Why is China so Obsessed With Food Security?

China is obsessed with food security. You might not realize just how obsessed: stockpiling rapidly, by the end of the year China – with its 20% of the world’s population – is projected to have accumulated and stashed away some 65% of the world's corn and 53% of the world's wheat. (...)

And they’re still at it this summer and fall. But what prompted all this, exactly?

Well one clue is a report prepared by China's intelligence agencies, the Ministry of Public Security and Ministry of State Security, that according to the sources of Japan’s Nikkei, “sent shock waves through the State Council, China's cabinet, in April.” The report, analyzing sanctions, blockades, and other measures the United States and its allies might take in response to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, concluded that China faced at least one critical national weak point: “There is a high risk of facing a food crisis,” it warned.

You see, China may be home to one-fifth of the world’s population, but it contains only about 7% of the world’s arable land. And the percentage of land in China suitable for cultivation shrank from 19% in 2010 to only 13% in 2020, amid urbanization and widespread pollution of soil and water. Remarkably, China still manages to produce 95% of its primary grain (wheat and rice) needs, in part through efficient production. China’s wheat production per hectare is almost 50% higher than the United States (though almost half that of the world’s most efficient, the Netherlands).

Nonetheless, China has steadily been driven to rely more and more heavily on imports to meet food demand. That 5% shortfall still makes China one of the world’s largest wheat importers. And while China only imports 10% of its corn, that still makes it the world’s largest corn importer, and it is the largest barley and oilseed importer as well (importing 100 million tons of the latter annually). Most importantly, China consumes nearly 120 million tons of soybeans a year – nearly the size of the entire U.S. soybean crop – but must import more than 100 million tons of that annually, or about 62% of all the soybeans traded internationally. About 30% of those imports come from the United States, much of the rest from Brazil. Without soy (itself important in the Chinese diet), much of China’s key protein source, its huge pork industry (by far the largest in the world), would collapse.

The vast majority of these food imports (like 80% of China’s oil and much of its other resources) arrive in China by sea after traversing lengthy supply routes across the Pacific or through the Indian Ocean. This would make them exceptionally easy to blockade or otherwise interrupt. None of China’s efforts over the last decade to buy up resources around the world, including farmland, have helped solve this conundrum.

The truth is that China is in a sense the opposite of Russia: it’s a vast importer of energy, food, and other commodities, taking all of these resources in and pumping out much of the world’s industrial product. This makes it far less self-sufficient (though also hugely more important to the global economy). And in short, as things stand, if China went to war with the U.S. over Taiwan or some other issue, millions of Chinese people would very quickly face a real risk of starvation, no matter the damage cutting off China from the global economy would also do to its enemies. Beijing must solve this problem before it can attempt any such adventures.

But, again, China has been obsessed with food security for years, so this one report from early this year can’t be the only cause. China’s leaders have of course been aware of this problem for decades. Nor is the risk of a specific major conflict the only issue, in my view. The real problem is significantly broader and deeper than that.

The reality, which China’s leaders appear to have grasped at least since the outbreak of the U.S.-China trade war in 2018, is that the golden age of globalization is now over. That era, defined by a truly global marketplace, and by globe-spanning supply chains, was built on the transient peace of a global order produced by hegemonic post-Cold War American power. Now that global order is falling apart, and the world and its once-global market is fragmenting into blocs and spheres of influence. Despite the ambitious efforts of the globalists, it is nationalism and regionalism that is everywhere succeeding in reasserting itself. In this environment, complex, world-spanning supply chains may soon no longer be sustainable given the growing (and already demonstrable) risks involved. We instead seem to be moving quickly toward a future of regional and separated supply chains, shorter shipping routes, built-in redundancies, and greater national protectionism and self-sufficiency. Necessary as this may be, it will have serious consequences for a world economy based on shipping everything from one corner of the planet to another.

by N.S. Lyons, The Upheaval |  Read more:

Image: uncredited