“[Brown’s] ability to make a complicated subject accessible to
the general reader is remarkable...” –Katherine Salant,
Washington Post Chapter 9. Feeding Eight Billion Well:
Introduction In April 2005, the World Food Programme and the
Chinese government jointly announced that food aid shipments to
China would stop at the end of the year. For a country where a
generation ago hundreds of millions of people were chronically
hungry, this was a landmark achievement. Not only has China
ended its dependence on food aid, but almost overnight it has
become the world’s third largest food aid donor. 1 The key to
China’s success was the economic reforms in 1978 that dismantled
its system of agricultural collectives, known as production
teams, and replaced them with family farms. In each village, the
land was allocated among families, giving them long-term leases
on their piece of land. The move harnessed the energy and
ingenuity of China’s rural population, raising the grain harvest
by half from 1977 to 1986. With its fa