Abstract

Food is one of the most important resources for staying alive. This paper analyzes grain output fluctuations and their driving forces in China from 1978 to 2014, based on Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) method. These results show that there are two type cycles of cyclical fluctuation, one is 3-yearterm, and another is 8-year term. These results show that the 8-year cyclical fluctuation is the major term. Grain production’s cyclical fluctuation in 3 years was mainly influenced by yield of grain per unit area from 1978-2004 and 2007-2014, and by the area sown from 2004 to 2007. On the other hand, the longer cyclical fluctuation of 8 years is mainly affected by the yield of grain per unit area. The grain output is predicted for the next three years through the RBF neural network optimized by PSO. These results show that China’s annul grain output in the next three years will be stabilized at about 600 million tons, which may grow slowly though.

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