The seven departments will continue the annual selection process for two more years, and introduce a competitive mechanism into the management of those people who are chosen, while eliminating those no longer qualified for the project. He noted that growing population, decreasing arable land and rapidly developing economy in China will impose an ever increasing pressure on its agriculture in the next century. If the Chinese population increases at the currently growth rate, China will have about 1.6 billion people by 2030. However, the arable land during the same period is likely to dwindle from the present 132 million hectares to 124 million hectares, according to Mei Fangquan, another CAAS researcher. Therefore, China should adopt a new development mode, that is, to increase its labour productivity, unit production and natural resources use with advanced technologies, Dai said.
Agricultural output is increased at the expense of wasting a lot of natural resources.
Only 30 percent of China ' s arable land is fertilized and systematically irrigated, the researcher said. If China fails to increase its grain output with advanced technology by 2030 and turns to the world market, chances would be slim that an adequate grain supply would be available for it to purchase, Dai predicted. As the trend of more people and less land spreads globally, an annual transaction volume of 200 million tons of grain on the international market will not be able to meet the demand of such major grain importers as Japan and Cuba, not to mention China. The country ' s trade liberalization process also demands competitiveness from Chinese agricultural products, the researcher pointed out. In the 1988-1997 period, China has reduced tariffs by large margins on a wide range of agricultural products.