ExplainerChina vaults salt with saline-tolerant crops, increasing yields and advancing food security goals
- China, hampered by a relative scarcity of arable land, has developed methods to farm mineral-dense soils not ordinarily conducive to plant life
- Tolerance in crops, amelioration of land among solutions to bottleneck that could otherwise halt country’s campaign for self-reliance in food
As extreme weather events battered China’s traditional breadbaskets and abrupt geopolitical shifts made reliable grain prices a thing of the past, Beijing has ramped up its campaign to safeguard food security, employing a variety of methods to expand yields and cultivate more efficiently.
To guarantee its 1.4 billion people can be fed without despoiling its limited stocks of arable land – a paradox that has always been a major hurdle to self-sufficiency -the country has explored ways to grow in soils dense with plant-killing salts and minerals.
What is saline-alkaline land, and where is it?
“Saline-alkaline land” refers to soil that contains an excess of both soluble salts and exchangeable sodium, both of which make land more difficult to farm.
China has the world’s third-largest surface area of saline-alkaline land at about 100 million (247 million acres) hectares, with about one-third carrying the potential for utilisation.
That land is distributed throughout the country, found in 19 provinces spanning China’s southeastern coast as well as the arid north and northwest.