Projecting China's feedgrain demand and supply: what matters?

Abstract

[Extract] Discussions in earlier chapters suggest that feed grain demand in China will become the major component of China's total grain demand in the future. Any future increase in total grain demand in China will be mainly caused by an increasing demand for feed grains. On the other hand, some researchers hold that China will not be able to meet the increased demand for feedgrains with its domestic supply (Gamaut and Ma 1992, p. 71; RGCFDS 1993, p. 26; Crook and Colby 1996; Findlay 1998, p. 32; Tian and Chudleigh 1999). Due to the importance of this issue for China and the world, an increasing number of studies have attempted to project China's feedgrain demand and supply. Researchers have attempted to make projections from various angles using different approaches and, not unexpectedly, obtaining different findings. A survey of the available literarure on China's feedgrain demand and supply will help to (I) gain an overview of the major influences that affect China's feedgrain demand and supply; (2) understand why earlier projections differ; and (3) identify areas where furure research attention should be focused to produce more plausible projections.

In the next section, we first address some conceptual considerations applicable to projecting China's feedgrain demand and supply. In Section 8.2, we examine China's feedgrain demand and supply in the past two decades, which helps to identify the discrepancies between the actual realised observations and some projections. Some existing projections are then highlighted in Section 8.3. Section 8.4 is devoted to addressing possible reasons why some projections differ from each other and why some deviate significantly from realised observations. We then in Section 8.5 address some other difficulties and uncertainties that researchers may encounter in their attempts to project China's feedgrain demand and supply. The last section points out some areas that deserve future research priority which will be dealt with in our modelling work in later chapters of this book.