Among the many sectors shaping China’s economic strategy toward the United States and other Western countries, few are as important as food and agriculture. As one of the world’s largest importers of agricultural products, China has frequently used access to its vast markets as leverage in trade negotiations. In 2025, for instance, it suspended soybean imports from the United States for several months—a major setback for U.S. farmers—in response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. As part of Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s fragile trade truce in May of this year, China agreed to purchase at least $17 billion per year of U.S. agricultural goods for the remainder of Trump’s presidential term, and it restored market access for U.S. beef and poultry imports from certain U.S. states.
The United States is not China’s only target for this strategy. In 2026, China similarly stopped importing a range of Canadian agricultural products in retaliation for Canadian tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles. And in other cases, Beijing has gone further, wielding its market for food products as a weapon in political disputes. When, in late 2025, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi signaled the potential for Japan to intervene in a conflict over Taiwan, China suspended more than $86 million in purchases of Japanese seafood and sake.
Yet Beijing’s enormous market for agricultural products also reflects a precarious reality: China is heavily dependent on imports to meet domestic demand. As the Chinese peoples’ incomes have grown, so has their appetite for meat, dairy, and other goods. Despite major efforts to shore up domestic food production, China has grown more reliant on imports—for animal products as well as feed to produce them. China’s food imports reached $215 billion in 2023, the world’s largest at the time, with nearly 85 percent of its soybeans, more than 67 percent of its oil crops and nuts, and nearly 25 percent of its beef coming from foreign suppliers. China’s food-import bill has receded slightly in recent years but has remained above $200 billion, a figure greater than the total imports of most countries.
Given China’s shrinking labor force and the effects of overproduction and climate change on its arable land, Beijing is likely to remain reliant on foreign food products in the coming years. While its strategy of leveraging its import market for geopolitical influence has served it well so far, Beijing also seems to recognize its great vulnerability. As a result, it is taking steps to become a leader in agricultural biotechnology, such that China could ultimately wield not only its vast food import markets but also select agricultural exports for political gain.
FEEDING THE PEOPLE
The threat of food insecurity looms large in the minds of Chinese Communist Party officials. Uprisings over food have contributed to political crises throughout China’s history. As many as 25 million Chinese starved in the famine of 1906–7, an event that accelerated efforts to overthrow the Qing dynasty, China’s last imperial dynasty. Even worse was the Great Chinese Famine of 1959–61, which was brought on by severe mismanagement amid Mao Zedong’s revolutionary zeal. It claimed the lives of roughly 30 million people and is widely considered the deadliest famine in history. In the late 1980s, surging food prices inflamed the popular discontent behind the Tiananmen Square protests, which resulted in the massacre of protesters in 1989.
Given this dark history, Beijing has long sought to shore up the national food supply, and in recent decades has made enormous gains in its ability to feed its population. Economic reforms launched by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s ushered in market-oriented policies that ended the food rationing system and provided new incentives to increase agricultural yields. The transition from collective production to a “household responsibility system” brought about rapid marketization and shifting dietary patterns, and China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 flung open the doors of China’s economy to global food and agriculture trade. China also put in place several regulations to promote and protect agricultural production and manage consumption. In 1996, for instance, the government called for a self-sufficiency rate of 95 percent for staple grains, and in 2006 it established a minimum threshold of farmland that must remain in agricultural use.
Under Xi, these efforts have intensified. Chinese state media is replete with stories of a young Xi experiencing hunger as one of Mao’s “sent down” youths during the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution. Xi’s own mother even turned him in when he escaped his school one night to beg for food. As a young official in the CCP, Xi then traveled to Iowa in 1985 as part of an agricultural delegation from Hebei Province and returned to Iowa as China’s vice president in 2012, famously impressed by advanced U.S. food production technologies. Soon after rising to power in 2013, Xi emphasized that “feeding the people has always mattered most in national governance” in a speech on China’s food security.
