Get short URL China’s Ministry of Agriculture has announced plans to create 53.3 million hectares of connected farmland to ensure the country’s food security.
More than five million hectares of farmland will be developed this year.
By the end of 2018, China had developed 42.6 million hectares of such land.
The construction of more high-output fields, coupled with higher agricultural mechanization levels and improved varieties of crops, will help ensure China has an advantageous position in the global grain market, Zhang Xiaoshan, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences told Xinhua News.
More than 40 percent of China’s arable land is suffering from degradation, according to the ministry’s statistics.
Currently, two-thirds of China’s arable land consists of medium- and low-yield fields.
Since 2013 the country has been creating 55 billion tons of artificial rain a year.
In an attempt to induce extra rainfall over the Tibetan Plateau it was embarking on the largest artificial rain experiment in history.
The plan, which is an extension of a project called Tianhe or ‘Sky River’ developed by researchers in 2016 at China’s Tsinghua University, is hoped to force extra rain over some 1.6 million square kilometers, an area roughly three times the size of Spain.
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