are frightened of food insecurity and they don’t want to rely on the market.”

He added that it had been “interesting to see the use of food as a weapon of war” by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government, which has blocked Ukrainian grain exports, and that “a country like China is very nervous about being held to ransom.”

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