economic growth, and the harvested area of grains has been reduced at an annual rate of 0.462% from the post war peak in 1976 to 1992, as described in the above section. Grain production (including soya beans) in China had increased at an annual rate of 3.42% from 130 million tons in 1950 to a mid-term peak of 407 million tons in 1984, and although it reached an historical record of 466 million tons in 1995, it has only increased at a rate of 1.27% annually from 1984 to 1994. The Chinese government raised the buying prices of the grains under the quota system from the farmers by 88% in July 1994, and by 20% in 1996 as well. However, these were still a long way off the free market grain prices. It is reported that many farmers stopped rice and grains production because of the government low buying prices. 17)
Various factors can be considered for the recent rapid declines in the increase rates of global average grains yield and grains production. The grain yield increase in the green revolution was made possible mainly by the increased use of fertilizers. The world total fertilizer use started to fall from the late eighties, and it has continued to fall until the mid-nineties, and it is expected to be stabilized during the whole nineties. 18) The effectiveness of chemical fertilizers in increasing the grain yield has decreased globally, and it was only one fifth as effective in the period 1984-89 as it was in 1950-84. 19) This may reflects the exhaustion of our technical knowledge accumulated in the grain varieties. The global stock of agricultural technical knowledge, which in the past had been accumulated rapidly by high research investment and had resulted in the green revolution, has recently been exhausted because of the decline in the research investment. 20) Investment for agricultural/rice research in Asia has been stagnated along with the rapid decrease in the global price of rice in real terms since the eighties. 21) Also yields of rice and wheat have recently reached a plateau and it is feared that they are near the biological limits for rice and wheat. 22) Shortage in agricultural water resource and gradual deterioration of the soil mentioned previously may also be factors for this. The recent stagnating grains yield and the significant reduction in the grains planted area as mentioned before brought stagnation or reduction in grain supplies, and the continuous
