In China’s main grain-producing region in the northeast, days of torrential rain have resulted in severe flooding that has killed 14 people and raised questions about food security as floodwaters flooded farmlands.
Since late July, typhoon Doksuri’s aftermath has pounded northern China, forcing more than a million people to flee their homes and killing at least 30 people in the Hebei province and Beijing’s suburbs.
Another 14 fatalities were recorded on Sunday in the city of Shulan in the province of Jilin as the storm advanced further north.
Three local officials, including the deputy mayor of the city, were among the deceased after being swept away by floodwater during last week’s rescue efforts, according to a statement from Shulan authorities. It noted that there was still a missing official.
Shulan has been cleared for evacuation, according to state-run news agency Xinhua.
State media said that rivers in Heilongjiang, a neighbouring province, that water its fertile farmlands overflowed, burying rice fields, ruining vegetable greenhouses, and harming enterprises.
According to Heilongjiang authorities, 25 rivers in the province have reached warning levels and are in danger of overflowing.
The third most urgent level in a four-tier emergency response system, Level 3 was declared on Sunday by China’s Ministry of Water Resources for the provinces of Jilin and Heilongjiang.
According to People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the ruling Communist Party, over 162,000 people had to be evacuated from Harbin, the provincial capital of Heilongjiang, and over 90,000 hectares of crops were destroyed by floodwater.
The biggest rainfall Shangzhi has seen in more than 60 years caused the destruction of more than 42,575 hectares of crops, according to Xinhua.
Authorities in the city of Wuchang, another important rice-producing metropolis in Heilongjiang, are still calculating the damage after numerous villages and substantial tracts of farmland were also inundated there.
As extreme weather events linked to climate change pose growing dangers to China’s agricultural and food resources, concerns about the possible effects on food security in the second-largest economy in the world have increased.
The three northeastern most provinces, Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning, are referred to as China’s granary since they produce more than one fifth of the nation’s grain production due to the area’s fertile black soil. The main crops grown there are rice, maize and soybeans.
Typhoons Khanun and Doksuri brought heavy rainstorms last week, which the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs said would have a “severe impact” on China’s agricultural output.
The destruction of the rice fields in northeast China followed the flooding of Henan Province, another significant grain-growing region that supplies nearly a third of the nation’s wheat, by severe rains in late May.
According to official media, the Henan authorities claimed that the flooding there was the region’s most disastrous rain event for wheat output in the previous ten years.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics, those downpours, which occurred just before the harvest, caused a 0.9 percent decrease in China’s output of summer wheat this year, the first decrease in seven years.
Family saved in risky attempt from typhoon flood waters
According to authorities from the China Meteorological Administration, the subsequent heat waves that scorched much of northern China and broke temperature records in June brought droughts that impeded the growth of young crops like maize and soybeans.
These blows to China’s agriculture industry are anticipated to have a short-term impact on food prices, which had been largely stable in recent months. This is largely because deflationary risks have been growing in China’s economy, which contrasts sharply with the continuing struggle with inflation in much of the rest of the world.
China removed anti-dumping penalties on imports of Australian barley last week. These tariffs were put in place in 2020 during the height of diplomatic hostilities between the two nations.
During the summer of 2022, China endured its worst heat wave and drought in decades, which led to widespread power outages and disrupted the supply lines for food and industry.
Beijing has since increased its emphasis on food security. Agriculture, according to Chinese President Xi Jinping, is the cornerstone of national security.
When agriculture experiences a problem, our bowls will be held in someone else’s hands, and we will be forced to rely on others for our food. In that case, how can modernization be accomplished? He made this statement in an article that appeared in the Communist Party’s primary theoretical journal, Qiushi, in March.