The purpose of this report is to provide information and analysis to government, civil society, and donors interested in improving the well-being of the rural population of Mon State. Specifically, the report analyzes the different sources of income for rural households, as well as their socioeconomic characteristics, with a view to identifying potential pathways to improving incomes, especially for poor households, and stimulating inclusive rural growth. The overall picture that emerges is one of an economy heavily dependent on services for local employment and on international migration for income. Like a two-legged stool, such an economy is potentially unstable in the face of external shocks. Diversification of the Mon State economy, including diversification and increased productivity within the agricultural sector, will lessen the relative dependence on external migration remittances and result in more resilient growth in the future

Agrifood systems are both a contributor to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and an important sector for achieving China’s 2060 carbon neutrality goal and mitigating climate change. Rising global temperatures and frequent extreme weather have greatly weakened agricultural production capacity (IPCC, 2021). The need to mitigate climate change by reducing GHG emissions has global consensus. In 2020, the Chinese government made an important commitment toward peaking its carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2060. Under China’s 2060 carbon neutrality goal, the contribution of agrifood systems to GHG emissions reduction cannot be ignored. According to estimates by the Academy of Global Food Economics and Policy (AGFEP) at China Agricultural University (AGFEP, 2021), GHG emissions from agrifood systems reached 1.09 billion metric tons (t) of CO2eq in 2018, accounting for 8.2 percent of total national GHG emissions. While ensuring food security as the top national priority, the combined measures can reduce GHG emissions by 47 percent by 2060, compared to 2020 levels; these measures include improving agricultural technologies, reducing food loss and waste, and shifting dietary patterns. When coupled with the carbon sequestration of land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF), agrifood systems can contribute significantly to achieving carbon neutrality (AGFEP, 2021). | Non-PR | 3 Building Inclusive and Efficient Markets, Trade Systems, and Food Industry; 1 Fostering Climate-Resilient and Sustainable Food Supply; DCA; IFPRI4 | DSGD

On March 6, 2022, at the Fifth Session of the Thirteenth National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, Chinese President Xi Jinping emphasized that China needs to improve the lives and livelihoods of its people and to ensure an adequate food supply by providing enough meat, vegetables, fruit, and aquatic products for healthy diets. Understanding the changing trends of people’s dietary structure and encouraging people to eat more healthily is central to establishing the “Big Food” concept. The country should actively promote reform of the agricultural supply side in order to achieve a balance between the supply of, and demand for, various types of food and to better meet the increasingly diversified food consumption needs of the people. | Non-PR | IFPRI4; DCA; 3 Building Inclusive and Efficient Markets, Trade Systems, and Food Industry; 2 Promoting Healthy Diets and Nutrition for all | DSGD

With rapid improvements in agricultural productivity and residents’ income, China has made remarkable advances in reducing hunger and malnutrition, as well as quality improvements in residents’ diets, witnessed by the progressively increasing consumption of fruits, eggs, aquatic products, and milk. However, new health and environmental challenges also arise alongside China’s dietary transition. Specifically, overweight and obesity have become increasingly prominent, and the incidence of diet-related chronic diseases has been on the rise. Among all these trends, the significant increase in meat consumption not only led to nutrition and health challenges, but also imposed intense pressure on resources and the environment. There are significant gaps between the current diet of Chinese residents and the recommended diets of the Chinese Dietary Guidelines and the EATLancet Commission. The current Chinese diet is mainly composed of grains, dominated by refined rice and noodles, insufficient coarse food grains, excessive meat, and insufficient consumption of whole grains, fruits, legumes, and milk. Incidence and mortality from diet-related chronic diseases in China would be significantly reduced if the “healthy diet” recommendations of the Chinese Dietary Guidelines, EAT-Lancet, Mediterranean and flexitarian (or low meat) diets were adopted. Deaths in China would be reduced by 1.15 million by 2030 if the population were following the Chinese Dietary Guidelines, or 1.8 million by shifting to the EAT-Lancet diet. At the same time, such a shift would significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions. Simulation results show that greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural activities would be reduced by 146-202 million metric tons if residents adopted one of the healthy diets, and by 60-116 million metric tons compared with food consumption at the 2020 level. The flexitarian diet would reduce greenhouse gas emissions the most. | Non-PR | IFPRI4; 3 Building Inclusive and Efficient Markets, Trade Systems, and Food Industry; DCA | DSGD

