“Released 62.5 tons of rice, 50 tons of corn and 760,000 tons of soybeans....”
For a country with China’s population, the amount of rice and corn seem low compared to soybeans. I wonder if that was a mis-print for those two amounts?
ThAt soybean total sounds way off. Also there’s been thousands of tons sold to “ unknown “. Some say China is stockpiling for some reason.
I’m guessing there’s a lot of missing zeros there.
Those numbers (corn and rice) have to be a mistake, or, the problem is insignificant. 50 tons of corn is not even two semi-truckloads. My neighbor harvests considerably more than that every day of harvest. Even the 760,000 tons of soybeans is not a large amount for a country with the population of China.
Consider: 1 bushel of soybeans = ~ 0272155 metric ton.
US production in 2019 was 3,558,281,000 bushels of soybeans, or, approximately 96,840,397 tons of soybeans.
The Chinese released roughly 0.78% of what the US produced in 2019.
Some of the other numbers are similarly insignificant. China imports only a tiny fraction of their food supply from the US. They actually import more from Brazil. China farms, as best I can tell, roughly 320 million acres of farmland (which may not include all the many small plots in cities, families in cities with caged or “in the (sometimes tiny) yard” chickens, hogs, etc.) 13 million acres of flooded farmland (best estimate I could find) is significant, but not disastrous.
The hog plague, however, IS significant, and the fowl problems somewhat so. China also has a significant problem with depleted aquifers (despite all the flooding). Water always seems to have a mind of its own!
Check out this article, esp. the section on “production”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_China
Related (interesting comments to me, since our neighbor started drying and shipping grain from silos he put up across the road from us.)
https://www.thecombineforum.com/threads/how-much-grain-can-you-transport-on-roads.14464/