China makes significant contributions to global food security

China is playing a positive role in improving the agricultural production and food production capacity of developing countries and has made significant contributions to global food security, Han Changfu, minister of agriculture, said during the recent 37th Food and Agriculture Organization Conference of the United Nations. Han also expressed hope that the international community could work together to cope with the challenges brought by the deterioration of global food security.

The conference was recently held at the Food and Agriculture Organization headquarters in Rome, Italy. Han led a Chinese agricultural delegation to attend the conference and made a speech.

China has sufficient grain stocks

The Chinese government has attached great importance and made great achievements in the development of agriculture and rural construction to benefit farmers. Han said that the development of China's food and agricultural production is very stable. China fed nearly 21 percent of the global population with only less than 9 percent of the world's arable land. Therefore, China has made significant contributions to global food security.

Han pointed out that the income of Chinese peasants increased steadily and their quality of life significantly improved. The rural impoverished population also reduced significantly and the living standards of peasants basically reached the moderately prosperous level.

China suffered severe droughts and floods in 2011, which aroused the international community's concerns about China's grain production. Han stressed that China received a summer grain harvest this year and the summer wheat yield is expected to achieve an increase for eight consecutive years. Meanwhile, China's autumn harvest also has a relatively good foundation. Han also said that currently, China has sufficient grain stocks and adequate market supply, and the grain prices are generally stable.

Han said that China has not only ensured its own grain supply but also made contributions to the global food security.

Han said that China has actively conducted international agricultural cooperation and exchanges, and provided considerable agricultural assistance to relevant developing countries within the framework of South-South cooperation. In addition, it has played an active role in helping other developing countries increase their agricultural production efficiency and capacity.

China has built more then 20 agricultural technology demonstration centers in Asia, Africa, Latin America and other regions, and dispatched more than 1,100 agricultural experts and technicians to other developing countries to help them train agricultural talent. Han said that China will further strengthen agricultural cooperation with other developing countries.

Global food prices have risen sharply since last year, leading to social unrest in certain countries. Since the rising food prices have become more than just an economic issue, Han called for the international community to strengthen cooperation, to increase agricultural investments, to enhance the wide application of advanced agricultural technology, to help developing countries achieve food self-sufficiency, to improve the agricultural trade environment, and to ensure global food security.

Han expressed hope that developed countries will fulfill their obligations to ensuring food security. "Food security is a global problem, and all countries should work together to solve it," he said.

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Fault Lines - The Root Cause Analysis Of The Global Economic Quake

Fault Lines, in geological terms, are the fractures in the earth's crust which are a result of a significant displacement of the earth mass - a movement on these lines usually results in massive earthquakes. These fault lines have been summarily been equated with the existence thin fissures and undercurrents in the financial world which have resulted in a tectonic shifts in the way business gets conducted worldwide.

Raghuraman G. Rajan is a Professor of Finance with the University Of Chicago Booth School Of Business and had also served as a chief economist at the IMF. In his book "Fault Lines", he brings apt comparisons with the geological lines which caused much upheaval in the financial status of America and why the world gets affected by it. These are the Financial or Economic Fault Lines which caused the global financial crisis. In fact, Rajan was one of the few economists who had actually warned us about these mild tremors much before the larger financial quake hit all of us.

While the world is struggling to come out of the crisis, blames fall upon few irrational people who caused this meltdown to happen due to the huge risks they undertook leaving a global recession in its wake. Rajan tries to look beyond these few people who supposedly caused the crisis, to those economic policies which were the actual root cause of the problem - and they still persist. He points out that unless those are looked into we continue to sit on a financial volcano which is causing fissures in the global economic crust the shift of which will cause an even massive crisis!

The book focuses on the facts that caused the recent predicament.He basically points out that the crisis was a collective problem caused by a large number of individuals (officials of FIs, governments, politicians, regulators, and even ordinary citizens) who in their own manner were acting as per the flawed economic policies laid out. He mentions that the risk that these policies posed, were not aligned to the benefits one used to draw out of them. He goes deeper into the system to visit those fissures that threaten the economics of the world business order which is heavily dependent on the financial stability of the US.

The American wage structure took a beating and saw the wages getting stagnated between 2002 -2005. These led to making housing credits available easily for the citizens, raising the purchasing power parity and expectations while deepening the Fault Lines in an already fissured economic status - stagnant wages, lesser jobs, inequality in education and health policies etc. Fault Lines points at the deepening pressure on the US to bring the house in order. There are serious inequalities in education, health care, home owning laws - all of which give access to cheap and easy credits - and these policies (touching upon Fannie and Freddie Mae) need to be revisited to ensure more stability in the world economy. The ever widening gap between the rich and poor will continue to put pressure on the government to push easy credit into the market. Rajan tries to expose this system which does not offer a blanket social safety net over one and all; however,

difficult decisions need to be taken to look beyond the short term incentives the policies have to offer. Change policies to make the economy robust and stable for a longer period of time. In all Fault Lines is a serious and essentially thoughtful book.

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