Who Will Feed China? 197tion. Lacking basic life-supporting soil and water resources, it contains only a small
percentage of the country’s people.
For China, where the opportunity for bringing new land under cultivation is
limited by water scarcity, population growth has a double-edged effect. First, it is
shrinking the cropland area per person, as a fixed area is divided among an ever
larger number of people. At the same time, the new citizens bring demands for
living space, which in turn generates pressure to convert cropland to residential
purposes. Simply housing an additional 490 million people in the next 40 years
will require an enormous area, some of which will be cropland.^24
There is a certain fascination with the demographic trends and issues of China
partly because of its sheer size. In addition, the chaos of the Great Leap Forward
and the arithmetic of the resulting famine that was long concealed from the out-
side world have intensified interest in China’s demographic history.
In the late 1950s, during the Great Leap Forward, millions of farmers were
diverted to large construction projects, including roads, huge earthen dams and
backyard steel furnaces. This movement of labour from agriculture led to massive
food shortages. Official records now show that 30 million Chinese starved to death
during 1959–1961. The demographic effect of the famine, however, extended far
beyond these deaths.^25
In populations that are near starvation, the frequency of intercourse decreases,
sharply reducing the number of possible pregnancies. Beyond this, severely malnour-
ished women cease ovulating, thus further reducing the number of pregnancies.
Women who do conceive when they are severely malnourished often miscarry.^26
During the heart of the famine in 1960, the number of deaths in China actu-
ally exceeded the number of births. The birth rate fell to 21 per 1000 population
Source: See endnote 27.
Figure 8.5 Crude birth and death rates in China, 1950–1994