By Mei Mei Chu
BEIJING (Reuters) – China, the world’s top importer of agricultural products, has set targets to significantly reduce its dependence on foreign purchases over the coming decade, in line with its push for food security, but these goals will be extremely difficult to achieve, experts say.
With limited land and water, China will need to dramatically increase agricultural productivity through technology, including genetically modified crops, and expand cultivated areas to meet Beijing’s 10-year projections.
The government plans to achieve 92% self-sufficiency in staple grains and beans by 2033, up from 84% in the 2021-2023 period, according to a document released in late April, en route to President Xi’s goal Jinping to become an “agricultural power” by 2033. mid-century.
Cutting the country’s imports would be a blow to producers in the United States, Brazil and Indonesia, who have expanded capacity to meet demand from China’s 1.4 billion people, the largest global market for soy, meat and cereals.
By 2033, the Ministry of Agriculture forecasts a 75% drop in corn imports, to 6.8 million tonnes, and a 60% drop for wheat, to 4.85 million tonnes.
For soybeans, the largest item in an agricultural import bill that totaled $234 billion last year, Beijing forecasts a 21% drop in imports, to 78.7 million tonnes over a decade.
These goals defy trends over the past decade, during which imports of grains and oilseeds jumped 87%.
“It seems questionable to predict a sharp reversal where, in ten years, the country will import less than today,” said Darin Friedrichs, co-founder of Shanghai-based Sitonia Consulting.
China will struggle to meet its targets, mainly due to lack of land and water, five analysts and industry executives say.
Contrary to Beijing’s projections, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that Chinese corn imports in 2033/34 will be roughly in line with current levels and that wheat imports will decline by 20%. The USDA expects soybean imports to increase by 39%.
The USDA also expects growth in demand for animal feed, a key user of soybeans and corn, to outpace expansion in domestic corn production and boost 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% of the world’s population with less than 9% of its arable land and 6% of its water resources.
The urgency to reduce dependence on imports has increased after the country faced supply chain disruptions during the COVID pandemic and the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.
A trade war with the United States, its second-largest agricultural supplier after Brazil, and climate shocks such as last year’s heavy rains that damaged China’s wheat crop, have added to the challenge.
On June 1, China will implement a food security law that calls for absolute self-sufficiency in basic grains and requires local governments to include food security in their economic and development plans.
This will come on top of other efforts to boost food production, including enhanced grain insurance coverage for farmers to protect their incomes, announced this week.
Last month, Beijing launched a campaign to increase grain production by at least 50 million tonnes by 2030, with a focus on improving farmland and investing in seed technology for Higher yields and harvest quality.
SOIL CHALLENGES
China increased its production of corn, soybeans, potatoes and oilseeds last year after expanding plantations on previously uncultivated land and encouraging farmers to abandon cash crops in favor of staple crops .
However, even if the world no. The second-largest corn producer harvested a record 288.84 million tonnes last year, with imports surging to a near-record 27.1 million tonnes, driven by traders’ preference for corn from ‘overseas, often of better quality and less expensive.
Production growth has faced a bottleneck due to insufficient arable land, small production scale and lack of farmers and agricultural technology, state media reported.
China’s per capita arable land is less than a third of that of Brazil and a sixth of that of the United States, according to 2021 World Bank data.
Degraded and polluted soils in a country where a significant portion of the land is rocky mountains or deserts leave little space for expansion.
The government, which is increasingly demanding protection of its fertile black soils, is expected to complete a four-year soil survey in 2025. The last survey, in 2014, found that 40% of its arable land was degraded due to overuse of chemicals and chemicals. contamination by heavy metals.
To compensate, China is investing millions of dollars in research into water-intensive crops, such as rice, in the deserts of Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang.
By turning sand into soil and growing salinity-tolerant crops, it aims to develop more farmland, a strategy that industry executives say will take time and heavy investments in fertilizer, irrigation and biotechnology.
One obstacle is the predominance in China of small farms, run by aging owners who may not be able to afford or use machinery such as drone sprayers, more productive seeds and technologies such as Big Data and AI.
Farms in China cover an average of 0.65 hectares, compared to 187 hectares in the United States and 60 hectares in Germany. China is gradually moving towards consolidation of its fragmented agricultural holdings.
After decades of hesitation, the country is slowly embracing genetically modified crops, this year approving the planting of higher-yielding, insect-resistant varieties of corn and soybeans, as well as genetically modified and disease-resistant wheat, in the hope of accelerating production growth.
China’s soybean yields, at 1.99 tonnes per hectare, are lower than the 3.38 and 3.4 tonnes yields of Brazil and the United States, which have adopted genetically modified soybeans.
But analysts say the government’s goal of reducing soy imports is unrealistic. At best, China could reduce its dependence on soybean imports to 70%, from more than 80% currently, said Carl Pray, an agriculture professor at Rutgers University in the United States.
Almost all Chinese soybeans are high-protein varieties for producing tofu, and to replace imports, production of high-oil varieties for cooking oil would need to be rapidly increased, which according to would be difficult, even with research.
“To produce enough soybeans to replace Brazilian and U.S. imports, there is simply not enough land,” Pray said.
($1 = 7.2276 yuan)
(This story has been refiled to correct a typo in the graphic)
(Reporting by Mei Mei Chu; editing by Tony Munroe and Sonali Paul)
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