China world's 3rd food donor
By Tom Miller (The Guardian)
Updated: 2006-07-20 11:11
http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,,1824582,00.html?gusrc=rss
After 26 years of receiving food aid, China has emerged as the world's third
largest food donor, according to a report released today by the UN's World Food
Programme (WFP).
China donated 577,000 tonnes of food to more than a dozen countries around
the world in 2005, with the great majority sent across the border by rail to
North Korea, which relies on food aid to feed its poverty-stricken rural
population.
The report's findings, which track all international food donations,
underline China's growing economic and political clout in Asia, and show how far
the country has come since the great famines of the late 1950s killed an
estimated 30 million peasants.
For the first time since 1979, China will not receive any food aid itself
from the WFP this year, under an agreement reached five years ago to phase out
donations to the world's most populous nation.
China's food aid soared by 260% compared to 2004, accounting for more than
half of the rise in overall food aid donations in 2005.
For China's leaders, many of whom grew up during the periodic food shortages
of the Mao years, ensuring food self-sufficiency is regarded as a basic duty of
government. China became self-sufficient in food production in the mid-1990s,
and last year the country's grain output grew to 484m tonnes.
Unicef estimates that 8% of Chinese children under the age of five remain
moderately underweight. But a greater concern in China's prosperous coastal
cities is obesity among the over-pampered "little emperors."
Courtesy of Tom Miller, the Guardian
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