Setting A Full Table

By GLENN GARELIK

Only a decade ago food was so scarce that the threat of starvation was an everyday fact of life for tens of millions of Chinese. Today shop windows are filled with chickens and ducks, and open-air markets are overflowing with fresh vegetables. But if even the casual visitor to China in recent years could see that agricultural sufficiency had come at last to a country historically plagued by famine, few Westerners truly appreciate the magnitude of that achievement or understand how it came about. Under Deng Xiaoping's regime, the Chinese have become the most efficient farmers in the world in terms of output per acre. They feed more than a billion people, or 22% of the globe's population, on only 7% of its arable land.

The story of China's stunning improvement in farm production is comprehensively told in a new 462-page book called Feeding a Billion (Michigan State University Press; $30). Its authors are Sylvan Wittwer, director emeritus of the Michigan State University Agricultural Experiment Station, and three Chinese farm experts: Professor Sun Han of Nanjing Agricultural University, Professor Yu Youtai of Northeast Agricultural College in Harbin and Wang Lianzheng, vice governor of Heilongjiang province. Wittwer, the principal writer, made five trips to China during the past seven years and received unstinting cooperation from the Communist authorities in undertaking an in-depth study of Chinese farming methods. What he found, writes Wittwer, was a "hallmark of success in food production and agricultural reform."

Wittwer and his co-authors maintain that most of the progress took place after 1978, when Deng began economic reforms by breaking up collective farms and introducing market incentives into agriculture. Since that time, per capita food consumption has risen by almost 50%.

The Chinese accomplished this feat by melding traditional methods with innovative modern technologies. As the Chinese would say, they "walked on two legs." For all its advances, Chinese agriculture is still strikingly labor- intensive; the backbreaking practice of hand planting is almost universal. Yet China is now using modern chemical fertilizers in addition to time-honored natural ones. More and more acreage is being covered by transparent plastic sheeting that warms the soil, conserves water and guards against bad weather. Veterinarians use the ancient technique of acupuncture, but increasingly they work with laser beams instead of needles.

These methods would probably not have been used so extensively and successfully were it not for the dollop of capitalism that the Chinese have added to their 38-year-old Communist society. The state continues to own the land, but the large old communes are essentially gone and individual peasant families are now responsible for looking after plots. Although broad policies remain centralized, says Wittwer, "the peasant contracts to deliver ((to the state)) a certain amount of an agricultural commodity that he produces at a fair price. In return, he is free to produce -- by himself or with a group -- as much more as he can and, to a certain extent, sell it for whatever price he can get."

The change in policy has given farmers powerful new incentives to use age- old Chinese agricultural techniques. For a thousand years longer than in Western Europe, the Chinese have fertilized their fields. They now use everything from animal waste and human fecal matter to butchery leavings and pond mud. The Chinese regard the West's failure to make use of excrement as "extreme extravagancy," says Wittwer. Shunning all manner of wastefulness, they feed livestock not valuable grain but materials of little other value. Algae and other aquatic plants, for example, have become a major source of both fertilizer and feed.

Fisheries are a masterpiece of efficiency: the Chinese encircle them with mulberry bushes. The leaves are eaten by silkworms, whose droppings fall into the ponds and feed the fish. Various species of fish ply the different depths of the ponds, which also support ducks and provide water for pigs.

In the laboratory, Chinese scientists have been unusually successful in developing hearty strains of crops. Several hybrid rice varieties yield up to five tons per acre, as much as 180% more than a standard American strain. The Chinese have also improved crop yields by pioneering the biological control of insect pests, using ducks, frogs and even other insects. Farmers employ wasps, for example, to control stinkbug infestations of fields.

For all their praise of Chinese agriculture, Wittwer and his colleagues concede that an abundant food supply for the growing population is by no means assured for the coming decades. One-third of the cultivated land, they note, is too saline, dry or eroded for maximum crop yields. National grain production, after years of rapid increases, has started to level off. Chinese leaders realize that to make further gains they may have to turn increasingly to more advanced farming technology, from sophisticated erosion-control methods to still wider use of chemical fertilizers.

Ironically, that may necessitate a partial reversal of the Deng reforms. Small plots will have to be recombined into larger collective farms. The trick will be to rebuild communal farms without destroying the new incentives that have made individual farmers so productive. Specifically, the incomes that farmers make will have to rise with the level of production. Only by maintaining its delicate new balance between Communism and capitalism can China hope to feed its next billion people.