By Du Xiaoli (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2007-07-17 13:53

Output of summer grain crops in China hit 116.09 billion kilograms this year, up 1.9 percent or 2.20 billion kilograms year-on-year, according to the Ministry of Agriculture. It's the country's fourth consecutive bumper harvest.

China continued to apply its minimum grain purchase price system this year, which prevented the prices from falling dramatically. Output of high quality wheat accounted for 61.6 percent this year, up 5.5 percentage points year-on-year, statistics showed.

Summer crops normally account for 20 percent of China's annual grain output. Wheat accounts for 90 percent of the summer grain crops.

At the end of October, the country had 1.83 billion mu (122 million hectares) of arable land, 4.6 million mu less than a year earlier, bringing it closer to the critical 1.8 billion mu warning level, according to figures from the Ministry of Land and Resources.

Most of the lost land went to construction, natural disasters and reforestation. The supply of food is a constant concern for authorities in China, as they are concerned with feeding one-fifth of the world's population with less than 10 percent of the world's arable land.