Homecurrent location： Home> Central News
Central News
Dr. Jikun Huang to Outline China’s Grain Policy and Its Global Impact at Borlaug Summit on Wheat for Food Security
Release date：2014/3/31 Source： ccap
Mexico City, March 27, 2014 – For 20 years, doom-laden predictions about China’s food security and its impact on global agricultural markets have failed to materialize, according to Dr. Jikun Huang, Director of the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Huang will emphasize that the global implications of China’s food economy in the coming decades are mostly positive. He notes that China’s ability to achieve self-sufficiency in rice and wheat will contribute to the global food grain security.Huang will make his presentation, “China’s Grain Policy and the World,” at the upcoming Borlaug Summit on Wheat for Food Security, which takes place in Ciudad Obregón, Mexico on March 25-28. The Borlaug Summit is being organized by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative (BGRI) and the Patronato for Research and Agricultural Experimentation of the State of Sonora (PIEAES).
The Borlaug Summit on Wheat for Food Security honors the 100th anniversary of the birth and the legacy of Dr. Norman Borlaug, a legendary CIMMYT scientist who developed high-yielding, semi-dwarf wheat that is credited with saving over 1 billion people from starvation. The Summit will look back at Borlaug’s legacy as the father of the Green Revolution, which sparked key advances in food production. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 in recognition of his contributions to world peace through an increased food supply. Borlaug’s wheat varieties were grown in Mexico, Turkey, India and Pakistan, boosting harvests in those countries, avoiding famine in South Asia and sparking widespread adoption of improved crop varieties and farming practices.
“Recently, China’s leaders have emphasized that China will achieve absolute security in food grains (rice and wheat) and will be largely self-sufficient in cereals,” Huang points out in his presentation abstract. “They are serious about modernizing agriculture, investing in agricultural technology and infrastructure to raise productivity, protecting the ‘red line’ of 120 million hectares of farmland and improving farmers’ incomes.”
As China’s food demand continues to grow, “the country must find new ways of boosting production,” Huang points out. “Given its severe natural resource constraints – China feeds more than 20 percent of the global population with just 8 percent of the world’s arable land and one-quarter of its average per-capita water resources – this requires raising productivity.” Huang notes that there are a number of reasons to be optimistic. “China is one of only a few major countries that have steadily increased public spending on agricultural technology over the past few decades. And that commitment remains strong.” For the past 10 years, China has focused on modernizing farming and making agriculture more productive.
Huang will be among a number of experts speaking at the Borlaug Summit, which will focus on wheat’s critical role in global food security. Other speakers include the President of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto; Howard Buffett, Chairman & CEO of the Howard G. Buffett Foundation; Sir Gordon Conway, Professor of International Development at Imperial College, London; Dr. Ronnie Coffman, Vice-Chair of the BGRI and Director of International Programs, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University; Dr. Per Pinstrup-Andersen, 2001 World Food Prize Laureate; Dr. Steve Jennings, Head of Programme Policy at Oxfam; Dr. Robert T. Fraley, Executive Vice President/Chief Technology Officer at Monsanto and 2013 World Food Prize Laureate; and Dr. Hélène Lucas, International Scientific Coordinator of the Wheat Initiative.
Dr. Huang is the founder and director of the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; professor at the Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research; and a Fellow of the World Academy of Sciences (TWAS). Currently, he is also vice president of the Chinese Association of Agricultural Economics and the Chinese Association of Agro-tech Economics; and a board member of the International Food & Agricultural Trade Policy Council, International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications and the African Agricultural Technology Foundation.
Previously Huang held research positions at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, the International Rice Research Institute and the International Food Policy Research Institute. He earned his BS degree in agricultural economics from Nanjing Agricultural University and his Ph.D. in agricultural economics from the University of the Philippines.
Huang’s research covers a wide range of issues on China's agricultural and rural development, including works on agricultural research and development policy, water resource economics, price and marketing, food security, poverty, trade policy and the economics of climate change. He has received the Outstanding Scientific Progress Award from the Ministry of Agriculture four times, the award for China’s top 10 outstanding youth scientists in 2002, the Outstanding Achievement Award for Overseas Returning Chinese in 2003, Outstanding Contribution Award on Management Science in 2008, the UPLB Distinguished Alumni Award in 2008 and IRRI’s Outstanding Alumni Award in 2010. He has published more than 400 journal papers, of which about 200 papers have been published in international journals, including Science and Nature. He is co-author of 18 books.
For more information on the Borlaug Summit on Wheat for Food Security, visit www.borlaug100.org.
For additional information about the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy, Chinese Academy of Sciences, visit http://en.ccap.org.cn/.
