China has prepared a draft of its 15th five-year plan and again put "food security" forward as a core policy line. Beijing has raised its self-sufficiency through agricultural technology investment and protection of arable land over the past 10 years, but it is pushing to strengthen self-reliance as U.S.-China trade tensions, climate risks, and supply chain instability remain.
According to the South China Morning Post (SCMP) on the 16th (local time), food security in the current 14th five-year plan (2021–2025) was also cited as one of the three pillars of economic security along with energy and finance. Zheng Fengtian, a professor at Renmin University, said, "Global food supplies are led by the United States and its allies, and Russia is hard to trust as it repeatedly imposes export bans," and added, "Food shortages are fatal for any leader." He noted that while China is widening its import channels to South America, including Brazil and Argentina, trade is unstable depending on changes of government.
China still places "food self-sufficiency" at the center of its national strategy. In particular, soybeans are considered the most vulnerable link in China's food security. Because the entire animal feed and food industry relies on imported soybeans, expanding self-sufficiency is an urgent task. From January to September this year, China's soybean imports were 86.18 million tons (t), up 5.3% from a year earlier. Since the U.S.-China trade war, the share of U.S. beans has fallen, but China is both securing alternative import lines such as Brazil and pushing to develop domestic corn varieties with higher protein content to reduce imports of soybeans for feed. National People's Congress deputy Yan Jianbing said, "If we raise corn protein by just 1%, demand for foreign soybeans will drop by 8 million t."
The government has strengthened its "land reserves and technology reserves" strategy and set a goal of boosting agricultural productivity with advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), synthetic biology, and gene editing. Arable land has expanded to 129 million hectares, and the mechanization rate of crop cultivation has surpassed 75%. A KPMG report said, "Sixty-three percent of last year's increase in agricultural output was thanks to technological progress," and assessed that "China's agriculture has entered a new stage of modernization."
The Chinese government is treating food security as both economic policy and a matter of political stability. After President Xi Jinping's remarks about keeping the people's "rice bowl" in China's own hands, targets for protecting arable land and improving the grain self-sufficiency rate were handed down to local governments. Expanding agricultural insurance and subsidies and introducing compensation systems for climate damage are also under review. However, some regions have faced criticism that compensation is not being properly made due to administrative inefficiency and poor loss assessments.
Although production has increased through technology investment and expansion of arable land, climate remains the greatest uncertainty for Chinese agriculture. This year, Henan and Shaanxi suffered their worst drought in 60 years, with wheat yields falling by nearly 90%. Zhu Qizhen, a professor at China Agricultural University, said, "Agriculture is facing increasingly frequent extreme weather and natural disasters," and added, "Although urbanization and industrial development have slowed, it is still difficult to maintain the preservation of arable land."
On this, Zhang Zhixian, a researcher in Henan, said, "The population is shrinking, but food insecurity remains a deep-seated psychology in Chinese society," and added, "Especially in a situation with few friends and many geopolitical competitors, anxiety will not disappear even if supply levels are the same." He added, "In such an environment, food self-sufficiency cannot help but become a central pillar of a national survival strategy, rather than a mere economic task."