In the long term, China can take advantage of its comparative advantage in labor-intensive and high value agricultural products by shifting its exports toward fruits, vegetables and aquatic products, while importing more land-and water-intensive products such as cereals and vegetable oils. Such a shift requires appropriate tools and infrastructure to provide farmers with market information, training and financial services, especially focusing on smallholder farmers.

Low-income households in rural areas have a small asset base, so shocks like droughts deliver a disproportionately harder blow to their livelihoods than urban households. In the short term, income support policies are needed to protect drought-affected smallholder farmers who are unable to access mainstream social safety networks. Such schemes need to be carefully designed, and the managing officials should be monitored and held accountable for lapses. Also, short-term social safety nets should be linked to efforts that promote long-term asset and capacity building of farmers.

Resilience strategies are needed in the long term to help farmers deal with extreme weather conditions such as floods and droughts, including adjusting sowing dates and introducing drought- or flood-resilient crops. Improving infrastructure such as irrigation systems, pumps, storm drains, rainwater collection centers and emergency shelters will increase community resilience to extreme weather events. Crop insurance programs, too, should be strengthened through yield or weather indices to help reduce the impact of natural disasters on rural people's incomes.

Moreover, the government needs to accelerate inter-ministerial integration to pool resources and information to provide a coherent, well-informed and cohesive disaster early warning system and response. Given China's booming non-farm sectors, some smallholder farmers should be supported in shifting from agriculture to non-farm sectors (both rural and urban), while others could be helped to realize their potential to undertake profitable commercial activities in agriculture.

Extreme weather events such as droughts are becoming more the norm than the exception because of climate change. Transparent, accountable and well-defined disaster management policies and institutional channels are needed to help cushion the short-term impacts of natural disasters as well as to improve access to productive resources that offer long-term opportunities to build resilience among the most vulnerable groups.

The author is director general of International Food Policy Research Institute.