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Research Interests |
China's Food
Security |
ChinaFood is the
acronym for my research on China's food security at the IIASA Land-use
and Land-cover Change (LUC) project between the summer of 1996 and the
end of 1999. |
The main idea of this
research was to bring together relevant arguments, models and
data for assessing China's food security. In addition to in-depths
analyses of various aspects of China's food system, I also collected and
organized a large amount of relevant statistical data (at the province
and often at the county level) in the form of tables, charts, maps and
animations. |
In the mid 1990s many
publications on China's food security focused almost exclusively
on just two issues: the scarcity of agricultural resources (arable land
and water) and the impact of environmental degradation (see for
instance, Lester Brown's "Wake up call" in which he doubted that China
would be able to feed itself). Little thought had been given to
demand-side factors of the food equation and to the reliability
problems in Chinese statistics. There was also a remarkable lack of
imagination in the literature when it came to technological
innovation, economic reforms or improvement in agricultural
management - which in the meantime turned out to be major factors of
China's spectacular food production increases. I developed the ChinaFood
CD-ROM and Web Site as a response to these narrow-minded, single-discipline
studies of China's food problems, which in the 1980s and early 1990s
often produced rather absurd results. |
The ChinaFood CD-ROM
and Web Site are also a pioneering work of electronic publication. They
are organized as hyper-linked documents with thousands of internal and
external connections that should help the reader to quickly jump to the
relevant information. All arguments and data are connected to a Policy
Evaluation Matrix, which is the conceptual framework of the study. It
organizes the information according to six analytical questions for each
of seven dimensions of food security - which gives the 42 cells of the
matrix that are equivalent to the 42 chapters of the study. |
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Options |
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Browse the China-Food website:
www.china-food-security.org |
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