Forestry

Macroeconomics

Agriculture

Statistics

Official statistics

China

Archaeology

Food security

Economics

Business

Crop

Crop production

Mathematics

Geography

Urbanization

Political science

Economic growth

Natural resource economics

Agricultural productivity

Scrutiny

Agricultural economics

Production (economics)

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Significance With rapid economic growth and urbanization, there has been an increasing debate on food security and crop supplies in China. Grains have become central to China’s agriculture policy of ensuring food security mostly through domestic supply. Accurate production statistics are essential for research, monitoring, and planning. Recent increases in crop production reported by national statistics have come under increasing scrutiny. This paper provides an approach to validate Chinese official grain data, based on integrated socioecological indicators of terrestrial net primary production. This approach, grounded on agriculture’s biophysical spatially explicit constraints, provides a powerful means to check the plausibility of China’s grain production statistics at different administrative levels, generates insights about their discrepancies, and can contribute to improved crop production measurements.

On the accuracy of official Chinese crop production data: Evidence from biophysical indexes of net primary production