During recent decades, agriculture has developed rapidly in China, ensuring food security and enriching residents’ diets. At the same time, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the country’s agrifood systems have increased by only 16 percent in the past two decades and fell for two consecutive years in 2017 and 2018. The proportion of GHG emissions in the country’s food systems to the total GHG emissions dropped from 18.7 percent in 1997 to 8.2 percent in 2018. GHG emissions from the Chinese agrifood systems should not be ignored, neverthless. In 2018, GHG emissions from agrifood systems was still as high as 1.09 billion tons CO2eq1. While ensuring food security as the national top priority, measures such as improving agricultural technologies, reducing food loss and waste, and shifting dietary patterns must be adopted to reduce GHG emissions from agrifood systems. Improvements in agricultural technologies are the most effective standalone measures, but the combined three measures above have the most significant effect on GHG emission reduction. Projections show that the combined three measures can redcue GHG emissions by 47 percent in 2060 from the 2020 level. Land use, land use change, and forestry (LULUCF) play a key role as a carbon sink. The carbon sequestration from LULUCF was around 1.1 billion tons CO2eq in 2014. It can increase to 1.6 billion tons of CO2eq per year in 2060, thus LULUCF could completely offset GHG emissions from agrifood systems and still have a surplus capacity to sequester nearly 1 billion additional tons of CO2eq per year, well above the current level of net sequestration,contributing to overall carbon neutrality of China. | Non-PR | IFPRI4; 3 Building Inclusive and Efficient Markets, Trade Systems, and Food Industry; DCA | DSGD

The unsustainable agricultural production mode of “high input and high output” has imposed a heavy burden on China’s ecosystems, and severely restricted the sustainable development of the country’s agrifood systems. Taking long-term prevention and control of agricultural nonpoint-source pollution as the key approach can play an important role in upgrading country’s agriculture to circular and renewable agriculture-food-ecological system circulation. Currently, the five major sources of agricultural nonpoint-source pollution in China are livestock, poultry and aquaculture; chemical fertilizers; pesticides; crop residues; and waste plastic films. The Chinese government has issued corresponding policies and measures to carry out prevention and control at the source and end, which have achieved initial results. Its accurate grasp of policy direction and policy implementation provide lessons for other developing countries. Several years of treatments have resulted in remarkable reduction of nitrogen and phosphorus emissions from the livestock and poultry farming, but the pollutant emissions of the aquaculture are increasing, and the utilization rate of chemical fertilizers and pesticides is still relatively low compared with that of developed countries. China mainly relies on policies and legal means, and government subsidies to control agricultural nonpointsource pollution in the short term. However, more emerging options should be explored to establish a long-term mechanism to prevent and control agricultural nonpoint-source pollution and to transform the agrifood systems to become even greener, including property rights arrangements, interprovincial ecological compensation, green finance, and brand building for ecological agricultural products. | Non-PR | IFPRI4; 3 Building Inclusive and Efficient Markets, Trade Systems, and Food Industry; DCA | DSGD

China's economy has developed rapidly in recent years, achieved historic reductions in poverty, and has met the ambitious goal of creating a moderately prosperous society. In this new stage, the Chinese government has announced multiple development goals, including improving national nutrition and health, achieving green, low-carbon, and sustainable development, and achieving common prosperity, and made commitments to reach its carbon emission peak before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060. Great changes have taken place in China's agrifood systems in this process, with a significant increase in agricultural productivity, extension of supply chains, an increased supply of agricultural products, and a significant improvement in residents’ food consumption, nutrition, and health. Agricultural support policies have played an important role in promoting agrifood systems transformation, increasing agricultural production, ensuring food quantity, and providing residents with abundant and diverse food. | Non-PR | 2 Promoting Healthy Diets and Nutrition for all; 3 Building Inclusive and Efficient Markets, Trade Systems, and Food Industry; DCA; IFPRI4 | DSGD

