China’s food security dream faces land, soil and water woes

BEIJING – China, the world’s biggest agriculture importer, has set targets to drastically reduce its reliance on overseas buying over the coming decade in line with its push for food security, but they will be exceedingly difficult to meet, experts say.

With limited land and water, China will have to sharply increase farming productivity through technology, including genetically modified crops, and expand area under cultivation to meet Beijing’s 10-year projections.

The government envisions 92 per cent self-sufficiency in staple grains and beans by 2033, up from 84 per cent during 2021 to 2023, according to a document released in late April, on a path towards President Xi Jinping’s goal to become an “agriculture power” by the middle of the century.

Cutting the country’s imports would be a blow to producers from the United States to Brazil and Indonesia, who have expanded capacity to meet demand from China’s 1.4 billion people, the world’s largest market for soya beans, meat and grains.

Over the 10 years to 2033, the Agriculture Ministry projects a 75 per cent plunge in corn imports to 6.8 million tonnes and a 60 per cent drop for wheat to 4.85 million tonnes.

For soya beans, the biggest item on a farm import bill that totalled US$234 billion (S$315 billion) in 2023, Beijing sees imports falling 21 per cent to 78.7 million tonnes in a decade.

Those targets defy the trends of the past decade, in which grains and oilseed imports have surged 87 per cent.

“Forecasting a sharp reversal where in 10 years the country will be importing less than it does today seems questionable,” said Mr Darin Friedrichs, co-founder of Shanghai-based Sitonia Consulting.

China will struggle to meet its targets mainly due to a lack of land and water, five analysts and industry executives say.

In stark contrast to Beijing’s projections, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) sees China’s corn imports in 2033/34 roughly in line with current levels and wheat imports declining 20 per cent. In the biggest divergence, USDA expects soya bean imports to rise 39 per cent.

The USDA also expects growth in demand for animal feed, a key user of soya beans and corn, to outpace domestic corn output expansion and spur imports of sorghum and barley.

National security

Food security has long been a priority for China, which has a painful history of famine and must feed nearly 20 per cent of the global population with less than 9 per cent of its arable land and 6 per cent of its water resources.

The urgency to cut dependence on imports grew after China faced supply chain disruptions during the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

A trade war with the US, its No. 2 agriculture supplier after Brazil, and climate shocks such as heavy rain in 2023 that damaged China’s wheat harvest have added to the challenge.

On June 1, China will implement a food security law that calls for absolute self-sufficiency in staple grains and requires local governments to include food security in their economic and development plans.

That will add to other efforts to bolster food production, including stepped-up grains insurance cover for farmers to protect their income, announced this week.

In April, Beijing launched a drive to raise grain output by at least 50 million tonnes by 2030, spotlighting upgraded farmland and investments in seed technology for higher crop yields and quality.

Soil changes

China increased production of corn, soya beans, potatoes and oilseeds in 2023 after expanding planting on previously uncultivated land and encouraging farmers to switch from cash crops to staples.

However, even as the world’s No. 2 corn producer harvested a record 288.84 million tonnes in 2023, imports surged to a near-record 27.1 million tonnes, driven by traders’ preference for corn from overseas that is often higher quality and cheaper.

Production growth has hit a bottleneck due to insufficient arable land, small production scale and a lack of farmers and agriculture technology, state media reported.

China’s arable land per capita is less than one-third the level in Brazil and one-sixth the level of the US, World Bank data from 2021 shows.

Degraded and polluted soil in a country where a significant share of land is either rocky mountains or desert leave it with little space for expansion.

The government, which has increasingly called for protection of its fertile black soil, is set to complete a four-year soil survey in 2025. The last survey, in 2014, found that 40 per cent of its arable land was degraded from overuse of chemicals and heavy metal contamination.

To compensate, China is pouring millions of dollars into research of farming water-intensive crops such as rice in the deserts of Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang.

By turning sand into soil and breeding saline-tolerant crops, it aims to develop more farmland, a strategy industry executives say will take time and heavy investments in fertiliser, irrigation and biotechnology.

One obstacle is China’s predominance of small farms, run by ageing owners who may not be able to afford or operate machinery such as drone sprayers, more productive seeds and technology such as big data and AI.

Farms in China average 0.65ha, compared with 187ha in the US and 60ha in Germany. China is gradually shifting towards a consolidation of its fragmented farms.

After decades of hesitation, it is slowly adopting genetically modified crops, in 2024 approving the planting of corn and soya bean varieties that are higher yielding and insect resistant, as well as gene-edited, disease-resistant wheat in hopes of accelerating production growth.

China’s soya bean yields, at 1.99 tonnes per hectare, lag the 3.38 and 3.4 tonne yields in Brazil and the US, which have embraced genetically modified soya beans.

But analysts say the government’s target for cutting soya bean imports is unrealistic. At best, China could ease its dependence on soya bean imports to 70 per cent from more than 80 per cent now, said Professor Carl Pray at Rutgers University in the US.

Almost all of China’s soya beans are high protein varieties to produce tofu, and to replace imports it would need to rapidly expand production of high-oil producing varieties for cooking oil, which he said would be hard, even with research.

“To produce enough soya beans to replace the Brazilian and US imports, there is just not enough land,” Prof Pray said. REUTERS