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The Chinese Food Purchases*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Allan J. Barry
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Extract

After three years of agricultural calamities, both natural and man-made, China has begun the importation on a substantial scale of foodstuffs— a dramatic departure from previous policy. The chief beneficiaries abroad are the grain producers of Canada and Australia.

Actual quantities involved may be regarded as small from the standpoint of total Chinese food consumption, but remarkably significant when considered in terms of the actual addition to domestic supplies of wheat and barley, the probable consumption of grain in the seaboard cities, the amount of foreign exchange required, the concomitant decline in other imports (including machinery and raw materials), and the enormous demands usually made upon transportation facilities by agricultural shipments from the interior to the coast. These food purchases are also significant from the standpoint of both Canada and Australia.

Type
Recent Developments
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 8 , December 1961 , pp. 20 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1961

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References

1 Cited in Garratt, Colin, “After the Deluge,” Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER), XXXII, 4 (04 27, 1961), p. 161.Google Scholar

2 April-June, 1961, p. 70.

3 In the preliminary draft of his paper on China's Balance of Payments presented to the University of Hong Kong's Golden Jubilee Congress Symposium on Economic and Social Problems of the Far East, September, 1961.

4 The observer who remembers what “mass movements” can achieve will realise, of course, that such conclusions can be drawn only tentatively.

5 The agreement was praised, somewhat over-exuberantly, by a newspaper favourable to the Government, the Ottawa Journal, as “a piece of business for Canada that transcends in significance anything in the history of Canada's wheat trade and anything in the whole scene of our present economy.”

6 House of Commons Debates, Tuesday, 05 2, 1961, p. 4206.Google Scholar

7 A highly likely possibility in view of poor rainfall in the late summer, according to the Canadian Grain Journal (Winnipeg, Vol. 17, No. 8, 08, 1961), p. 5.Google Scholar

8 Vide, for example, The Financial Post, Toronto, 06 17, 1961, p. 15.Google Scholar

9 House of Commons Debates, Tuesday, 05 2, 1961, p. 4205.Google Scholar

10 The author's estimate, obtained by adding the bushel equivalents for each contract given by Canada's Dominion Bureau of Statistics (The Wheat Review, May, 1961, p. 30)Google Scholar with additions for the two options of 110,000 and 75,000 tons, although a deduction might be made for December shipments, which will fall in the next crop year. A similar total for wheat and flour was given by Australia's Commonwealth Bureau of Agricultural Statistics. (The Wheat Situation, Canberra, 08 1961, p. 2.)Google Scholar

11 The Wheat Situation, loc. cit.

12 Canadian Press dispatch in the Winnipeg Free Press, 06 6, 1961.Google Scholar

13 Vide, for example, MacDougall, Colina, “Oats from the Aussies,” FEER, XXXII, 8 (05 25, 1961), p. 347Google Scholar, where she makes this suggestion, even venturing the figure of 600,000 tons for barley.