Hexi Corridor plays a very import part in the national economy of Gansu Province. It is the main agricultural production base of Gansu and it is one of the 12 commodity food grain bases in China.

FOR a brief period it looked like “Food Crisis 2.0”, or another “great grain robbery”—the episode in 1973 when a Russian harvest failure sent commodity prices soaring.

It is the world's number one non-grain food commodity and world production reached a record 320 million tonnes in 2007.