Why China's Farms Are Failing

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http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/08/why-chinas-farms-are-failing/278906/


A farmer walks through a field near a replica of the Eiffel Tower at the Tianducheng development in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province. (Aly Song/Reuters)

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Then there's land. Here are just a few of the findings of recent investigations into the state of Chinese farms:

China's farmland is shrinking. Despite the country's immense geographical footprint, there just isn't that much to go around. Between 1997 and 2008, China saw 6.2 percent of its farmland engulfed by factories and sprawl.

The United States has six times the arable land per capita as China. Today, the FAO/OECD report states, China has just 0.22 acres of arable land per capita -- less than half of the global average and a quarter of the average for OECD member countries.

A fifth of China's land is polluted. The FAO/OECD report gingerly calls this problem the "declining trend in soil quality." Fully 40 percent of China's arable land has been degraded by some combination of erosion, salinization, or acidification -- and nearly 20 percent is polluted, whether by industrial effluent, sewage, excessive farm chemicals, or mining runoff, the FAO/OECD report found.

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1. 0.22 acres of arable land per capita