HONG KONG — Rain and snow during the past two weeks, together with a huge irrigation effort, appear to have saved much of the wheat crop in northern China from drought, Chinese and international agricultural and meteorological experts said on Monday and over the weekend.
This winter was the driest in perhaps 200 years in parts of China, which is the world’s largest wheat producer. That prompted a sudden flurry of alarm a month ago that China might need to sharply increase its usually modest wheat imports, at a time when world food prices were already surging. Supplies were tight after bad weather in other producers, including Russia and Australia.
But days of snow and rain across the heart of China’s wheat belt in northern Henan and western Shandong Provinces have brought moisture to fields so dry that large cracks appeared in the dirt. The precipitation arrived at just the right moment, experts said, as vulnerable wheat planted last autumn was coming out its winter dormancy and needed to grow or it would die.
“Things look better, definitely, and the government seems to be in control with irrigation and providing a lot of assistance to farmers,” Kisan Gunjal, an official at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, said in a telephone interview on Monday. Mr. Gunjal is responsible for food shortfall alerts in Asia.
Chen Xiwen, the Chinese Communist Party’s director of rural policy, said at a news conference in Beijing on Sunday that three rounds of precipitation and extra irrigation efforts had left less than a third of China’s wheat acreage still suffering from drought.
Academic experts agreed that recent rain and snow had done much to relieve the drought.
“The situation was rather tense when we did not have rain for over 50 days,” said Tian Qi Zhu, a prominent wheat expert at Shandong Agricultural University in Tai’an, in western Shandong Province.
“However, with the two recent snowfalls, the drought situation is pretty much alleviated,” Mr. Tian said on Monday. “Except for some areas up in the hill region of Shandong where there is still insufficient water, I would say the drought is under control.”
A good wheat harvest could also help China control inflation. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao said over the weekend that price stability was a top priority for China this year.
Winter in China’s wheat belt is usually fairly dry. But this winter was so dry that it provoked considerable concern, from government offices in Beijing to the grain markets of Chicago.
President Hu Jintao and Mr. Wen separately toured parched wheat fields during the Lunar New Year holidays and urged emergency irrigation and other efforts. The U.N. food agency issued a rare “special alert “ on Feb. 8 warning of the drought’s effects on the wheat crop and even on drinking water for people and livestock.
Wheat futures in Chicago, already high because of extreme heat last summer in Russia, surged even higher when the food agency issued its alert, jumping 2 percent in a day. On Monday, wheat prices edged down 0.3 percent in early trading after word spread of China’s recent damp weather.
China has been planning to send more trade delegations to the United States this year to look for imports to help balance its enormous exports and persistent large trade surpluses. But grain experts said that it would be hard to discern quickly whether China was buying more wheat from the United States.
Virtually all of the wheat grown in China is fairly low quality, which works fine for making noodles, an important food, particularly in northern China. China imports some high-grade wheat every year for use in bread and pastries, which are becoming increasingly popular in the cities. Chinese-grown wheat is almost never suitable for making croissants and other Western delicacies, agriculture experts said.
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