As such, he has overseen a continuous effort to achieve food self-reliance. In 2017, for instance, ChemChina, a Chinese state-owned company, bought Syngenta, the Swiss seed and pesticide company, in an effort to improve domestic agricultural output with cutting-edge technology; at $43 billion, it was—and likely remains—China’s largest foreign acquisition. By 2019, Xi was demanding “absolute security” in domestic production of wheat and rice and he reiterated China’s minimum farm-acreage threshold policy, emphasizing strict punishments for officials who fail to maintain arable land in their jurisdictions. The Chinese government also reclaimed land from other industries and businesses and dedicated it to agriculture. China even approved its first pilot program for cultivating genetically modified staple crops in 2021, reflecting Beijing’s shifting stance on the technology and its effort to further accelerate domestic food production.
GROWING APPETITE
On paper, these sweeping efforts have produced results. China’s production of pork, poultry, and beef, for example, surged by nearly 55 percent between 2000 and 2025; for some fruits, the figure is 258 percent, and for dairy it is 342 percent. For corn, rice, and wheat, China has achieved near self-sufficiency. Meanwhile, undernourishment has declined significantly, falling from 10 percent of the population in 2001 to under 3 percent by 2010, where it as remained since.
For all these gains, however, production has not kept up with consumption, and food and agricultural imports have exploded. Today, China is the largest consumer of meat and fish in the world, consuming more than 30 percent of the world’s total. By 2025, China’s imports of some citrus had grown 243 percent, imports of meat had grown approximately 669 percent, and imports of dairy had grown more than 1,751 percent compared to 2000.
It is unlikely that China will be able to fill this gap with still greater domestic production.Although Beijing’s past efforts have improved its food security in the near term, they have also introduced long-term challenges to the agriculture sector. China’s limited farmland has been degraded by overcultivation and excessive use of fertilizers, for instance. In some of China’s most productive regions, water scarcity and water pollution threaten farming; in other areas, torrential rainfall and flooding—made more frequent by climate change—are destroying crops. Overall, scientists project that, by 2050, loss of cropland from urbanization and soil degradation could reduce China’s food production capacity by up to 18 percent.
Meanwhile, the decline in China’s agricultural labor force, driven by the migration of farmers to urban and industrial centers, is also decreasing productivity. And demographic shifts, combined with Chinese social norms, have contributed to the country’s outsize food waste problem; today, China wastes more food than any other country in the world—even after Xi launched multiple “Clean Plate” campaigns and China’s legislature passed a 2021 Anti-Food Waste Law. China will thus remain reliant on food imports as it struggles to match domestic production and consumption in years to come.
BOTTOM-LINE THINKING
China’s persistent reliance on food imports is a likely irritant to Xi, especially given recent global economic disruptions. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, global food prices reached historic highs, and China was temporarily denied access to exports from Ukraine, a top maize supplier to China in recent years. That same year, access to food became a flashpoint amid large-scale protests in China opposing the government’s strict COVID-19 policies. In a rare public display of discontent, one protester unfurled a banner on a Beijing bridge that proclaimed, “We need food, not COVID tests.” Recognizing the political urgency of these issues, Xi mentioned the term “food security” in at least 71 public engagements that year—double the references from the year before—including his assertion that “food security is among the country’s most fundamental interests.”
Growing tensions with Washington have heightened Beijing’s anxieties. Following the U.S.-Chinese trade war during the first Trump administration, China rapidly shifted much of its U.S. soybean purchases toward other suppliers, mainly Brazil. But while the move reduced China’s dependency on the United States, it increased its exposure to potential crop failures or market instability in Brazil, which frequently experiences droughts that disrupt production. Despite efforts to diversify imports away from the United States, the United States and its NATO and Asia-Pacific allies still accounted for 46 percent of China’s agricultural imports in 2023.
As part of a broader emphasis on economic and national security, Xi has repeatedly instructed his bureaucrats to pursue “bottom-line thinking” in preparation for “extreme case” situations. U.S. Army experts, for instance, have assessed that a direct confrontation between China and Western countries would disrupt international trade flows and force the Chinese population to change its food consumption patterns, which could undermine Beijing’s ability to maintain domestic stability and sustain a protracted war. The United States and its farmers would pay a price if Washington moved to restrict agricultural exports to China. Nevertheless, Xi is keenly aware of the risks and political consequences of significant disruptions to China’s food supplies.
