China's Plan: Food from a Chemistry Set

Chinese leaders cloak themselves in first-world food snobbery, but underneath they are obsessed with removing humans from agriculture through mechanization, relying on the latest scientific fads to magically increase crop yields, commoditizing "food" into standardized tons, and producing food in chemistry labs and factories.

China's 5-year plan for 2026-30 reveals the "modernization" obsession. At a June 2 press conference the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs explained its approach to implementing the 5-year plan by identifying a handful of industries they expect to underpin the growth of "new quality productive forces" in agriculture:

• AI in plant breeding
• new energy agricultural machinery
• agricultural low altitude economy (drones)
• agricultural biological manufacturing
• novel food products

A June 10 meeting of the agriculture ministry's leading group on science and technology innovation prioritized biomanufacturing and artificial intelligence for support. The expansive 5-year plan envisions an "industrial ecosystem" in the countryside wired up with sensors, monitors, "smart" controls, and temperature-controlled facilities, calls for upgrading farm machinery, continuing to bulldoze and pave fields to create "high-standard farmland" program, fostering scaled-up farms, and building food processing industrial parks in the countryside.

These targets have common themes of touting magical solutions to boost productivity, replacing humans in agriculture with machines, and transforming food into pills and powders created with chemistry sets.

Let's zoom in on the vaguely defined "biological manufacturing" industry touted by China's overall 5-year plan and adopted by the agriculture ministry--even though it turns out to have little to do with agriculture when we pull it apart.

Signaling its role in the new 5-year plan, biological manufacturing was described in a State media article last December as a "new industrial frontier" attracting investment from various quarters. The one food example mentioned was artificially synthesized starch--a carbohydrate created in a lab from CO2, hydrogen and electricity--bypassing the photosynthesis process. Examples featured in the article were not breakthroughs: "gutter oil being transformed into aviation fuel" and "corn processed into fuel ethanol" are both in full swing overseas. 

The December article bragged that China's biological manufacturing already has RMB 1 trillion in output. It noted that 70% of the products are biological fermentation products made mostly from organic raw materials.

A report on the industry last year claimed that biological fermentation is a "novel technology" that harnesses the specific functions of microorganisms to make products or to apply microorganisms in industrial processes. The report identified three main segments of the bio-fermentation industry: 

• raw materials used in fermentation such as corn, rice, wheat, and cassava; production machinery; and environmental protection equipment
• production of bio-fermented products including amino acids, organic acids, enzyme preparations, polyols, starch sugars, yeast, and functional fermented products
• downstream products include unidentifiable potions and powders in the ingredient list on food packages: lysine, threonine, valine, isoleucine, monosodium glutamate, xanthan gum, and glutamine.
• 
  
• These are not novel products. A handful of companies based in Europe, the U.S. and Japan have experimented with amino acids like lysine, tryptophan, threonine, methionine, and valine as feed additives since the 1950s and had formed a multinational industry by the 1980s. Monosodium glutamate was discovered as a food flavoring by a Japanese scientist decades ago before it was introduced to China. Multinationals and Chinese companies began producing these products in China in the early 2000s, and China now dominates the global industry. 

An initial measure to support biomanufacturing this year
is a list of vendors selling bioreactors used to culture cells or bacteria.
Source: Eppendorf Group.

In a familiar pattern, China pushed biological fermentation products in its last two 5-year plans whether there was a market for them in China or not. The fact that China had a deficit and high costs of raw materials--corn, wheat, rice, cassava--was also brushed off. Companies flooded the global market with these products, prompting antidumping and countervailing duty investigations in multiple countries. Exports gradually ramped up from $1.8 billion annually to $2.5 billion during the 13th 5-year plan, then spiked to over $5 billion in 2022 before dropping off to $3.8 billion in 2025. 

Biological fermentation products identified in a 2025 industry report. China customs data.

There are dozens of companies you've never heard of producing these products. The industry report identified Meihua Group--specializing in amino acids--as the largest bio-manufacturing company, accounting for 10% of output. Others include Angel Yeast, Bloomage Biotech, Kingdomway, Fengyuan Group, and Yiduoli. Fufeng Group, a maker of MSG and xanthan gum, has been trying to open a plant in the United States to manufacture lysine. Much like 20th-century fascism, none of the companies are explicitly state-owned, but all are eager to fulfill the government's plan in exchange for real estate, bank loans, subsidies, tax breaks, etc. 

As in most Chinese industries, the report complained that bio-fermentation companies churn out vast amounts of products such as lysine, MSG, and citric acid that fill the low-end of the market. The industry report grumbled that Chinese companies have difficulty competing with multinationals on quality and cost, and they are blocked from overseas expansion by the global footprint of their multinational competitors.

Lysine, the amino acid produced most widely in China, used mainly as an 
additive in livestock feed.

China's over production of conventional corn starch has helped push the country's corn output to 300 million metric tons. The U.S. is exporting record volumes of corn this year--but none to China. Does synthetic starch make economic sense in view of abundant corn supplies? The same Chinese government laboratory that developed synthetic corn starch also reportedly developed a method for making fuel ethanol from coal to replace ethanol made from corn and cassava.

Replacing soybean meal with amino acid feed additives is the centerpiece of China's strategy for reducing reliance on soybean imports. However, there are so many soybeans available in the world this year that Chinese soybean meal prices have been driven to historically low levels, undercutting the economic viability of amino acids as a replacement for soybean meal. Meanwhile, because there are so many surplus soybeans the U.S. and Brazilian biomanufacturing industries are increasing their use of soybeans to produce soy-based biodiesel at a much more rapid pace than is China. 

Chinese officials pretend to be first-world food snobs, touting the distinctiveness of Chinese cuisine, terroir and geographic indications, a purported commitment to smallholder farmers, and high food safety standards that require zero tolerances for hormones and antibiotics and excessive testing of GMO crops. They do prefer this for their own dinner tables, but for planning the country's food system they are more committed than any country to industrial-style standardized agriculture and food in laboratories and factory-style buildings divorced from the natural environment (e.g. 26-story hog farms and "vegetable factories"). 

China's ideal: an enclosed "vegetable factory" with colored lights, trays of seedlings and 
one worker in a hazmat suit. Source: Chinese Academy of Sciences.

A second fiction to beware of is the premise that China's industrial policy works as promised. Despite stories about high-tech, the products of industrial policy are typically huge in number, low in quality, and dumped on the world market. The best scientists flee abroad. Interfaces between labs and companies are poor--China has spent decades attempting to do this in its seed industry and results have been slow. Support policies attract unimaginative CEOs with good connections and willing to do the government's bidding. Truly innovative entrepreneurs are viewed as a threat and have poor access to real estate, bank loans, and subsidies. The result is a few impressive demonstration projects and a race to the bottom in most industries.