Food politics in China: How strengthened accountability enhances food security

Yingnan Zhang and Shenghua Lu

Food Policy, 2024, vol. 128, issue C

Abstract: As the locus of political power, state is widely acknowledged to play an important role in achieving Sustainable Development Goals, particularly in food security. However, the means through which states can harness their power to enhance food security, particularly in developing countries, has yet to be thoroughly explored. This paper addresses this gap by examining the effects of enhanced accountability on food security, and investigating how it can operationalize food security goals into enforceable directives for lower-tier officials, with a focus on China. Utilizing the implementation of the “provincial governor responsibility system for farmland protection and grain production” as a natural experiment and employing a difference-in-difference strategy, we demonstrate that main grain-producing areas (MGPAs), whose governors’ promotion is more tightly linked to food producing, experience a more significant increase in grain sowing areas when compared to other provinces. The results are robust facing a series of robustness checks. Additionally, by considering the dispatch of central inspection team, political cycle, and governor’s tenure as the sources of variations in accountability, we confirm that the key mechanism at play is the accountability inherent in China’s nomenklatura system, rather than alternative economic incentives. The back-of-the-envelope calculation demonstrates the increased grain production caused by strengthened accountability could meet the basic food needs of at least 8.76 million people annually. Our findings highlight that crafting tailored policies based on different political systems to strengthen official accountability is of great significance for better governance of food security.

Keywords: Food security; Accountability; Nomenklatura; Food politics; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306919224001039
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jfpoli:v:128:y:2024:i:c:s0306919224001039

DOI: 10.1016/j.foodpol.2024.102692

Access Statistics for this article

Food Policy is currently edited by J. Kydd

More articles in Food Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().