In reality, however, China produces more than enough rice, wheat and maize to feed its human population. So why the sudden rush? Xi Jinping, it seems, is preparing for war.

At present, China relies on colossal imports of soya beans, maize, wheat and other cereals to feed its pigs, cattle, chickens and ducks — more than 120 million metric tons last year. These are supplied by the daily arrival of bulk carriers into Chinese ports from Argentina, Brazil, Canada and the United States. If war were to break out, these imports would quickly dry up.

In China, there is no spare land for crops, leaving Beijing little choice but to uproot the trees recently planted by its costly and much-admired reforestation efforts — even though China’s forests are mostly on slopes, and new crop plantings are often swept away by the first serious rain. Local party officials executing Beijing’s orders  know this perfectly well, but disobeying means instant demotion at best.

After the colossal Yangtze River floods of 1998 destroyed 13 million homes, drowned thousands and swept away highways and rail lines, the CCP recognised that the floods had been made worse by uncontrolled deforestation. Orders were issued all across China to stop logging and to plant trees instead, with vast funding allocated to add up to roughly 90 billion trees over the next decade. Thousands of tree nurseries were established, and an army of tree-planters set to work on the bare deforested slopes, with local farmers hired to nurture the new trees. As a result, China became visibly greener in satellite images, as forest cover increased from 12% in 1998 to 24% in 2020 to then increase further — until last year. No figures have been published, but what has happened since greatly exceeds the rate of the Amazon’s deforestation, even though the West’s environmentalists have so far remained entirely silent.

There are no further forests to uproot; all that is left are the very small fruit orchards cultivated by individual farmers. And so, to the horror of the elderly peasants who planted each tree by hand, a local Party official will arrive one day with the People’s Armed Police in camouflage uniforms, and cut them down. Sometimes, this is not enough: many farmers raise ducks in their backyards to supplement their income, which the police then club to death, issuing orders to plant cereals instead. Even room-sized pigsties are destroyed to free up the few square yards of soil underneath.

Local officials know that it is madness to destroy so many livelihoods to produce a few truckloads of cheap cereals, but they have no way of changing Xi’s policies — especially when each official has juniors ready to denounce him in the hope of taking his place. It was this dynamic that produced the tragedy of the Great Leap Forward. Peasants were ordered to melt down their pots and pans to make steel in backyard furnaces, with the promise they would instead eat in the dining rooms of the promised new “communes”; they were also told to melt down their animal ploughs because new tractors were arriving. In a mere four years from 1958 to 1962, at least 30 million died of hunger — some to be eaten by those who survived — and hardly any usable steel was produced.

Now, there is no question that China has very little arable land, having lost some 4 million acres to urbanisation and industry between 1957 and 1996 — an average loss of 100,000 acres per year, which jumped to more than 1.5 million acres per year from 1997, with China’s explosive economic growth that followed the opening of the US and world markets. As a result, China now has less arable land per inhabitant than India.

But why should this matter? As a very successful exporter of increasingly advanced and costly manufactures, China can certainly pay for all its food and animal feed imports easily enough. And this is how we arrive at something much worse than the destruction of China’s new forests and the human tragedy of its destroying orchards and ducks: the reason for it all.

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Why no one can end the Ukraine war

By Edward Luttwak

The crescendo of Xi Jinping’s “rice bowl” speeches came on 21 June, when he claimed it was imperative to prepare for “extreme circumstances”, having previously warned on 6 May that China must be prepared “for worst-case and extreme scenarios” to survive “high winds, choppy waters and even dangerous storms” — all transparent codewords for “the danger of war”. He returned to the topic on 6 July when, on a visit to the Eastern Theater Command, whose jurisdiction includes the Strait of Taiwan, he called for increased “training under real combat conditions to raise the capability to fight and win”.

Xi’s incessant calls for “combat readiness” may mean that he actually doubts that Chinese military forces are ready for real combat. Its navy, after all, is brand new and inexperienced, while the air force is greatly inferior in its technology, mostly relying on Soviet jet engines, radar-evading “stealth” that is not really stealthy, and inferior missiles. But more importantly, Xi’s intense bellicosity and intense calls for “the rejuvenation of the Chinese people” suggests motives that we cannot even imagine. No, not Taiwan, which China could have had for the asking by merely treating Hong Kong’s freedoms with demonstrative respect, making “one country, two systems” very attractive to the Taiwanese.

