{"id":161467,"date":"2025-09-22T13:22:24","date_gmt":"2025-09-22T13:22:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/161467\/"},"modified":"2025-09-22T13:22:24","modified_gmt":"2025-09-22T13:22:24","slug":"fewer-people-work-in-farming-in-asias-largest-countries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/161467\/","title":{"rendered":"Fewer people work in farming in Asia\u2019s largest countries"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"article-block__text col-start-5 span-cols-6 col-md-start-3 span-md-cols-10 span-sm-cols-12 col-sm-start-2\">Since the 1960s, China\u2019s population has more than doubled. Despite having more than twice as many mouths to feed, the amount of food it produces per person has increased dramatically.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-block__text col-start-5 span-cols-6 col-md-start-3 span-md-cols-10 span-sm-cols-12 col-sm-start-2\">Better seeds, irrigation, pest management, and improved farming techniques have all helped increase the country\u2019s agricultural productivity. But the addition of nutrients through fertilizers has also made a huge difference. The chart shows the rapid uptake of fertilizers in China from the 1960s through the early 2000s.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-block__text col-start-5 span-cols-6 col-md-start-3 span-md-cols-10 span-sm-cols-12 col-sm-start-2\">While fertilizers can play a crucial role in feeding more people and using less land, they also have negative environmental impacts. Excess nutrients run off into rivers and pollute coastlines, and fertilizers can emit nitrogen oxide, a powerful greenhouse gas. Using fertilizers more efficiently helps grow food while cutting pollution.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-block__text col-start-5 span-cols-6 col-md-start-3 span-md-cols-10 span-sm-cols-12 col-sm-start-2\">China has made important progress on this in the last decade. As you can see in the chart, its fertilizer use peaked in 2014 and has fallen since then. At the same time, the country\u2019s agricultural production has continued to increase.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-block__text col-start-5 span-cols-6 col-md-start-3 span-md-cols-10 span-sm-cols-12 col-sm-start-2\">In 2015, China launched its \u201cZero-Growth Action Plan for Fertilizer\u201d, and its government policies have played an essential role in this turnaround.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-block__text col-start-5 span-cols-6 col-md-start-3 span-md-cols-10 span-sm-cols-12 col-sm-start-2\">Subsidies previously made fertilizers very cheap in China, which encouraged farmers to overuse them. Cutting these subsidies while offering incentives for agricultural machinery, precision technologies, farmer education, and larger farms (which tend to use less fertilizer per hectare) has made China\u2019s farming sector much more efficient.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-block__text col-start-5 span-cols-6 col-md-start-3 span-md-cols-10 span-sm-cols-12 col-sm-start-2\">Read more in my article \u201cHow effective are policies in reducing the environmental impacts of agriculture?\u201d \u2192<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since the 1960s, China\u2019s population has more than doubled. Despite having more than twice as many mouths to&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":161468,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[45,49,48,124],"class_list":{"0":"post-161467","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-jobs","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-jobs"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161467\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/161468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}