Word: wittwer
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...story of China's stunning improvement in farm production is comprehensively told in a new 462-page book called Feeding a Billion (Michigan State University Press; $30). Its authors are Sylvan Wittwer, director emeritus of the Michigan State University Agricultural Experiment Station, and three Chinese farm experts: Professor Sun Han of Nanjing Agricultural University, Professor Yu Youtai of Northeast Agricultural College in Harbin and Wang Lianzheng, vice governor of Heilongjiang province. Wittwer, the principal writer, made five trips to China during the past seven years and received unstinting cooperation from the Communist authorities in undertaking an in-depth study...
...Wittwer and his co-authors maintain that most of the progress took place after 1978, when Deng began economic reforms by breaking up collective farms and introducing market incentives into agriculture. Since that time, per capita food consumption has risen by almost...
...dollop of capitalism that the Chinese have added to their 38-year-old Communist society. The state continues to own the land, but the large old communes are essentially gone and individual peasant families are now responsible for looking after plots. Although broad policies remain centralized, says Wittwer, "the peasant contracts to deliver ((to the state)) a certain amount of an agricultural commodity that he produces at a fair price. In return, he is free to produce -- by himself or with a group -- as much more as he can and, to a certain extent, sell it for whatever price...
...techniques. For a thousand years longer than in Western Europe, the Chinese have fertilized their fields. They now use everything from animal waste and human fecal matter to butchery leavings and pond mud. The Chinese regard the West's failure to make use of excrement as "extreme extravagancy," says Wittwer. Shunning all manner of wastefulness, they feed livestock not valuable grain but materials of little other value. Algae and other aquatic plants, for example, have become a major source of both fertilizer and feed...
...their praise of Chinese agriculture, Wittwer and his colleagues concede that an abundant food supply for the growing population is by no means assured for the coming decades. One-third of the cultivated land, they note, is too saline, dry or eroded for maximum crop yields. National grain production, after years of rapid increases, has started to level off. Chinese leaders realize that to make further gains they may have to turn increasingly to more advanced farming technology, from sophisticated erosion-control methods to still wider use of chemical fertilizers...