Xinhua News Agency, Beijing, February 23, Title: Resolutely keep the initiative in food security

Xinhua News Agency reporter Gu Yiping

Everything is the best thing to do in your life. The 2025 Central Document No. 1 released on the 23rd made a series of important arrangements around "rice bags", "vegetable baskets", and "oil bottles". This once again shows that it is necessary to ensure national food security and always keep the rice bowl firmly in your own hands.

We must see that on the basis of stabilizing at more than 1.3 trillion jin for nine consecutive years, my country's grain output has reached a new level of 1.4 trillion jin for the first time in 2024. We must also see that my country's grain supply and demand have not changed for a long time. Affected by factors such as climate, water resources, and external environment changes, the challenges and risks that threaten my country's food security still exist. Moreover, grain production is difficult to climb and easily fall, so we should not be careless because of continuous bumper harvests.

Arable land is the lifeblood of grain production, and the strictest arable land protection system must be implemented. "Strictly control the total amount of arable land and 'to determine occupation by supplementary land'", "Improve the evaluation and acceptance standards for supplementary arable land quality", "Continue to rectify problems such as 'green houses', encroachment of arable land', "digging lakes to create land, and illegally occupying arable land to build houses"... This time, the Central Document No. 1 targeted and proposed a series of targeted deployments to strengthen the protection of arable land and improve the quality of arable land. All localities should implement it in a solid manner, constantly turn arable land into fertile land, and demand output from fertile land.

While stabilizing the area, we must strengthen agricultural technology and equipment support and make greater efforts to promote the large-scale grain yield. In 2024, my country's grain yield per mu increased by 5.1 kilograms, and its contribution to increased yield reached 80%. What depends on increasing yield per mu? Specifically, it is necessary to promote the efforts of good seeds, opportunities and methods. In accordance with the central requirements and document deployment, we must accelerate the cultivation and application promotion of good varieties, promote the intelligent application of agricultural machinery and equipment, increase R&D investment, encourage industry-university-research cooperation, cultivate agricultural professional talents, give the wings of science and technology to improve yields, and turn high-standard farmland into high-yield farmland.

To ensure food security, we should further improve the policy system for food production support. All parties must work hard to enter the market and form a joint force, further strengthen support for strengthening and benefiting farmers, protect farmers' enthusiasm for growing grain, improve the accuracy and direction of subsidies, and improve the inter-provincial horizontal interest compensation mechanism of grain production and sales areas under the central government's coordination, so that the main production areas can benefit from grain and not suffer losses, and better build a food security pattern where jobs are taken together and responsibilities are carried together.

Food security is the "big thing for the country". Only by firmly taking the initiative in food security can we firmly take the initiative in rejuvenation of a strong country and provide reliable guarantees for Chinese-style modernization construction.