New vision and policy recommendations for nutrition-oriented food security in China [In Chinese]

Abstract

After four-decade significant economic growth and development, China sets a series of goals aiming at sustainable medium to high speed economic growth,reasonable equity, and better market oriented economy. In this pursue, agriculture will take a crucial role. Under the Health China 2030, National Nutrition Plan (2017-2030) and Rural Vitalization Strategy, more attention has been paid on nutrition both in policy and research field, meanwhile the linkage between agriculture and nutrition is enhancing, but the integration of Agriculture-Food Security-Nutrition system is not yet completed. During the economic transformation, agriculture and food industry will play a key role, especially when considering the nutrition and health status will impact the national physical fitness and therefore influence the economic transformation approach. It may also impact whether China can move out of the Middle Income Trap to some extent. In the new development era, China needs a new food security development strategy to improve the national nutrition status and sets of policies to strengthen the integration of agriculture and nutrition. This paper reviewed the major challenges about China’s food security and put forward a new vision based on international experiences, which aimed at providing recommendations for designing China’s food security strategy. The key food security challenges include natural and environmental pressure, such as insufficiency and degradation of land resources, shortage and pollution of water resources, climate change and extreme disaster, fiscal pressure caused by increasing agriculture subsidy, Triple Burden of malnutrition, food safety issues and food loss and waste. It requires institutional and technical innovations for the transformation of agriculture development which means that more value added, nutritious and healthy food should be produced, the productivity and efficiency of water, land and energy should be improved, and environmentally friendly social inclusive development should be considered. All of those call for a transformation of China’s food security strategy. This paper put forwards a new vision for China’s food security: China should set nutrition-oriented food security strategy with nutrition indicators as key targeted goals, aim to eliminate hunger and undernutrition by 2025 while effectively reducing overweight/ obesity and food safety risks. Therefore policy innovations are recommended including: Improve nutrition governance, Market motivated and nutrition oriented agriculture support system, Promote Nutrition-based Food Production, Establish efficient, safe, and inclusive food value chains, Policy innovation for sustainable nutritious diet and nutrition education, and Evidence based research to support policy making.