In an opinion piece in the People’s Daily last August, China’s Agriculture Minister Han Changfu laid out the country’s philosophy on food security: “Chinese people’s rice bowls must always be held firmly in our own hands, and should be full mainly of Chinese grain.” In a country with a checkered history of food sufficiency, the statement underscores the state’s priority to keeping stocks plentiful and stomachs full.
After suffering among the worst famines in human history during the Great Leap Forward, China is now one of the world’s largest food producers and consumers. The nation’s food prosperity is tied to multiple policy areas, ranging from agriculture and rural revitalization to environmental policy, putting it at the center of Chinese domestic policy.
The past year has seen a renewed focus on food security and supply, thanks to a pandemic that sent millions more people around the globe into hunger, a trade deal heavy on agricultural purchases and a swine flu that decimated the country’s pork supply. The public is being warned against food waste and State Council guidelines are encouraging farmers to increase their grain planting. Food security was also a major policy focus of the 14th Five Year Plan, a decision consistent with the state’s prioritization of security and self-sufficiency.
“This idea that food security is important and one of the major priorities of the government has been well communicated much before any of the political tensions or food crises,” said Jiayi Zhou, a researcher at the Stockholm Peace Research Institute who studies food security in China. “This has been a long-standing policy for almost three decades. It has become more prominent with these very public-facing campaigns that change consumption and lifestyle, that’s a difference.”
Now as the central government launches a wide-scale self-reliance campaign to spur greater domestic production, the goal of feeding its population without the help of unreliable trade partners is informing government decisions. As China enters the new decade, it will weigh how to maintain its food security with a renewed push for food self-sufficiency, a task easier said than done.
Areas of concern
China’s recent food worries began in 2019 with the African swine flu, which killed or caused the culling of more than 100 million pigs, 41% of the country’s total hog herd, according to government reports. The state was forced to release tens of thousands of tons from its pork reserves and import record amounts of the meat, driving up pork prices more than 100%. The issue gave a glimpse into both consumer and state anxiety when a food commodity runs short, concerns compounded by the US-China trade war.
“It’s very clear that the swine flu and trade deal stimulated some thinking about the political nature of trade and the need to diversify suppliers,” Zhou said. “With the phase one trade deal, it made China obliged to purchase even more, but I think the thinking is that we can no longer sit easy on the fact that economic relations are not related to politics.”
China has become “irreversibly dependent” on the US for its soybean supply, according to Zhou, Prior to the trade war, in 2016 China purchased $33.98 billion of soybeans in total, $13.76 billion of which came from the US. While Brazil is China’s top supplier of soybeans (it supplied $15.55 billion worth of soybeans in 2016), the country’s appetite for the staple exceeds the production capacity of Brazil and most of the world combined. China relies on the US to fill the gap. Following the trade war standoff, China’s US soybean purchases are forecast to reach record amounts by the end of 2020.
Adding to food security concerns are surging corn prices, amid predicted shortfalls for the 2020/21 season of up to 10% of the total crop. The shortage is stoking China’s highest levels of food inflation in over a decade as corn imports rise to a more than four-year high. As a result of the shortage, the US Food and Drug Administration forecasts that China’s imports of US corn will jump from 7 million metric tons to 22 million metric tons in the 2020/21 season.
This past year’s volatility compounded the already hefty existing food security challenges the country is facing as its economy grows, said Matthew Funaiole, a senior fellow for the ChinaPower Project. Even if the upheaval subsides as vaccines bring the COVID pandemic under control and a Biden administration takes over, many of China’s food security issues will endure, including an increasingly demanding consumer base versus a lack of arable land.
China’s meat consumption has steadily increased over the last several years, as household incomes rise and allow people to keep meatier diets. By 2026, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization forecast the average Chinese citizen will consume 55 kilograms (121 pounds) of meat per year, up 10% from 2017. That amount of meat means the need for more grains to feed livestock, and with it land on which to keep both, something China is in short supply of — China has only 0.21 acres of arable land per capita, according to CSIS.
“China’s still going to face huge food security hurdles ... its middle class is going to continue to grow and their dietary habits are going to continue to change,” Funaiole said. “That middle class has developed an appetite for those labor intensive, agriculture intensive foods like dairy and meat, so that’s going to keep happening.”
Building an impenetrable food fort
The combination of the country’s pork woes and the protracted trade war has helped spur China to diversify its imports, looking to emerging economies such as Kazakhstan and other countries in the Black Sea region and central Asia — many of which are a part of the Belt and Road Initiative — as new suppliers of proteins and grains. The recent push, Zhou said, is a pragmatic move by China to ensure a “safety valve” for its food supplies, should its current trade partnerships ever fall through. While currently these smaller economies don’t have the capacity to replace the US’ import supply, China is hedging its long-term bets.
