China summer grain output fell 2.2 percent to 138.72 million tonnes in 2018, the National Bureau of Statistics said in a statement released on Wednesday. Summer grain acreage was at 267.03 million hectares in 2018, down 0.6 percent from last year, the bureau said. China's summer grain is mostly wheat, and also includes barley, buckwheat, potatoes and yellow peas, according to the statement.
The output drop this year was mainly due to falling wheat acreage and yield as bad weather damaged the grain and after farmers switched to other crops, Huang Jiacai, senior statistician with the bureau, said in a separate statement released on Wednesday.
China's wheat output from the summer harvest fell 2.4 percent to 128.35 million tonnes, according to an editorial written by an official from the statistics bureau published in state media. China produced 11.85 million tonnes of winter rapeseed in 2018, down 1.9 percent from the previous year, due to a fall in acreage of the crop, head of the rural affairs division under the statistics bureau, Huang Bingxin, wrote in the editorial published in the Economic Daily.
Chinese farmers have switched to economic crops including peanuts, vegetables, and cotton as Beijing reformed its crop structure and pricing system, statistician Huang Jiacai said. Continuous rains during autumn and winter last year delayed wheat planting, while low temperatures and lack of sunshine in the growing season reduced the yield and quality of grain, according to Huang Jiacai. China's wheat output could drop as much as 20 percent this crop year after bad weather hit fields in major growing areas, likely boosting imports by the world's top producer and consumer of the grain, traders and an analyst had estimated.
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