Dim Sums: Agricultural Markets in China

China will import fewer soybeans and less corn in the next ten years, according to projections issued by China's Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs (MARA) at its annual agricultural outlook conference held April 20. An examination of the track record of these projections indicates that they are a vision of what Chinese leaders would like the future to be, not an objective forecast of what will happen. MARA expects the country's soybean imports to decline from 96.1 million metric tons (mmt) in 2021 to 85.84 mmt in 2031. This is the first time MARA has projected a decline in soybean imports since Ministry first began issuing future projections in 2014.  Although these projections are issued by a so-called "early warning committee," they have never proven to be accurate. The projections seem to reflect what Chinese leaders would like the future to look like. In particular, the projections are evidently massaged to minimize imports.  Each year from 2015 to 2021 MAR...

China can reduce its food import risk by importing low-quality wheat from the Black Sea war zone because importing from Canada is too risky. This is the latest idea peddled by China's "food security" propagandists struggling to tout a Xi-Putin wheat trade deal while simultaneously assuring the public that the country doesn't really need to import wheat.  Yicai , a communist party-controlled business news outlet, observed last month that 80 percent of China's record-high wheat imports in 2021 came from the United States, Canada, and Australia, while less than 1 percent came from Russia . The propaganda directives were apparently to allay concerns about wheat supplies in view of bad news about this year's wheat crop announced by the agriculture minister AND to give a boost to the February 3 wheat trade announcement by new best friends Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. Yicai noted that the "record-high" 9.77 million metric tons of wheat imported in 2021 w...

Chinese officials are locking down millions of people to prevent the latest spread of the covid-19 virus, but they need to make exceptions for hundreds of millions of farmers dispersing to their fields to plough, seed and fertilize their crops this spring. During March, China had nearly 104,000 covid-19 infections detected in 29 of the country's 31 provinces, according to China's National Health Commission. The cases are widely spread and occurring frequently, prompting stronger virus prevention and control lockdowns and mass-testing. The highly contagious Omicron variant makes the virus situation "severe and complicated," the commission said.  The conflict between epidemic control and spring farm work has come to the fore in Jilin Province, one of the two primary case clusters (Shanghai is the other) and a northeastern province that is one of the country's top suppliers of corn.  Spring field work in China Jilin Provincial Governor Han Jun held an April 1 video c...