If the demographers are right, in fifty years the population will be down to 800 million so no worries.
From CNBC, February 11:
- Investment in agriculture has boosted local availability of fresh produce.
- China has long wanted to reduce its reliance on other countries for agricultural products.
- Companies from e-commerce players to seed developers have benefited.
The big storyThis report is from this week’s CNBC’s The China Connection newsletter, which brings you insights and analysis on what’s driving the world’s second-largest economy. You can subscribe here.
Over the last few years in China, it’s gotten easier to buy food straight from the farm.Whether it’s boxes of apples or bags of vacuum-sealed corn-on-the-cob, online orders placed through popular e-commerce apps take just a couple of days to arrive in Beijing.
China’s food safety standards are still a work in progress. But what I’ve noticed is that even if the apples from a nearby supermarket taste artificial — the ones I can order from the countryside taste like the ones I ate in the U.S. And I can’t say it’s just as easy to get apples shipped from a New York orchard.
The economics behind this consumer experience boil down to a few key differences at the heart of the U.S.-China trade story.
Over the past decade of trade tensions, the U.S. has repeatedly asked China to buy more American agricultural products. But many American farmers have lost sales under the Trump administration’s tariffs.
As the largest U.S. agricultural export by value, soybeans get the headlines. But even there, the White House has struggled to define the deadline for new Chinese purchases of U.S. soybeans. China did buy a record amount last year — mostly from Brazil. But Beijing’s end goal is food security — reducing reliance on other countries.
That’s where corn comes in.
Chinese researchers are developing corn with higher protein that could replace significant amounts of soybean imports. Most of those soybeans are used in animal feed that supports domestic meat production. Here, China has a clear goal to boost self-sufficiency. By 2030, China aims to cut the amount of soymeal in animal feed to just 10%.
Notably, Beijing this month called for increasing the quality of domestic soybeans, rather than simply planting more, as it had urged last year. That indicates the land is being saved for something else.
Tech-driven agriculture
To tackle the challenges of limited farmland and a large rural population, Beijing has sought to use technology and targeted policies to achieve its food security goals.China has about three-fourths the arable land of the U.S., according to Goldman Sachs, despite having a population four times as large, which means policymakers have had to double down on increasing yield per acre. Around 34% of China’s population lives in rural areas, compared with roughly 20% in the U.S.
While corn fields and tractors dominate much of rural America’s plains, on a similar drive through China’s countryside, I’d see more mountains — and far more people still working the land by hand. The difference for urban consumers in China is that those farms are more connected to the internet and high-speed trains.
Beijing’s efforts to reduce poverty and ensure social stability in rural areas have driven infrastructure development across the country. E-commerce companies such as JD.com and Pinduoduo have expanded into new markets in the countryside. Companies like DJI have also built a business around agricultural drones. Last year, as I was taking a high-speed train from Beijing to Shanghai, I saw a drone working in a field.
Tech company Qicaihong has gone further, expanding from China’s Silicon Valley, Shenzhen, to a very rural part of Yunnan province to standardize local corn production for bigger markets.
The local subsidiary, Shijing Agriculture Technology, uses sensors and software — including AI from DeepSeek — to optimize regional production. Rather than having to find their own sales channels, participating farmers working off tiny plots on mountain steppes can sell their corn to the company at a set price for unified processing, before the corn is sold online and to major distributors.
A similar story plays out in the northeastern Heilongjiang province, where farmers can process their corn at a centralized plant and sell it nationwide and abroad under the brand “Laojieji.”
That’s just one aspect of local agricultural development. China is investing heavily in agricultural research and development, and its public sector spending was roughly double that of the U.S. in 2019 and 2021.
By 2022, China started commercializing its first generation of biotech seeds that improved corn yield by 10%, said Trina Chen, co-head of China equity research at Goldman Sachs.
That allowed the country to import just 2.65 million metric tons of corn in 2025, down from peak levels of nearly 30 million metric tons in 2022 and 2023, according to official data accessed via Wind Information.
Investor interest
More money is poised to enter China’s agricultural sector....
....MUCH MORE