It is, thus, no surprise that China maintains enormous national reserves for fertilizers, grains, and even pork. Though details of China’s reserve system are held as a state secret—and though the quality of reserves is a topic of debate—China holds a significant proportion of grains in reserves worldwide, including about 44 percent of global wheat reserves, 53 percent of global rice reserves, and 59 percent of global corn reserves, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates.
SEEDS OF POWER
China’s continued inability to produce the food it needs presents existential vulnerabilities for Beijing. Yet, paradoxically, Beijing has found ways to leverage its extraordinary need for food imports as a source of strength on the world stage. With agriculture and seafood imports totaling more than $207 billion in 2025, China was among the top three agriculture export markets for at least 32 economies. This is a major transformation from just a few decades ago. In 2005, according to Trade Data Monitor, Brazil exported less than 8 percent of its agriculture products to China. By 2025, that number was 33 percent. Similarly, Australia’s agriculture exports to China more than doubled from 10 percent in 2005 to 22 percent in 2025, while Thailand’s food exports to China more than doubled in an even shorter timeframe, from 9 percent in 2010 to 24 percent in 2025.
By exploiting its importance to food-producing countries, Beijing has found growing opportunities to pressure its rivals. According to analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Beijing has deployed coercive agriculture trade restrictions 26 times since 2010, including five in 2025 alone. These measures are often a response to perceived geopolitical affronts, with Chinese policymakers attempting to pressure the targeted country to reverse a specific policy decision or deter other countries from doing the same. In addition to using these measures against Canada and the United States, Beijing has also aimed them at the European Union, which has lost nearly $4 billion in exports of pork, dairy, brandy, and cognac since 2024 for imposing antidumping duties on Chinese electric vehicles. Australia is another target. In 2020 and 2021, in response to Australia’s inquiries into the origins of COVID-19 and China’s human rights record, China restricted purchases of Australian meats, grains, seafood, wine, and other products, affecting over $4 billion in exports. Chinese officials were overt about the tactic: when asked about the drop in Australian agricultural exports to China, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson responded, “We will not allow any country to reap benefits from doing business with China while groundlessly accusing and smearing China.”
At a port in Lianyungang, China, April 2020 China Daily / Reuters
Beijing will likely continue hanging its vast agricultural market as a sword of Damocles over agriculture exporting countries. But, aware of its own vulnerabilities and reliance on foreign countries, it also appears to be finding new ways to gain leverage in the global agricultural market. China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, for instance, calls seeds the “chips” of agriculture; that is, the technology foundational for all other agricultural production. Beyond its purchase of Syngenta, Beijing has been increasing investments in advanced seed-breeding technologies, including genetically modified technologies enhanced by AI. In 2019, China surpassed the United States and the EU in applications for all international patents—many for agricultural patents using state-of-the-art biotechnology—and China has grown to be the largest funder of agricultural research and development globally. By 2022, China had commercialized its first generation of biotech corn seeds, increasing corn yields by ten percent. China’s imports of corn decreased from 23 million metric tons in 2023 to 6 million metric tons only two years later. By the end of 2025, Syngenta had developed 111 new seed traits, which Chinese regulators have since approved for commercial use.
China has also worked to dominate the production of the vitamins and amino acids that are essential to animal feed. China already produces between 80 and 100 percent of some of the inputs to livestock and poultry feed, leading the U.S. animal feed industry to conclude that “heavy dependence on imports from a limited number of sources highlights the vulnerability of U.S. animal feed production to global supply chain disruptions.” Chinese dominance of an industry critical to U.S. animal production serves as a potential counterweight to the threat of restricted U.S. food exports to China. A U.S. decision in this direction could be met with Beijing’s decision to do the same, harming the U.S. farm economy and consumers alike.
A China that is a net exporter of select but critical commodities could present a new type of challenge in the global agriculture market. Beijing would hold sway over countries reliant on its imports as well as key exports. The United States should expect Beijing to continue to wield its agriculture sector for geopolitical influence, whether through curtailing imports of food, restricting exports of select commodities, or both. As Beijing seeks to exploit all possible avenues for geopolitical leverage against Washington, food exports and imports could become an even more acute pressure point in the U.S.-Chinese relationship.
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