The official policy is that Beijing wants to be 95 percent self-sufficient in food, but the reality is that its effort to equalize rural and urban incomes makes the objective unlikely. India's Food Security Chimera In exchange for trade facilitation and thus the potential of removing some of the bureaucratic sclerosis that clogs the world's trade pathways, India received what it claims as a policy right to food security. However, India has not had food insecurity, at least not as a result of global trade rules. In fact, the country has actually run an agricultural trade surplus for 75 percent of the time since 1989. Over that period, it has averaged 12 percent more food exports than imports, and the trend is for that gap to widen (see gra...