Chinese leader Xi Jinping has returned to emphasizing the importance of food production with a new government policy that offers subsidized land reclaimed from manufacturing sites to farmers, many of whom have migrated to large cities to improve their prospects.
Increasing China-U.S. tensions and the global supply chain snarls of the pandemic prompted Beijing to realize its dependence on U.S. soy and corn. The possibility of global food shortages after the Russian invasion of Ukraine further aggravated China’s concern, and by February, the 2023 Central Government No. 1 Document was promoting food security.
At the second meeting of the Central Finance and Economics Committee, on July 20, Xi said, "Food security is the most important thing in a country," calling for effectively strengthening the protection of agricultural land and making every effort to improve the quality of agricultural land, steadily expand agricultural production space and increase agricultural production capacity.
He also said that more farmland will mean more grain production and less reliance on imported grain, echoing remarks from December 2013, when he told the Central Rural Work Conference, “The rice bowls of the Chinese people must be firmly in our own hands. Our rice bowls should be filled mainly by Chinese crops.”
The snag in the new policy appears to be the reluctance of people to embrace farming.
Yang Caili, who lived in a farming area until he moved to Guang'an, Sichuan, where he works as a driver, said he has no intention of leasing newly available land from the government, even with the subsidies. As a farmer, he said, “it is not easy to make money. We would only make a few thousand yuan a month at most. So, all people who can [farm] migrated elsewhere for work, so that they could double their income."
China has been a net importer of agricultural products since 2004. Between 2000 and 2020, the country’s food self-sufficiency ratio decreased from 93.6% to 65.8%, according to a report released in January by the Council on Foreign Relations.
One commodity — soybeans — illustrates China’s problem: According to data released by China Customs in July, China imported 12.02 million tons of soybeans in May, an increase of 24.3% compared with the same period last year, setting a new record for monthly imports. An article in the Chinese state media Xinhua said, “Improving soybean production capacity and self-sufficiency rate is a major strategic measure for China to ensure national food security. ”
“China remains the goliath of global soybean demand,” according to the American Soybean Association. “Over 60% of soybean trade around the world is destined for the country.”
China’s domestically produced soybeans account for less than 20% of its annual consumption, according to the association.
Since 2021, Chinese authorities have reclaimed more than 170,000 hectares (420,000 acres) of farmland in an effort to reduce the country's reliance on imported food.
In April, the Chinese government began issuing one-time financial subsidies to farmers from a set-aside of 10 billion yuan, or roughly $1.38 billion.
Lai Rongwei, assistant professor of the General Education Center at Lunghwa University of Science and Technology in Taiwan, specializes in the economics and politics of modern China. He said he has low expectations for Beijing’s policy reversal — having previously applied agricultural land to other uses only to turn it back into agricultural land in the present.
"The value of the agricultural land has been almost destroyed after being used for real estate and factories,” he told VOA Mandarin by phone. “Now it is used to grow crops again. Will it work? The land has become unsuitable for agriculture."
Lai added that it will be difficult for the government to persuade young people from rural areas who have migrated to cities to return to the countryside to farm as young people are not as easily swayed by government slogans and policies as those from the 1950s and 1960s were.
Cai Shenkun, an independent analyst in the United States, was on the research team at the NBD Think Tank before he left China. A specialist on China's financial issues, he believes that even if China increases the amount of available farmland, it will not be able to increase food production significantly.
"China's agriculture has always operated on a small family workshop model and hasn't developed a model that can manage large-scale farmland on a large scale,” Cai said. “Therefore, China's agricultural output has not increased significantly.”
A 2023 report by the Virginia Tech College of Agriculture and Life Science counters Cai, saying that Chinese agricultural productivity has increased at a “phenomenal” pace since 1978, when Beijing embarked on major economic reforms.
But, the Virginia Tech report says, maintaining or increasing that productivity growth “will be difficult.”
Cai said that the Chinese government decision to increase agricultural production with inefficient policies such as increasing farmland shows that they have no other way to reduce their dependence on imports.
“Moreover,” he said, “China's agricultural operational costs are higher than those of foreign countries, and the prices of foreign agricultural products are relatively stable. Chinese farmers do not make much money, and they are even prone to losing money, which makes them even less willing to invest in improving the agricultural production environment. Naturally, it is impossible to increase production significantly."
Lai also believes that substantially increasing agricultural land through administrative means will not improve China's food supply, but that it will allow people to see that Xi Jinping is following Mao Zedong's model.
In the Mao era, he said, “the large-scale steelmaking movement used a lot of farmland that should have been used for farming and created a lot of scrap iron. … Now Xi Jinping wants to ensure food security [by] forcibly [converting] nonagricultural land with no agricultural value into agricultural land."
