China's Plan to Promote Agricultural Product Consumption

China released a sprawling program to boost sales of its agricultural products. The plan calls for special promotions for soy products, milk, beef, but it is more than a short-term consumption stimulus. It has much broader goals of revamping agricultural marketing to improve product quality, offer premium attributes, build consumer confidence in products and earn more income for producers. Officials say they are pondering how to incorporate the program into the next 5-year plan.

The plan released July 27, 2025 (10 days after it went into effect) is called "implementation program for promoting consumption of agricultural products" (促进农产品消费实施方案), but it is mainly a marketing program to promote premium-priced specialty products, enforce standards, create brands, engage in various promotions, and carry out campaigns for dietary change such as "reduce oil, increase soy, and add milk," "increase vegetables, fruit, whole grain and aquatic products," and a plan to encourage consumers to eat according to the seasons. 

The program focuses on building supply pipelines from Chinese producers to consumers in China as well as foreign markets. There is no obvious discrimination against imported foods, but the program's promotion of idiosyncratic Chinese standards and traceability could make it harder for foreign competitors to crack Chinese supply chains unless they kowtow to Chinese standards and/or gain favor with officials who are envisioned to wield power over supply chains. 

The first item in the agricultural product consumption plan calls for upgrading the "three products, one indicator" ("三品一标") system that was cooked up by China's agriculture ministry over 20 years ago as a set of slap-dash food safety certifications to cope with China's widespread pollution and pesticide use. The plan describes "green food" (绿色食品，within prescribed limits of pesticide and heavy metal residues) and "organic food" (有机食品, China's organic certification differs from those in other countries) as specialty, premium, and novel products. "Geographic indicated" agricultural products (地理标志 农产品) are a related class of premium products from particular regions of China. (Non-harmful food, a puzzling third certification introduced in the early 2000s, is not mentioned.)

"Three products, one indicator" comes up again in the plan's section on foreign trade which calls for aligning export product quality standards with "three certifications, one indicator" and with a certification for export manufacturers called "same line, same standard, same quality" (同线同标同质) developed in 2014 to close the yawning gap between safety of exported and domestic food by mandating that exported and domestic food be produced on the same production line with the same standards and quality. It's worth watching for whether China will push its idiosyncratic certifications for use by foreign companies or growers exporting to China.

If you see online live streamers selling products from a field, festival or trade show, they likely got subsidies to do so through this promotion program. The program endorses strategies such as a Golden Autumn harvest festival, "100 live broadcasters + 1,000 villages + 10,000 products", a China International Agricultural Products Fair, an "Advertising to Support Farmers" campaign, and promoting "Famous Gourmet Villages." E-commerce companies (e.g. Alibaba, JD.com) are expected to choose a set of villages where they will subsidize live-streamed sales and promotions.

The plan calls for linking up urban markets, chain stores, and cold chain distribution centers with rural sorting, grading, logistics and distribution, including investments in cold chain facilities for the "last kilometer" in production areas. These are not new ideas. Fifteen years ago, a farmer-supermarket counterpart (农超对接) initiative to remove middlemen between producers and retailers and a farmer cooperative law that waived taxes and subsidized market infrastructure were supposed to solve problems of marketing coordination, cold-chain, standards and farmer training.

Government officials are to act as channel captains of "marketing ecosystems," coordinating arrangements between suppliers in farming regions with urban buyers, such as "southern vegetables to the north" and "western fruit to the east." The section on foreign trade calls for supporting local governments to set up platforms to match up exporters with local suppliers.

Enforcement of laws and standards will be critical to give consumers confidence that they are not being duped into paying premiums for products that are misrepresented, fake or even toxic. The plan includes instructions to strengthen product monitoring, traceability, and law enforcement.

The plan is so broad that it inevitably has some contradictions. It promotes natural organic and geographic-indicated products from the pristine countryside as well as chemical food ingredients like artificial starch, bacterial protein, functional sugars and probiotics, snack foods and instant foods. The plan calls for promoting rural tourism to lure city people to the countryside to encourage sales of local specialties, but other policies prevent city people from buying rural land or residences (this year's No. 1 Document calls for a crackdown on rural vacation homes, hostels, and tea houses disguised as greenhouses). The plan calls for promoting regional specialties, "green food" and organic products from "poverty stricken" areas, although China supposedly eliminated rural poverty in 2020.