Dim Sums: Agricultural Markets in China

Chinese leaders are worried that flooded fields and soaring farm input prices are slowing the corn harvest and planting of the winter wheat crop.  Sustained heavy rains and other anomalous weather events--including giant hail, tornadoes, and snow in August--have occurred all over northern China since the summer months. Many fields remain waterlogged or flooded, creating a double threat of suppressing the fall harvest of corn and delaying or preventing the planting of winter wheat.  Flooded corn field in Shandong Province, September 26, 2021. Source: iqilu Shandong news service . The standing committee of China's State Council held an October 20 meeting  that ordered officials to take measures to ensure that fall grain is harvested and to speed up the planting of winter wheat. The top leadership promised to give strong support for completion of fall harvest and planting of over-wintering crops to ensure food security and commodity price stability.  According to Y...

China's swine industry is in liquidation mode exactly two years after hog supplies cratered in the fall of 2019. In August 2019, a vice premier ordered officials to build hog farms to replenish pork supplies asap. Now the same officials are being ordered to pare back herds in their provinces and counties.  China's Economic Weekly reported that six of the top hog-producing companies in China reported losses for the third quarter of 2021. That includes a loss of 500 million to 1 billion yuan for the largest company, Muyuan, a loss of 2.58-2.98 billion yuan for New Hope Group, and a loss of 6.75-7.25 billion yuan for Wens Foods. In Hunan Province, farms are reportedly taking losses by selling weaned pigs to barbecue restaurants because the farms would lose even more by raising them to slaughter weight. The pork glut is an outcome of frenzied expansion. Last year the chairman of hog company Tangrenshen told Economic Weekly that companies like his planned to add production capaci...

Chinese officials are promising to rescue the global trading system as they celebrate the country's 20th year as a World Trade Organization (WTO) member. While China spent its early years in the WTO watching and learning, confident leaders now seem to be maneuvering toward a more proactive role as a leader of the organization.  Last week  a forum was held by China's agriculture ministry  to discuss the country's agricultural development in the 20 years since it joined the WTO. Deputy Agriculture Minister Ma Youxiang emphasized that China's agriculture had "withstood" multiple tests of a global food crisis, world financial crisis, and the covid-19 pandemic. Ma went on to praise China's achievement of "stability," and insisted that China's agriculture has become more globally competitive. Ma added that China has also enhanced its ability to participate in food and agricultural governance, code for China's ambitions to take a more proactive ...

In land-scarce China, swine farming companies are making a great leap to factory farming by spending billions on high-rise, high-tech hog barns up to seven stories high. With generous subsidies, Chinese officials view these farm factories as a improvement on the traditional "backyard" livestock farming model--long viewed as a road to riches for generations of rural households. However, this corporate farming model is highly experimental, still unproven, and investors probably did not count on the cratering of hog prices this year.  Swine go down a ramp inside a high rise barn. These farms have varying designs, but they typically feature 5-7 story buildings that move pigs from floor to floor by elevator at different stages of their life cycle. Ventilation, temperature control, feeding, monitoring of pigs is often controlled by automated sensors, thermometers, and cameras. Animal waste is transported through tubes to centralized treatment facilities. A recent article by Agricul...

Corn was the crop most impacted when floods covered large swathes of China's Henan Province during July 2021. It turns out that officials had canceled insurance for corn four years ago, even though corn is by far the biggest crop grown in Henan during the summer, so many farmers were not insured. Flooded fields in Henan Province in July 2021 This oversight was revealed in an August 16 Beijing News interview with two agricultural insurance experts from China's Academy of Agricultural Sciences which revealed numerous shortcomings in the country's huge subsidized agricultural insurance program.  The experts explained that China's agricultural insurance program is the biggest in the world. According to the Beijing News interview, premiums grew 27-fold to about $12.5 billion from its launch in 2007 to 2020--significantly larger than the U.S. agricultural insurance program. China's agricultural insurance covers 16 major commodities and 60 local specialties. Insurance c...

Chinese officials are acknowledging that the country's statistics are riddled with fraud now that Xi Jinping has targeted statisticians in his expanding campaign to purify the Chinese communist system. Chinese statistics in the "new era" will be improved by endless audits, punishment of perpetrators, and replacement of humans with "smart" computers and gadgets when possible. The attack on statistical fraud kicked into high gear with an August 30 speech by Xi Jinping summarizing his ideas for improving the quality of data in his "Opinions on more effective use of statistical supervision functions ." That was followed by a series of articles posted on the National Bureau of Statistics web site explaining a third round of statistical inspections to root out fraud, falsification, and concealment of data.  The Bureau's director Ning Jizhe issued slogans for statisticians to contemplate: "Statistical data quality is the lifeline of statistical work....

China's latest survey shows that cultivated land comprised 16 percent of national land use. Orchards and plantations account for another 3 percent. Forests and grasslands are the most prevalent land use, covering a combined 68 percent of land area. Urban/industrial/mining covers 4 percent of land, according to the survey results. The land survey results were released in a communique by China's Ministry of Natural Resources and National Bureau of Statistics after 3 years of work. This survey measured land area as of December 31, 2019. The previous land survey had gathered land data as of 2009.  Calculated from China 3rd National Land Survey. The sum of land area categories reported by the Chinese land survey totals near 7.8 million square km, substantially less than the 9.4 million square km China total land area reported by World Bank statistics. China's 2020 Statistical Yearbook reported data for 2017 slightly different from the 2009 land survey totals. Officials are cong...