China seeks to nurture love for humble spud
The potato doesn’t get a lot of respect in China, where rice and noodles made from wheat typically dominate the dinner plate. Ask a Chinese Mainlander to name a popular potato dish and the likely reply will be McDonald’s french fries — and that’s in a country where fine national cuisine is a point of pride. The potato does show up in the meat stews in the northeast and alongside chicken and mutton in the far northwestern Muslim region of Xinjiang.
One of the few widespread potato dishes eaten across China is served shredded and sautéed with green pepper in vinegar.
Now the Chinese government wants to turn the potato — known as tudou, or “earthy bean” — into a popular food in order to better utilize scarce farmland. In preparation for the starchy future, China’s agriculture ministry announced plans earlier this month to double the land devoted to spud production from five to 10 million hectares.
China is already the world’s largest potato producer, with annual production of 90 million tonnes in 2013, according to Zhang Hongzhou, an associate research fellow at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. Most of this production is for domestic consumption, but given China’s huge population, per capita potato consumption is low. Potatoes require far less land and water than rice.
The public effort to encourage more potato eating is already underway. China’s national television channel, CCTV, shared potato recipes on its Weibo account, including preparations for Kung Pao potato and potato pancakes. “The potato will soon be Chinese people’s newest staple food, after rice, wheat and corn,” said Xu Xiaoshi, the national planning agency director, at a food policy meeting in Beijing on Jan. 8.
Why is Beijing now keen to raise the profile of the humble spud? It has everything to do with food security, a millenniaold concern of China’s emperors that is still relevant today. As China’s leaders like to point out, their country must feed a fifth of the world’s population but only has about 10 per cent of all arable land. Freshwater resources are badly constrained, too, amounting to just seven per cent of the world’s total, according to the United Nations. Some 70 per cent of Chinese water demand goes to agriculture.
Ensuring that China can feed itself is becoming a more vexing policy challenge alongside the nation’s rapid urbanization. The proportion of Chinese living in cities has risen from less than a fifth in 1978 to over half now — and China’s leaders have set a goal of lifting that to 60 per cent by 2020.
Rampant economic development has left 3.3 million hectares of former farmland too contaminated to grow crops.