Dim Sums: Agricultural Markets in China

The Chinese Communist Party relies on statistics-based rankings to demonstrate success and to promote officials, creating incentives to falsify statistics from bottom to top. The Party's head-scratching campaign to address "formalism" appears to offer no real solution and suggests the Party may be collapsing in on itself.  Last week China's Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs held a meetin g to prod Party officials to correct performance evaluation incentives that generate endless meetings, phony statistics, and reams of documents that distract grassroots officials from achieving practical results in agricultural and rural development work. This is part of a years-long campaign to eliminate so-called "formalism" (形式主义) that undermines the effectiveness of local Party officials and therefore diminishes the citizens' support. This year's campaign against formalism is said to be linked to the 15th five-year plan, but it may also be motivated by th...

China's customs authorities reported rejecting 14 batches of rapeseed oil from Kazakhstan in December 2025 due to detection of genetically modified material in the shipments. The report said the rejected shipments totaling 811 metric tons had been purchased by Xiamen Agricultural Products Trading Company located on China's southeastern coast. The shipments were rejected by Chinese customs authorities in the Urumqi customs region that borders Kazakhstan.  According to news from Kazakhstan  this month, Chinese officials put 3 Kazakh plants on a blacklist, 2 had suspended operations, and 5 were on the brink of closure. One of the idled plants reportedly had Chinese ownership. A Kazakh industry official reported that the China market is vital to the industry's development strategy.  The Kazakh article suggests there are disputes over the detections of GMOs: "Chinese importers periodically detect GMs in rapeseed oil shipments and return the cargo, although Kazakh laborator...

Chinese inspectors upped their rejections of beef, chicken feet, and pork from the United States, Europe and Brazil during 2025. Meat was rejected for containing hormones not permitted in China, failing sensory inspections, and lack of documentation or plant registration. The spike in rejections coincided with China's imposition of tariffs over the last 2 years designed to reverse losses of Chinese meat producers or to punish trading partners. China's rejections of imported food during 2025 increased 55% from the previous year. The volume of shipments rejected increased 150%. These were the largest values since the customs administration took over inspections at the border from the now-defunct AQSIQ in 2018.  Compiled from lists posted on China Customs web site. China rejected food shipments from about 75 countries -- from Denmark and France to Pakistan and Belarus. The top 3 trading partners with the most rejections -- the United States, European Union, and Japan -- are not kn...

China's relentless growth in exports of the amino acid lysine was finally reversed in 2025. The value of exports fell more than the volume as AD actions by the EU, Brazil and the U.S. hit prices hard in the Chinese industry. Lower prices led to gains in dozens of other markets around the world, but the value of exports was down sharply. Source: China customs data HS code 29224190. Lysine is an essential amino acid that can be used in animal diets for protein synthesis to improve muscle growth and feed efficiency. China imported lysine and other amino acid feed supplements until the early 2000s, but China now produces an estimated 70% of the world's amino acids. In addition to lysine, China exports threonine, tryptophan, and methionine.  China has the world's largest livestock herd, and China's agriculture ministry has been promoting domestic use of amino acids as a means of reducing use of soybean meal in animal diets. Yet domestic demand for lysine has been less dynami...

China's consumption of corn has grown by leaps and bounds over the past decade, but China still has the same opaque corn import quota mechanism that was set up 25 years ago when farmers fed whatever was available to backyard pigs and chickens and the country was dotted with thousands of rudimentary feed mills. China has spawned dozens of feed and livestock companies--including most of the world's largest--spread across the country. China has also become the world leader in manufacturing corn-based starch, lysine, and citric acid. China adopted a "tariff rate quota" (TRQ) system for imports of corn, wheat, rice, cotton and sugar when it joined the WTO in 2001. Trading partners envisioned the TRQ creating a small market-driven trade for commodities previously controlled by nontransparent bureaucratic mechanisms. China's corn TRQ allows a quota of up to 7.2 mmt to be imported at a low tariff of 1% while additional imports are subject to China's prohibitively high...

Propaganda ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday shows Xi Jinping firmly in charge of everyone and everything. But he has pointedly refused to leave Beijing. Rural officials in the hinterland are warned to implement Xi's blueprint for overhauling the countryside, or else. Xi's "rural revitalization" in this year's 5-year plan is meant to retain the peasants' loyalty. But it could be backfire if massive spending, bank loans, carving up of rural land, and building construction breed corruption and mismanagement that undermine villagers' support for Party rule.  This week's cheerful propaganda shows Xi Jinping visiting grassroots officials in Beijing to extend Spring Festival greetings and hype high-tech AI and robots as the key to China's future. The captions of each carefully staged photo began with a list of Xi's titles--General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee, Chairman of the State, Chairman of the Central Milit...

Growth in China's animal feed production continued to outstrip growth in its livestock output last year, according to data released by China's Feed Industry Association . Feed output increased 27.2 million metric tons (mmt) in 2025 to reach 342.25 mmt, while production of meat and eggs increased by only 3.2 mmt. Over the past decade, 2015-2025, feed output increased by s cumulative 142 mmt, more than 10 times the 13.8 mmt increase in meat and egg output over those years.  There were 37 manufacturers with output exceeding 1,000,000 metric tons, with a combined market share of 57%, up 2 percentage points. 7 had production exceeding 10 mmt.  Source: China Feed Industry Association and National Bureau of Statistics. The value of feed industry output increased by only 2.3%, and income from feed increased by only 2.7%, suggesting that prices fell. The value of feed milling machinery produced fell by 0.2%. Consistent with last week's post about breakneck expansion in the swine ind...

Chinese propagandists appear to have given up on soybean self-sufficiency now that China has gained the upper hand over the U.S. on the soybean trade war front. The barrage of Chinese articles about finding soymeal substitutes, low protein animal diets, corn-soy intercropping, etc. has quietly faded from Chinese media. China's plan to bolster soybean self-sufficiency actually failed, but Brazil's bottomless soybean supplies nevertheless enabled China to snub U.S. soybean producers during last year's trade war. Xi Jinping now is free to make offers of soybean purchases to President Trump in trade negotiations without appearing to do so from a weak position. Mission accomplished, but not in the way Chinese strategists planned. Back in 2019--at the height of the first U.S.-China trade war--China's "Number 1 Document" announced a "soybean revitalization plan" to increase self-sufficiency in soybeans. Soybeans were pronounced to have strategic significanc...

Giant Chinese pork producers are expanding aggressively to achieve scale economies and exert control over every link in the supply chain. Wringing every penny (or fen) out of unit cost is viewed as the key in this winner-takes-all competition for a market that is not growing. Government authorities ordered companies to scale back capacity last year, but no one dares to let up on their expansion plans. China's 39 largest hog enterprises (slaughtering 1 million or more hogs) produced 295 million hogs in 2025, accounting for 41% of the national total, according to data from a "high level hog farming forum" released by China Feed Information Net . All but 2 of the 39 largest hog producers increased their output during 2025, many of them by double-digit percentages.  The million-plus-head companies together increased their hog output by 51 million head (up 21%) in 2025, National hog slaughter reported by the National Bureau of Statistics increased by 17 million head (up 2.4%)....