China produced 27.29 million tonnes of early rice in 2020, up 3.9% from the previous year, as various steps pushed farmers to grow more of the grain and favourable weather during spring planting season facilitated output, Li Suoqiang, head of agriculture division at the National Bureau of Statistics said.
Beijing had said in May it would draft a food security plan amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and the government has encouraged regions with good growing conditions to increase planting acreage of rice.
President Xi Jinping also urged the country to maintain a sense of crisis about food security and called food wastage "shameful," prompting local governments to launch campaigns and restaurants to raise penalties on buffet wastage.
China's early rice acreage in 2020 rose 6.8% to 4.75 million hectares, as local governments in major production regions issued grain subsidies to farmers and encouraged them to grow crops on farmland that used to lie fallow, as per a statistics bureau statement, citing Li.
However, early rice yield in 2020 fell as continuous heavy rains hit some regions in the south, including Anhui, Jiangxi, Hubei and Hunan provinces, where flooding destroyed all crops on some farmland, Li said.
Some regions in southern China were hit by heaviest rains in decades, which have also caused fresh outbreaks of animal disease, and taken away lives.
(Reporting by Hallie Gu and Tom Daly; Editing by Shri Navaratnam and Uttaresh.V)
