Residual rains from former super-typhoon, Haikui, now a tropical storm, drenched southern China for the seventh day as slow-moving storm clouds drifted from Guangdong on the coast to Guangxi, flooding low-lying areas, blocking roads and trapping residents.
In the rural county of Bobai in Guangxi region, rescuers on assault boats have scrambled to pull people to safety since Sunday night as water more than 2 meters (6.6 feet) deep stranded residents in low-rise homes, state media reported on Monday.
Torrential rain deluged Hong Kong on Friday leading to widespread flooding across the densely packed city, submerging streets, shopping malls and metro stations, as authorities shut schools and asked workers to stay at home. It's the highest hourly rainfall since records began 140 years ago.
China’s leaders have long agonized over how to feed the country’s sizable population—nearly one-fifth of the world—when it is home to just 9 percent of the world’s arable land, and that bit is increasingly underwater.
CLIMATE CHANGE TO BLAME?
If Beijing was already worried about food security, rising geopolitical tensions have only turbocharged its bid for self-sufficiency in agricultural production. Over the years, China has grown increasingly reliant on foreign food imports—a habit that Beijing is trying to kick by expanding its farmland. But as climate change drives increasingly extreme weather, the resulting fallout could pose yet another challenge to Beijing’s food security campaign.
“Food security is a very important concern for the Chinese government,” said Zongyuan Zoe Liu, an international political economist at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Most of the ancient Chinese dynasties were toppled by an uprising of the farmers because of extreme weather conditions that caused famine or food crises.”
Floods battered southern China again this week, the latest disruption in a string of extreme weather events that have pummeled the country’s agricultural sector and inundated harvests. In the cities of Harbin and Shangzhi, floodwaters mauled 220,000 and 105,000 acres respectively of crops last month; earlier this summer, extreme rainfall is estimated to have impacted as much as 30 million metric tons of grain in Henan province, a region that is widely called the granary of China. As farmers braced for more disruptions last month, officials announced that they would pour $60 million in flood relief funds dedicated to agricultural production.
It’s not just floodwaters that threaten to impact China’s agricultural output, either. In other regions, extreme heat has killed pigs and fish, and also stoked uncertainty about China’s rice crop and its production of key staples such as wheat, corn, and soybeans.
GLOBAL RAMIFICATIONS
What happens in China won’t necessarily stay in China, either. Given the size of the Chinese agricultural market and the scale of its demand, Zhang, the Cornell economist, said that severe climate disruptions impacting Chinese producers could ramp up demand in the global marketplace. Last month, Fitch Ratings, a U.S.-based ratings agency, warned that heavy rainfall in three Chinese provinces—Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Inner Mongolia—could intensify pressures on the global rice market.
The disruptions to Chinese harvests come at a time when global grain supplies are already strained by Russia’s continued interference with exports of Ukrainian wheat. Moscow not only refuses to renew a deal to allow the unfettered export of Ukrainian grains, but has also attacked agricultural export facilities in southern Ukraine and forced other countries to intervene in a bid to protect the flow of food. That, coupled with crazy weather, makes China’s headache a pain for the whole world.
“China is so big that these domestic shocks that arguably mainly affected the Chinese market are increasingly [having] significant global market implications,” Zhang said.
**FYI: I believe that "climate change" is the M.O. (modus operandi) being used to merge the world into a global system. I also believe that this ties into the attack on food, whether by truly naturally occurring disasters OR through man-made weather modification.
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