Explainer | What is the state of China’s food-security drive, and what must be done to feed its people?
- From technology to tumultuous trade ties, China is finding it a challenge to guarantee sufficient crop yields, but drastic measures are being taken
- Climate change and supply-chain upheavals have also forced a rethink on how best to ensure that critical grains remain abundant
China’s leaders have been ramping up efforts for years to ensure there is enough food to feed the country’s 1.4 billion people, but this effort has been given greater impetus amid heightened tensions with the West and the war in Ukraine – geopolitical factors that affect imports and supply chains.
Beijing’s approach is to seek greater self-sufficiency by putting an emphasis on the domestic supply of staple foods. While government grain reserves have remained abundant, as Beijing has reiterated over the years, the country’s overall food self-sufficiency rate has been falling since 2000.
In this article, we explore six major challenges faced by China in its agricultural-security drive.
Low efficiency, lack of advanced technology
Despite annual grain harvests surpassing more than 650 million tonnes for the past eight years, China is facing growing pressure in stabilising or increasing that level, mainly due to inadequate productivity and efficiency.
This output is supported by 490 million people in rural areas, or nearly 35 per cent of the Chinese population, according to official population data as of last year.
Xi Jinping says agriculture a national security issue of ‘extreme importance’
In comparison, the US produced about 570 million tonnes of major grains last year, with around 66 million people, or 20 per cent of its total population, living in rural areas, according to its 2020 census.
Yields of domestically produced seeds of corn and soybean are only about 60 per cent of those growing in the US, which some officials said represents a “more than 20-year” gap.
Under a nationwide “seed industry revitalisation” plan issued in 2021, breeders are also urged to make breakthroughs in different seed varieties.
But despite its large volume, Chinese agriculture still lacks advanced technologies in fertiliser, pesticides and farming machinery.
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Why is the Chinese government so concerned about food security?
Loss of farmland, over-exploitation and pollution
President Xi Jinping has brought the importance of maintaining enough farmland to a new level in the past few years, with a nationwide campaign to reclaim farmland and a food-security law under deliberation that has prioritised farmland protection.
With large areas of fertile land being used for commercial development and becoming severely polluted during China’s rapid urbanisation push, Beijing has warned that no more arable land can be lost. Its total size started rising in the past two years amid tough measures, according to national surveys by the Ministry of Natural Resources.
Chinese lawmakers passed a law last year to protect its rich soil in the northeast and parts of the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, known as black soil, where about a quarter of the country’s grain crops grow.
The central government has, in the meantime, stepped up efforts to improve the quality of farmland, vowing to build 1.2 billion mu (80 million hectares) worth of “high-standard” farmland by 2030, compared with 1.9 billion mu of farmland in total.
“High-standard” fields are large and on level ground, with stable yields regardless of weather.
The top leadership has also called for dietary diversification, looking at deep-sea aquaculture to supplement growing food demand.
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High dependence on soybean imports
With limited land resources prioritised for staple food crops such as rice and wheat, China imports more than 80 per cent of the soybeans it consumes each year, mostly from the US, Brazil and Argentina. Those three countries, led by Brazil, contributed to a combined 96 per cent of China’s imports of soybean last year, Chinese customs data showed.
While demand nearly tripled since the late 1990s, growth in domestic production has remained slow, mainly due to little yield improvement in domestically developed seeds as mentioned above.
Beijing has been diversifying the source of soybean imports in recent years as concerns over being “strangled” by certain countries grew, adding Uruguay, Canada and Russia to its suppliers’ list.
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Uncertain global market
With high dependence on the international market for oilseeds and animal feed, China is facing mounting challenges amid growing tensions with the US and its allies, which are major food suppliers, and a volatile global market due to the war in Ukraine.
A deal aimed at safeguarding the Black Sea exports of grain from Ukraine, one of the world’s top agricultural producers, to the rest of the world expired on Monday after Russia quit it.
The deal between the two sides of the war, brokered by the UN and Turkey a year ago, is widely believed to have helped ease food-price inflation throughout last year. Now with Russia’s withdrawal, concerns that global food prices will surge again are widespread.
China, nearly 30 per cent of whose corn imports were from Ukraine last year, now needs to turn to more expensive sources to fill the gap, as it had built relatively mature infrastructure there.
Rare rains claim millions of tonnes of Chinese wheat right before harvest
Growing impact of climate change
As in the other parts of the world, China’s grain security has been increasingly tested by extreme weather.
Already this summer, the country has recorded the most days with temperatures at 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) or above since at least 1961, the National Climate Centre said in a WeChat post earlier this month.
These included a river to lead water from the middle route of the mega South-North Water Transfer Project to the Xiongan New Area south of Beijing that is known as Xi Jinping’s pet project.
‘No more declines’: China’s crop crackdown targets critical grains, oilseeds
Huge waste
At least 35 million tonnes of grain, or 5 per cent of China’s annual production, is wasted each year during transport, storage and processing, mainly due to substandard methods, according to a report submitted to the standing committee of the National People’s Congress in 2020.
Seed technology is another factor. For example, domestically bred vegetables often perform worse than imported species in the Chinese market, in terms of resistance to transport loss.
Waste at the consumer end is also huge. Between 12 million and 14 million tonnes of food is wasted in public dining places in China’s urban areas every year, the same report said.
In response, an anti-food waste law was enforced in 2021, requiring individuals and restaurants to avoid excessive orders and pay fines when the amount wasted reaches certain levels.