Much more likely is his personal sense of shame that China’s history is a long sequence of defeats at the hands of badly outnumbered invaders — the Turkic, Mongol and Manchurian Jurchen tribespeople, and then the Japanese who might still be there if they had not attacked the US. As with Mussolini, then, Xi’s real aim may well be to turn his unwarlike people into warriors.

So far, China’s future war might appear to be all talk, but preparations are well underway. Already, catastrophic deforestation is harming all humanity while the destruction of orchards and the mass killings of ducks are impoverishing tens of millions. That is not just talk.

Trees have inexplicably, unaccountably, become the magic wooden bullet for all environmental ills. Anxious about flooding? Well, forget dredging rivers or digging up the suburban concrete drive, just plant a tree. Anxious about the climate effect of your  cheap plane ticket to Thailand? No worries mate, pay a bit extra to get some minion down on Earth to stick a tree in a hole. Trying to win a general election? Commit your manifesto to trees, trees, trees. Oh Jeremy Corbyn at his last tilt at Number 10 pledged that a Labour government would plant two billion — billion — trees by 2040. Or, half of Wales, planted up at commercial density.

The electorate read this as “magic money trees” and shied in the polling booth, though Boris’s government, itself not lacking in amour aboreal (or indeed in the discovery of theurgic trees that fruit GBP), has committed itself to planting a whopping 75,000 acres of trees annually until 2025. The Green Recovery Challenge Fund — effectively an arm of DEFRA — last week allocated almost £40m to 68 projects to plant more than 800,000 trees, including 10,000 trees at 50 NHS sites and 12 “tiny forests” the size of a badminton court in urban areas.

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Stop planting more trees!

By Peter Franklin

Everyone is at it, this tree-planting palliative. I do mean everyone. The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) has decreed that we in the UK need to stick into the ground 90-120 million trees a year between now and 2050 to achieve carbon neutrality. Craft beer company Brewdog has grabbed 2,000 acres of Scottish highland to plant a million trees. The National Trust is on the band wagon; Britain’s largest private landowner has promised to insert 20 million trees into its land over the next decade. The Woodland Trust, meanwhile,  has launched an Emergency Tree Plan. Not enough trees yet? Danish clothing magnate Anders Holch Povlsen and his wife Anne, who own over 200,000 acres of Scotland, are removing sheep and deer across their estates to allow more native woodland. 

Aye, and there’s the first rub. Quite aside from the Povlsens’ self-entitled decision about how to use their land (HG Wells’ Dr Thoreau would have enjoyed their droit de dicatator), the Danish duo’s re-treeing is removing a chunk of land from food production. Sheep and deer are rather good at providing meals from the uplands for us poor humans. Haunch of venison, anybody? Kebab? Num num. 

But tried eating oak leaves? Fir cones?

It all starts to add up, this public and private tree-planting. What remains is the simple arithmetic of farming, because humans, damn them, will eat: abstract land from food production, and you are left with either a lot of food miles from importing enough to keep your population alive, or the intensification of agriculture — with all the associated pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, molluscicides — on the remaining land. It gets worse. If we are not getting protein from an Aberdeen Angus cow up a glen, it is likely we are getting it from a soya bean grown in the Amazon on what was once primary rainforest.

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How to save British farming (and the countryside)

By John Lewis-Stempel

Make no mistake as you read this: the land is already under demand to produce more, more, and then more food. As long as a decade ago, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation warned that the global population would increase by 34% by 2050, to 9.1 billion. It added that “in order to feed this larger, more urban and richer population, food production … must increase by 70%”. 

Brilliant, eh? The trees planted in order to save us from climate change … will kill us by starving us. 

