From BBC: “China’s rapid economic development is eating its way into the country’s rice production”
“Over the last five years, rice farmers in their millions near to big cities, and along China’s prospering coastline, have switched from rice cultivation to cash crops yielding larger profits.
Millions of others have given up farming altogether, leaving their fields and venturing to the cities.
And the cities themselves – perhaps modern China’s fastest growing crop – are sprawling out into the countryside, routing their roads where rice paddies once lay.
And yet rice consumption is on the rise, as family incomes increase, so the country is forced to rely on imports, which are too expensive for China’s poor. ”
