Standing amid his sodden field sown with peanuts, Wang Wei pulls a clump of green leaves from the mud and frowns as he looks at the tiny, underdeveloped pods at the base of the plant. The farmer from Baoshang village in the central Chinese province of Henan grumbles they are much too small to ensure a good autumn peanut crop. Already reeling from a poor summer wheat harvest following drought in May and early June, heavy rain now threatens to hammer Wang’s output with a “double blow”. “I can’t recall a year that had a drought this bad … my wheat output was almost halved from last year,” he said, adding he was likely to see his peanut output shrink by a third and corn production decline by roughly 10 per cent. “Too little rain in the first half, but too much in the second half.” Wang’s misfortune is one of a growing number of anecdotes fuelling concern about China’s grain supply this year. “Grain security” has become a buzzword in Chinese media, even though official data does not show an immediate danger of a shortage. China’s summer harvest hit “an all-time high”, rising 0.9 per cent from a year earlier, including a 0.6 per cent increase in wheat output, according to the Ministry of Agriculture. That follows 16 consecutive years – between 2004 and 2019 – of “good harvests”, with grain output last year 54 per cent higher than it was 2004. Officials also made assurances in April that there was enough wheat and rice in storage to feed the “Chinese population for a year”. Yet, Beijing has simultaneously stepped up efforts to remind the country about the importance of maintaining self-sufficiency in strategic grains, including rice, wheat and corn. President Xi Jinping emphasised grain supply security during a visit to Jilin province in July and again last week when he made an unusual instruction for people not to waste food. The message on food thrift immediately turned into a national campaign, with restaurants promising to serve food in smaller portions, websites banning food shows, and lawmakers flirting with the idea of creating a legal framework to punish food waste. For some, the message has fanned memories of Mao Zedong’s instructions in 1959, at the beginning of the Great Chinese Famine, that people should eat less during leisure time to save food. In Henan, which accounts for about 10 per cent of China’s grain output, farmers have become reluctant to sell their wheat because of supply problems – a perception that runs against the official narrative. Many farmers are hoarding crops in expectation that prices will continue rising because of low supply, partly because of the coronavirus pandemic. The manager of one of two privately-owned “wheat purchase stations” in the town of Donghong – which encompasses Wang’s village – said his purchases had fallen by about 44 per cent this year due to a drop in output and reluctance among farmers to sell. “Last year the farmers rushed to sell all the wheat they harvested,” said the man surnamed Zhu, while a large screen blinked behind him with closed-circuit television images of his storehouse. “This year they have generally chosen to keep more reserves under their own roofs.” Wheat output in the area had fallen roughly 30 per cent to 40 per cent from a year ago, said Zhu, adding the “official figures may have been produced to assure the public”. Zhu’s claim is not supported by any official data and the Henan provincial government has said the summer harvest was at “an all-time high”. Zhu said that traders from as far away as Beijing to the north and Shaanxi to the west have arrived to buy grain recently – underlining national supply difficulties. Official figures also appear to hint at disruptions in output. State purchases of wheat were 42.9 million tonnes as of August 5, a drop of 9.4 million tonnes from the same period last year, according to the National Food and Strategic Reserves Administration. In Henan, government purchases of wheat dropped to 9.1 million tonnes, or 5.4 million tonnes less than a year earlier. China’s state grain reserve system runs about 1,000 grain warehouses across the country. In one warehouse about 80km from Zhu’s grain purchase station, a long row of granaries stood locked up to the outside world, while a handful of staff sat in a nearby office chatting. The warehouse, which is managed by the state-owned China Grain Reserves Corporation (Sinograin), was unusually quiet as authorities in Henan had scaled back government purchases from local farmers due to rising prices. Surging imports of grains, including wheat and corn, also offers evidence there are issues with domestic grain supply, although it is too early to predict any shortages. China imported 74.51 million tonnes of grain in the January-July period, up 22.7 per cent from a year ago, according to data from the General Administration of Customs. Natural disasters like floods and droughts are common in China and there is no alternative data to suggest the official grain output figures are not accurate. Though there is concern from some quarters about food security, China has come a long way from the days of food shortages and famine. Absolute poverty – defined as income below 2,300 yuan per year – is expected to cease to exist in China by the end of this year and the main issue concerning food for many Chinese nowadays is eating too much. The prevalence of obesity in China increased more than threefold between 2004 and 2014, according to a study by researchers at Chinese National Centre for Disease Control and Prevention published last year. A quarter of a century after the publication of Who Will Feed China?: Wake-Up Call for a Small Planet, a book by Lester Brown that warned of China’s impending food crisis and the impact that could have on global food supply, dinner tables in ordinary Chinese households have never been so plentiful. Still, China’s farming sector faces a number of long-term challenges from increasing urbanisation and industrialisation, which is eating into the supply of arrable land. In the county town of Shangcai, which was categorised as extremely impoverished until February, residential buildings are advancing while green farmland is in retreat. In one area, a new residential block with about 20 buildings encroaches on a fields of sesame and peanut. In Yancang, in the Xinan county, local leader Chen Yunfeng said the village was forced to move to their current location after residents’ ancestral homes were seized for development of a big hydropower project on the Yellow River. China’s countryside ‘returning to poverty’ as lack of reforms help fuel urban-rural divide The village was given about nearly 100 hectares (247 acres), but about two thirds of that land has been taken over by an aluminium powder factory, leaving little space for farming. Local resident Chai Jianhui said he had mixed feelings towards the factory, which pumped plumes of white smoke into the sky from its towering chimneys. Although the factory grabbed the best part of the village’s arable land, it has offered residents jobs with monthly salaries of about 2,000 yuan to 3,000 yuan (US$432), an income they could not earn planting crops on small plots of land. “You can’t make money from farming, and that’s why few people want to till the land,” Chai said. Back in Baoshang village, where Wang tends to six hectares (14 acres) of land, most of the adults have left to take jobs in towns and cities. Many villagers have leased their plots to Wang and he is able to work the area because he is a major grain producer in the village. Henan had just 0.2 acres of arable land per capita in 2019, below the national average of 0.25 acres. With the land entitlement for each household so small, farming is not a realistic source of income for many rural residents. Even with a larger plot of land and machinery, farming is still a hard and unpredictable business in China, said Wang, who is one of only two full-time farmers in the village. Wang pointed to a tiny plot of corn on a river bed to make his point. Heavy rains had caused the river to burst its bank and down the crops. “All the labour and effort were washed away,” he said.