Mei Mei Chu
BEIJING (Reuters) – China, the world’s largest importer of agricultural products, has set a goal to significantly reduce its dependence on overseas purchases over the next 10 years as it seeks to boost food security. Experts say that will be extremely difficult to achieve.
Because China has limited land and water, meeting Beijing’s 10-year plans will require it to dramatically improve agricultural productivity and expand the area under cultivation, using technologies such as genetically modified crops.
According to a document released in late April, the government aims to increase self-sufficiency in staple grains and pulses from 84% between 2021 and 2023, in line with President Xi Jinping’s goal of becoming an “agricultural powerhouse” by mid-century. The aim is to raise this to 92% by 2033.
China’s import cuts would be a blow to producers from the United States to Brazil to Indonesia who have expanded capacity to meet the demand of China’s 1.4 billion people, the world’s largest market for soybeans, meat and grains.
The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries predicts that corn imports will fall 75% to 6.8 million tons and wheat imports will fall 60% to 4.85 million tons over the 10 years leading up to 2033.
For soybeans, the largest item in last year’s total agricultural imports worth $234 billion, Beijing expects imports to fall 21 percent over the decade to 78.7 million tonnes.
These targets buck the trend of the past decade, when imports of grains and oilseeds soared by 87 percent.
“It’s questionable to predict a sudden reversal in which China’s imports will be lower in 10 years than they are now,” said Darin Friedrichs, co-founder of Shanghai-based Sithonia Consulting.
Five analysts and industry executives said China will struggle to meet the target, mainly due to land and water shortages.
In stark contrast to the Chinese government’s projections, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) sees China’s corn imports in 2033/34 remaining roughly in line with current levels, while wheat imports will fall by 20%. In the largest deviation, USDA sees soybean imports increasing by 39%.
The USDA also expects demand growth for animal feed, a major user of soybeans and corn, to outpace expansion in domestic corn production, spurring imports of sorghum and barley.
international security
Food security has long been a priority for China, which has a painful history of famine and must feed about 20% of the world’s population with less than 9% of its cultivated land and 6% of its water resources.
The urgency of reducing reliance on imports has increased as the country faces supply chain disruptions due to the coronavirus pandemic and the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
A trade war with the United States, the country’s second-largest agricultural supplier after Brazil, and climate change, including last year’s heavy rains that damaged China’s wheat crop, are adding 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.
This will build on other efforts to boost food production, such as enhanced grain insurance coverage announced this week to protect farmers’ incomes.
Last month, Beijing launched a drive to increase grain production by at least 50 million tonnes by 2030, with a focus on improving farmland and investing in seed technology to improve crop yields and quality.
soil issues
China increased production of corn, soybeans, potatoes and oilseeds last year after expanding planting on previously uncultivated land and encouraging farmers to switch from cash crops to staple crops.
But even though China, the world’s second-largest corn producer, harvested a record 288.84 million tonnes last year, imports surged to a record 27.1 million tonnes as traders preferred overseas corn, which is of higher quality and often cheaper.
State media reported that production growth was stagnating due to a lack of arable land, small scale of production and a shortage of farmers and agricultural technology.
According to 2021 data from the World Bank, China’s arable land per capita is less than one-third that of Brazil and one-sixth that of the United States.
The country’s degraded and contaminated soils, where much of the land is rocky mountains or desert, leave little room for expansion.
The government, which has increasingly called for the protection of fertile black soil, is due to complete a four-year soil survey in 2025. The previous survey, in 2014, found that 40 percent of agricultural land was degraded by excessive chemical use and heavy metal pollution.
To make up for that, China is pouring millions of dollars into research into growing water-intensive crops like rice in the deserts of Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang.
The company aims to open up more farmland by turning sand into soil and growing salt-tolerant crops, a strategy that will take time and require big investments in fertilizer, irrigation and biotechnology, industry executives say.
One obstacle is that China is dominated by small-scale farms, and older farmers often cannot afford to buy or operate machinery such as drone sprayers, more productive seeds, or technologies such as big data and AI. That means there may not be any.
The average size of a Chinese farm is 0.65 hectares, compared with 187 hectares in the United States and 60 hectares in Germany. China is gradually moving towards consolidating dispersed farms.
After decades of hesitation, China has gradually begun to introduce genetically modified crops, and this year it hopes to accelerate production growth by developing high-yielding, pest-resistant varieties of corn and soybeans, as well as gene-editing and disease-prone varieties. approved the cultivation of wheat that is resistant to
China’s soybean yield is 1.99 tonnes per hectare, below the 3.38 and 3.4 tonnes produced in Brazil and the United States, which have accepted genetically modified soybeans.
But analysts say the government’s target for reducing soybean imports is unrealistic. At best, China could reduce its reliance on soybean imports to 70 percent from its current level of more than 80 percent, said Carl Pray, a professor of agriculture at Rutgers University in the United States.
Most of China’s soybeans are high-protein varieties used to produce tofu, and to replace imported products, it is necessary to rapidly expand production of varieties that produce high amounts of oil for use as edible oil, but even with research, That’s difficult, he said.
“There’s simply not enough land to produce enough soybeans to replace imports from Brazil and the United States,” Pray said.
(1 dollar = 7.2276 yuan)
(This story has been reedited to fix a typo in a chart)
(Reporting by Mei Mei Chew; Editing by Tony Munro and Sonali Paul)
