A farmer waters his vegetable crop in the shadow of new thirty-story apartment buildings that surround the small field that he leases from year to year in Xiapu, a midsize coastal city in China’s Fujian Province. Although Chinese President Xi Jinping has made food self-sufficiency and preserving farmland a priority since he took power in 2013, China continued to lose a staggering 2,800 square miles of arable land each year to erosion, salinization, and its booming real-estate development in the decade after 2009. That’s equivalent to losing all of Ireland or Austria. More concerning, a third of China’s remaining farmland is degraded. Even though Xi has repeatedly stressed that the rice bowls of the Chinese people must be filled mainly with Chinese grain, the People’s Republic has been a net importer of agricultural products since 2004 and today is the world’s largest importer of meat, grain, and dairy products.
