Assessment of Food Security in China: A New Perspective Based on Production-Consumption Coordination

The grain output of China increased continuously for 11 years from 2004 to 2014, effectively ensuring security of the country’s food supply. At the same time, rapid advancement of urbanization and industrialization generated marked changes in the food consumption patterns of residents, and supply-demand structural problems, such as the variety, quality and region of grains, became increasingly prominent. Currently, national food security goes beyond the guarantee of total grain demand. Therefore, both the production and consumption systems must be evaluated to produce a scientific measurement of food security. From the perspective of food production-consumption coordination and matching, this article sets up a multidimensional coupling assessment index system and model, and carries out assessment of the food security level and the warning status of China between 1995 and 2012. Results show that the level of quantity coordination remained high and the level of variety coordination fluctuated before 2006 and continued decreasing afterwards. The regional coordination level largely continued to decline during the whole research period. The level of coordination of Chinese food production-consumption was high overall. The warning situation existed only for four years, but it started to decrease continuously since 2007 because of aggravated structural and regional disharmony. The state of coordination at the early stage primarily reflected variation of food production, but that of the later stage greatly reflected the problems caused by food consumption. In the future, food security of China can be ensured overall, but regional and variety coordination problems may worsen further, which may exert a potentially negative influence on agricultural trade, industrial security and market stability, thereby leading to decrease in food security at the regional and household levels. In the future, this problem can be addressed by ensuring the self-sufficiency of core varieties of grains, building interest coordination mechanisms in the production and sale regions, forming a modern food and nutrition development pattern, and making additional efforts to save grains.