Geography: Agriculture

Agriculture is an important economic sector of China, employing over 300 million farmers. China ranks first in worldwide farm output, primarily producing rice, wheat, potatoes, sorghum, peanuts, tea, millet, barley, cotton, oilseed, pork, and fish. About 75% of China's cultivated area is used for food crops. Rice is China's most important crop, raised on about 25% of the cultivated area. The majority of rice is grown south of the Huai River in the Yangtze valley, the Zhu Jiang delta, and in Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan provinces.

Although China's agricultural output is the largest in the world, only about 15% of its total land area can be cultivated. China's arable land, which represents 10% of the total arable land in the world, supports over 20% of the world's population. Of this approximately 1.4 million square kilometers of arable land, only about 1.2% permanently supports crops and 525,800 square kilometers are irrigated. The land is divided into approximately 200 million households, with an average land allocation of only 1.6 acres.


Crop 1949 Output (tons) 1978 Output (tons) 1999 Output (tons)

1.	Grain	113,180,000	304,770,000	508,390,000
2.	Cotton	444,000	2,167,000	3,831,000
3.	Oil-bearing crops	2,564,000	5,218,000	26,012,000
4.	Sugarcane	2,642,000	21,116,000	74,700,000
5.	Sugarbeet	191,000	2,702,000	8,640,000
6.	Flue-cured tobacco	43,000	1,052,000	2,185,000
7.	Tea	41,000	268,000	676,000
8.	Fruit	1,200,000	6,570,000	62,376,000
9.	Meat	2,200,000	8,563,000	59,609,000
10.	Aquatic products	450,000	4,660,000	41,220,000