By KEVIN WALKER
Michigan Correspondent

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Grains Council (USGC) recently completed its annual tour of China’s Corn Belt, and is predicting a pretty good harvest, though not a bumper crop.

The nonprofit group is dedicated to the promotion of corn and other grains on international markets. The USGC began its China corn tour in 1996 because, it says, the information from official Chinese sources is less than reliable.

“It was, in fact, the only non-China information that was being collected relative to corn production, grain production in China,” said Thomas Dorr, president of the USGC.

The tour consists of a survey and sampling procedure in the northern and northeastern sections of the vast country. These areas represent 71 percent of China’s corn production; the remaining 29 percent is too spread out to be easily surveyed.
“We did see a reasonably good crop,” Dorr said. Based on the tour, the USGC is projecting a 158 million-metric-ton crop (about 6.2 billion bushels, by USDA conversion equations) produced on an area of about 30 million hectares. A hectare is equal to 100 acres.
Five teams made up the survey crew. David Howell, a corn producer from Middletown, Ind., was a team leader and spoke at the press conference.

“It was a wonderful week’s experience to get to go see a different culture and system,” he said. “This was my first time to China.”
Howell’s team took 12-13 corn samples a day and counted ear length, row numbers, girth and tested for moisture and weight. He said the places he visited reminded him of Indiana, Illinois and Iowa.

“There’s wide open spaces,” he said. “In places, you could see corn to the horizon.”

He added that the area is “strictly Corn Belt.” There are no other crops such as soybeans. Farmers there make about $500 a year and own about 1 to 2.5 acres. The corn is hand-cut with a scythe. It’s shucked by hand and the stalks are used as fuel to heat people’s homes. Howell said it’s a little sad to see this, since the winters there are about as cold as they are in Minneapolis.

Kevin Latner, USGC director in China, said, “Every year China consumes more and more corn, either through meat, starch or other industrial products. This year’s production is better than last year, but it’s still going to be a tight supply and demand situation.”
Dorr chimed in that supply should keep up roughly with demand.
“We’d love to see (demand for) corn expand in China, as soybeans have,” Dorr said. “That’s probably not going to happen.”

He said there’s still debate in China about whether corn should remain on the restricted list – that is, whether it should be viewed as something China needs to grow enough of in order to be self-sufficient.

He believes the Chinese are coming to realize that self-sufficiency and food security are not one and the same.

There was some discussion among USGC representatives of dried distiller’s grains with solubles (DDGS). The Chinese do not limit imports of DDGS, Latner said: “The spread there makes it valuable for importers to bring in DDGS even as corn prices are going up, or maybe because corn prices are going up.”

About genetically modified (GMO) corn, Latner said there is some resistance to it. “There continues to be public acceptance concerns about biotechnology,” he said. “That’s come out in the newspapers.”

Latner said there are a number of other factors inhibiting the efficiency of farming in China: for one, the nature of the terrain makes it impossible to use large planters. The quality of the seed is a problem, in addition to people’s reluctance to use GMO corn.
Also, the government doesn’t want farming to become too efficient anyway, because it doesn’t want to push more people off of farms and into cities, which are already too crowded.