China food security: Beijing puts local cadres in cross hairs to ensure they reap what China needs to sow

Provincial governors and party secretaries must ‘shoulder the responsibility of food security’, according to high-ranking agricultural officials
Geopolitical upheavals, including pressure from Washington and implications of the Ukraine war, are testing China’s ability to feed its people at a level not seen in decades

China food security

Mandy Zuoin Shanghai

Published: 10:00am, 12 May 2023

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China is imposing stringent performance evaluations on local government officials to hold them accountable for protecting farmland and ensuring sufficient grain production, as the nation ramps up efforts to strengthen food security, agricultural officials said on Thursday.

Cadres at provincial-level governments are at risk of failing their appraisals if they do not meet quotas on farmland size, grain output and crop structure. The warning was issued as the world’s largest agricultural importer has become increasingly hard-pressed to improve self-sufficiency amid heightened geopolitical tensions, according to statements made at a State Council press conference.

The policy, the first of the kind to apply to provincial governors and party secretaries, was in response to “President Xi Jinping’s repeated calls for local governments and party committees to shoulder the political responsibility of food security”, said Lu Jingbo, deputy director of the National Food and Strategic Reserves Administration.

Beijing has expressed growing concerns over food security in recent years – with the president calling agriculture a “national security issue of extreme importance” – amid worsening ties with the United States and its allies, which are major agricultural suppliers to China, and in the face of shrinking arable land and climate shocks.

“For now, food might be the second-biggest concern after [computer] chips for China, in terms of being controlled by the US,” said Zheng Fengtian, a professor with Renmin University’s School of Agricultural and Rural Development.

The pandemic has also served as a “warning lesson” to all of Chinese society on the importance of emergency food supplies, said the administration’s director, Cong Liang.

He vowed to improve a nationwide emergency response system, which he said has proven to be weak. Overall, however, Cong noted that China is more than 95 per cent self-sufficient in grains and has an annual food-supply allocation of 480kg (1,058 pounds) per person, well above the international standard of 400kg frequently cited by Chinese officials.

Zheng said the great pressure being put on local governments also came as the lower limit of arable land size, which Beijing set at 120 million hectares (296.5 million acres), has been increasingly challenged in recent years amid a rush to build up landscaping and grow more lucrative plants.

Grain-planting acreage has also dropped … as people replaced it with more profitable crops

Zheng Fengtian, Renmin University

“There has been a greening ‘Great Leap Forward’-type movement in some areas, where a large amount of money and effort were spent on building big parks and lawns,” he said, referencing the disastrous economic campaign in the late 1950s and early 1960s launched by Mao Zedong to modernise the country within just five years.

“Grain-planting acreage has also dropped in western areas and some southern regions, as people replaced it with more profitable crops to accomplish the goal of eliminating absolute poverty in past years,” he added.

The authorities are also working to improve the stability and resilience of China’s soybean supply, authorities said at the press conference. The country has long relied on US imports of soybeans to produce enough edible oil and livestock feed.

Besides improving productivity and processing technologies, Cong also urged the public to consume less food oils, for the good of their health.

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Why is the Chinese government so concerned about food security?

In the meantime, “we will try to stabilise traditional source markets of soybeans and also explore new markets in pursuit of diversified sources of imports”, Cong said.

China is also looking for new suppliers of corn, of which it used to similarly depend on the US and Ukraine.

Since last year, China has been importing corn from Myanmar, South Africa and Brazil. Brazil overtook Ukraine in recent months to become China’s second-largest source of corn, according to a commentary in the state-run Economic Daily on Thursday.

“Grain diplomacy” would expand China’s circle of friends and improve its ability to manage the global food supply chain, it said.

Doug Christie, a former executive with leading agricultural commodity trader Cargill, said China should increase domestic oilseed production at the expense of other crops to fulfil its pledge of greater food self-sufficiency.

“Oilseed imports for domestic livestock feed have been the key feature of China’s diet evolution, but crop patterns within China have not mirrored this,” he said in a report issued by publishing house Hedder late last month.

“A realignment of acres inside China away from grains and toward oilseeds would help correct the imbalance,” he said.

“China could then look to increase grain imports as needed to offset any domestic acreage reductions. This would have an added benefit of allowing China to increase trade with politically favoured partners (i.e. Russian wheat) while minimising its reliance on US soy.”