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 has caused a global public health crisis. It has also severely damaged the world’s agrifood systems. Before the pandemic, agrifood systems were already vulnerable to many threats, including climate change, frequent extreme weather events, degradation of natural resources, economic slowdown, and regional conflicts (Fan, Wei, and Zhang 2020; Chen et al. 2020). The number of undernourished people worldwide had been increasing for five consecutive years to 690 million in 2019. More than 135 million people in 55 countries and territories were facing acute hunger, 144 million children younger than five were stunted, and 47 million children were wasted (FSIN 2020; FAO et al. 2020). The pandemic has increased poverty for the first time in 22 years—about 100 million more people have fallen into extreme poverty (FAO 2021b). Moreover, an additional 130 million people are threatened by acute severe food insecurity during the pandemic (WFP 2020a). A recent study has shown that the total number of children affected by stunting could increase by 2.8 million because of the pandemic (World Bank 2021). At the same time, the number of children experiencing wasting could increase by 6.7 million (UNICEF 2020; WFP 2020b). The livelihoods of vulnerable groups such as smallholder farmers, women, and migrant workers are threatened as they face losing jobs and incomes (FAO 2021b). Without effective measures, 840 million people in the world could face undernourishment and suffer from hunger by 2030, far from the “zero hunger” of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (IFPRI 2021b). As vaccines are gradually deployed globally, the pandemic is expected to be under control to some extent by the end of 2021. But we should not simply recover from the crisis; it is time to rethink how to build back better to achieve green, low-carbon, healthier, inclusive, and more resilient food systems. | Non-PR | IFPRI4; 3 Building Inclusive and Efficient Markets, Trade Systems, and Food Industry; DCA | DSGD

Since the reform and opening-up in 1978, China’s income distribution gap has widened. The Gini coefficient of national residents’ income rose from 0.31 in 1981 to a historic high of 0.49 in 2008 and has continued to hover at a high of 0.46 in the recent years (Molero-Simarro, 2017; Li and Zhu, 2018; Luo et al., 2021). Narrowing the income gap between urban and rural residents is the key to reducing China’s Gini coefficient. The ratio of per capita income between urban and rural residents exhibited an overall growth trend before 2009, despite the increase in disposable income per capita of rural residents from 134 yuan in 1978 to 18,931 yuan in 2021. In 2007, the urban–rural income ratio exceeded 3:1 for the first time and contributed over 50% to the Gini coefficient of the national income distribution (Li and Wan, 2013). Since 2009, the urban–rural income gap has decreased; however, the decline has nearly halted post 2014. In 2021, the urban–rural income ratio was still as high as 2.5:1, almost equal to that in 1978 and larger than that in developed countries, which have a level of approximately 1:1 or lower. | Non-PR | 3 Building Inclusive and Efficient Markets, Trade Systems, and Food Industry; 4 Transforming Agricultural and Rural Economies; DCA; IFPRI4 | DSGD

In recent decades, agricultural support policies in many countries have played an active role in promoting food production and reducing hunger and poverty. Remarkable achievements have been made globally in agricultural production, with rapid growth in output of agricultural products outpacing population growth. Populations’ food consumption has increased and the number of undernourished people has decreased significantly. Particularly in China, agricultural reforms that were initiated in the late 1970s have increased farmers’ incomes and improved dietary quality. By 2020, China had achieved a moderately prosperous society in all aspects and had eliminated hunger and poverty. This chapter reviews domestic and international agricultural support policies and their impacts. China's experience of developing agricultural support policies has been summed up in order to, on the one hand, provide a reference for other developing countries. On the other hand, China is now implementing new national development goals of nutrition and health, green and high quality development, common prosperity, and institutional opening. The analysis of the challenges being faced in the course of implementing the corresponding new agricultural support policies can help optimize these policies. | Non-PR | IFPRI4; 3 Building Inclusive and Efficient Markets, Trade Systems, and Food Industry; DCA | DSGD