Deadly Floods Hit China's Granary, Fuelling Fears Of Food Shortage

Days of heavy rain have caused severe flooding in China’s leading grain-producing region in the northeast, killing 14 people and raising concerns about food security as floodwater inundated farmlands.

Photo Insert: Heavy rains brought by Typhoon Doksuri have battered China since late July.

Heavy rains brought by Typhoon Doksuri have battered China since late July, displacing more than a million people and killing at least 30 people in the outskirts of Beijing and the surrounding Hebei province, Nectar Gan and Mengchen Zhang reported for CNN.

The flooding of farmland has added to concerns about the potential impacts on food security in the world’s second-largest economy, as extreme weather events linked to climate change pose rising threats to China’s agricultural and food supplies.

Known as China’s granary, the three northeastern provinces – Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning – produce more than one-fifth of the country’s grain output, thanks to the region’s fertile black earth.

Major crops produced there include soybeans, corn, and rice. Last week, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs warned that the heavy rainstorms brought by Typhoon Khanun and Typhoon Doksuri were expected to cause a “severe impact” on China’s agricultural production.

Last week, China lifted anti-dumping tariffs on Australian barley imports, which were imposed in 2020 at the height of diplomatic tensions between the two countries.

China experienced its worst heat wave and drought in decades during the summer of 2022, which caused widespread power shortages and disrupted food and industrial supply chains.

Since then, Beijing has strengthened its focus on food security. In March, Chinese leader Xi Jinping said agriculture was the foundation of national security.

“Once something’s wrong with agriculture, our bowls will be held in someone else’s hands and we’ll have to depend on others for food. How can we achieve modernization in that case?” he said in an article published in March by Qiushi, the Communist Party’s main theoretical journal, Simone McCarthy and Laura He also reported for CNN.

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