“It’s a diversification strategy for the long term. They’re building up these connections and these networks,” Zhou said. “For soybean supply, they’re looking at Russia, they’re looking at Ukraine, they’re seeing if they can be suppliers. These kinds of suppliers are not going to displace the US, but China is looking at them over the long-term as enhancing the Chinese import security.”
China is also purchasing land in foreign countries to make up for its own lack of arable land. China was the fourth largest buyer of foreign land in the world between 2000 and 2018, buying up farmland primarily in Australia, where it owns 2.3% of the country’s soil, most of it used for cattle farming.
On the domestic side, China is investing heavily in its agricultural R&D in both the public and private sector, aiming to make more efficient use of the country’s farmland and produce higher yield crops through new agricultural technology and genetically modified crops. GM corn and soybean species passed domestic biosafety evaluations in January 2020, paving the way for commercialized GM crops.
An integral part of increasing food production power will be through producing higher yield crops, said Robert Ash, professorial fellow in the China Institute at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. To do so, officials are pushing for greater innovation and use of technology, such as putting smartphones in the hands of farmers.
Companies including Baidu and Alibaba, as well as central and provincial government bodies, are investing in everything from new drone technology to expanded weather modification capabilities. The State Council released a circular in December 2020 that it would expand its experimental weather modification program over five years to cover 2.1 million square miles in artificial rain or snowfall, meant to safeguard farm production in case of extreme weather or other disasters.
“Xi has been very explicit about that, he said that the key to modernizing agriculture lies in scientific and technological progress and innovation. And I think that’s the key direction in which China has been trying to go for quite some time and I think the process will accelerate,” Ash said. “We’ll see future productivity improvements coming from what I think of as basic technology, but also more and more advanced technologies, for example biotech and genetic engineering.”
What’s next?
Like in plans past, the 14th Five-Year Plan makes agriculture and food security a central part of the directive. The central government is drafting a food security plan to increase domestic capabilities and diversify sources for agricultural imports. The measures support China’s broader dual circulation strategy and goal of becoming less reliant on the US as a trading partner. The plan will also make provincial governors responsible for grain diversification measures, putting more responsibility in local hands to fulfill food security plans.
Zhou said it’s likely that new food security plans will also include more talk of the battle against excessive food waste. “Waste is really low hanging fruit. If a third of the meat production is being wasted or anything like that, that’s low hanging fruit for enhancing self-sufficiency.”
China’s prosperity and size make it unlikely that it would ever face a significant food shortage, Funaiole said, but its current trading status and environmental limitations mean that it is also unlikely to achieve food self-sufficiency in the near-term.
“I think they have identified a desire for food self-sufficiency, [but] I think they could face some real issues with where they’re trying to go,” Funaiole said. “The soybean issue sort of highlighted that, where amid the trade dispute China was not as able to get access to soybeans as they had been getting from the US to fuel their growing livestock industry. So there was a disruption; not a catastrophic disruption, I’m sure it affected prices in some areas and created some amount of very targeted stress on some supply chains in certain industries, but this isn’t something that’s going to cripple the functioning of the government. It’s about putting things into perspective.”
At its core, the next phase of China’s food security structure is meant to ensure that food supply stability continues, and with it social and political continuity. An old Chinese saying, “without agriculture, there’s no stability; without grain, there’s chaos,” continues to drive policy, with the Communist Party fearing that unless it can feed its people, it could lose control of the system. Leaders are shoring up the country’s plans for both building up its own reserves and production as well as an expanded network of trade partners, to position its food security regime to weather any future tumult the likes of this year.
“Food’s a very human element of existence,” Funaiole said. “I think there’s a genuine concern among Chinese leaders over ensuring that they can maintain stability on this front. Especially since economic growth has been such an important part for the Party’s legitimacy.”
Ash remains confident that China is not facing a looming food crisis. Harvests in the country are buoyant overall, and despite tensions, agricultural trade relations are unlikely to sever entirely. And yet, he understands officials’ need for caution. China’s relationship with food security has evolved over the years from one of scarcity to safety and now to self-sufficiency, always keeping the issue at its policy center.
“It’s part, I imagine, of the mindset of policymakers, just this knowledge that if you look at Chinese history going back hundreds of years, but also recent history, indeed when food security has collapsed, then there have been social consequences and those social consequences have sometimes had political consequences,” Ash said. “They’ve precipitated the downfall of regimes, of imperial dynasties. And I do think that is part of the mindset of officials, this awareness that you must never forget food security.
This article is originally published on AMCHAM SHANGHAI
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