The sanctification of trees is curious. They are hailed as carbon sequestors, but so is the grassland on which cows mosey and munch. (The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, by the way, had deduced that methane from Britain’s ruminants is not causing further global warming.) Trees are lauded as increasers of biodiversity, the lament of our British naturalists being that we only have 13% tree cover and the European Union has 40%. (Continental Europe is always lovely and good isn’t it?) But have these naturalists ever been to the Black Forest? Poland? The Landes region of France? The lot of them, vast tracts of silence and desolation. 

I spend part of my year bang next door to a 5,000 acre forest in France. The parts of it le forestier are able to manage — by chopping and pruning trees to let in the light — are wonderful for wildlife, and nightingales sing there, but the larger unworked regions are dense, dark and conquered by invasive bramble.

So, there is the second rub. Treeland is not intrinsically better for nature. To be cruelly honest, my neighbour Philippe’s chemical corn fields have more wildlife than than most of our neighbouring natural forest. 

Undeterred by such freely available trans-European evidence, the Rewilding Britain pressure group of Britain reported this week that it wants native woodland to regenerate through the natural dispersal of seeds. Unfortunately, without a management plan — and I looked in the small print in vain for such — this is a recipe for an immense soundless mausoleum propped up by wooden pillars. 

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Factory farming will kill us all

By John Lewis-Stempel

I know. It goes against the grain, but if we do have to have trees for biodiversity they need to managed, not left to their own darkening devices. Trees are hegemonic. Unchecked, trees would take over the world and place it under their shadow. 

Now for the next and third rub, prompted by the clan chief on the Isle of Skye, Hugh MacLeod, deciding recently he needed to go wild and reforest 572 acres of his  Scottish  outcrop (that sense of territorial entitlement again) courtesy of a handy £1 million grant from the EU and Holyrood. According to chief MacLeod the island’s lack of tree cover is “not natural.”

Neither, I suggest, is living in a castle. If you want “natural”, Hugh Magnus MacLeod of MacLeod, try a cave as your abode. 

Mark my words: such reforesting is the thin end of the re-wilding wedge. Macleod has already signalled his intention to reintroduce beaver. The wolf and lynx will follow, and Skye will become a rewilded theme park, with the food — no longer produced locally, of course, because all the shepherds will have been transformed into tourist guides — coming over the sea on a bonny, smoky, diesel-engined boat. 

Britain is an agricultural country. It has been farmed since the Neolithic period, and today’s open landscape would be absolutely recognisable to an Anglo-Saxon. These isles’ celebrated “quilt-pattern” of fields and hedges is the work of people, the result of agri-culture, and is not to be lightly thrown aside, or forested over. The farmed countryside is “the past speaking dear” as the Poet Laureate John Masefield once put it. It is heritage. 

Take the Lake District, beloved of  that other great pastoral poet, Wordsworth. The hills of Cumbria were revealed into glory from their scrubby oak and rowan shroud by the farmer’s iron axe and the gnashing teeth of his/her sheep. And well done them. 

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Let loose the lynx!

By Tom Chivers

Really, why vaunt “natural”? Some of the best places for the wild things are actually human made — meaning, the farmed environment. A traditional hay meadow may  easily contain 30 plant species per square metre. The overwhelming majority of ponds in the British countryside — and there are few things better for the bugs, birds and beasties than a mere — were dug by the farmers of yore. Now there’s an idea for mass government funding: restoring Britain’s ponds. 

That rasping sound? Me grinding my farmer’s axe. The carbon-sequestering benefits of planting trees are frequently hyped yet rarely weighed against what existed there before — such as peaty moorland burnt regularly to renew the heather. Peatland is a particularly efficacious carbon sink. 

In fact, the tree-planting proposals put forward by some conservation organisations will actually annihilate precious ecosystems. The reforesting map drawn up by Friends of the Earth and Terra Sulis marks out as suitable land the rough pastures of the North Pennines and Yorkshire Dales. Er, these farmed and thus awful “artificial” habitats are critically important for the iconic, red-listed curlew, lapwing, grey partridge and black grouse. 

Not much of a deal, is it — if, instead of the cry of  the curlew, we have the hiss of wind through the needles of a Sitka spruce? 

Trees are lovely, but to propose them as the one and only eco-solution is false premise. And false promise.