China has made remarkable progress in achieving food security over the past 30 years, a UN official said Thursday.

"China has made remarkable progress in achieving food security as a result of 30 years of investment in agriculture and reforms that have allowed small-scale farmers in this country to be incredibly productive," Olivier De Schutter, UN special rapporteur on the right to food, told a news conference.

De Schutter, who took office in 2008, paid a visit to China from Dec. 15 to 23.

His mission included meeting with officials from the Chinese foreign and agriculture ministries and the State Administration of Grain in Beijing. He also made a field trip to east China's Shandong Province.

With a population of 1.3 billion, China has 21 percent of the world's population and 9 percent of the world's arable land.

China has moved since 2005 from being a beneficiary of food aid to being a donor of food aid, thanks to impressive progress in agricultural production by 200 million small-scale farmers who have an average land holding of 0.65 hectares, De Schutter said.

China has achieved a grain self-sufficiency rate of at least 95 percent, and its grain reserves are estimated to be more than the double the 17-percent safety level recommended by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, he added.

The official said the high productivity of small-scale farming was "the secret of China's success."

"Small-scale farming will be more productive if it is sufficiently supported and if small-scale farmers are encouraged to organize themselves at the cooperative level, at the level of village, to achieve certain economic scale," De Schutter said.

De Schutter praised the Chinese model of combining small farms with collective organizations at the village level.

"[China] is the country where small-scale farming is very clearly the best way to work," he said.

In China, an agricultural cooperative organization is a union of enterprises, scientific and technological workers, and farmers.

Responsibilities of the cooperatives include helping each other and increasing farmers' income by assisting members with technique, funds and market information.

De Schutter said China should address two issues: environmental sustainability and social equity.

Since 1997, China has lost 8.2 million hectares of arable land due to urbanization and forest and grassland replanting programs, as well as damage caused by natural disasters.

China's per capital available land is 0.092 hectare, 40 percent of the world average, De Schutter said.

"This shrinking of arable land represents a major threat to China's ability to maintain its current self-sufficiency in grain," he said.

The disparity between urban and rural areas is also a concern for China, De Schutter said.

The urban-rural income gap widened from 2.79:1 in 2000 to 3.33:1 in 2007, and if distribution of public services spending is taken into account, the urban-rural ratio reaches about 5.5:1, according to the rapporteur's preliminary investigations.

There is also a wide gap between urban and rural residents in terms of food consumption structure and nutrition, De Schutter said.

China faces the challenge of improving the situation of people living in rural areas, he said, adding that improving the security of land tenure is also important.

He also said China faces the challenges of moving toward more sustainable agriculture and addressing issues of nutrition and food safety.

(Xinhua News Agency December 24, 2010)