Dim Sums: Agricultural Markets in China

Chinese leaders announced new farm subsidies this month that reflect worries about shrinking profits for scaled-up grain farms and farmer cooperatives. With costs escalating year by year, officials worry that newly-minted commercial farmers may abandon their land  if grain prices fail to keep rising.  Premier Li Keqiang squatted in a corn field for a photo-op with local officials and farmers  to announce a new one-time grain subsidy for 2021. In a carefully orchestrated visit to Jilin Province on June 15-16, 2021 Premier Li was photographed in a corn field where farmers assured him that another bumper harvest is expected this year. However, the farmers also complained that they were worried that increasing prices of fertilizer, fuel and other inputs will eat up profits from record-high corn prices.  According to Xinhua News Agency propagandists, Premier Li turned to comrades in his delegation and pronounced, "This is a key period for grain production; we m...

China's 14th five-year plan for Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region envisions great opportunities for development and westward-facing trade in the region--and the plan makes it clear that it has Xi Jinping's personal stamp of approval. The plan promises huge material economic progress, and it includes measures to ensure it is not impeded by social instability or threats to the communist party's leadership. The plan calls for expanding vocational training schools, reeducating ethnic minorities, and creating Islam with Chinese characteristics.  The Xinjiang plan is an exhausting catalogue of projects that goes on for pages and pages. They include high-tech industry clusters; petroleum- and coal-based chemicals; steel and nonferrous metals; upgrades of textiles and agricultural processing; new energy and e-commerce; industrial clusters and industry parks sprinkled across the desert; new roads, rails and canals crisscrossing the region; hordes of tourists; build new cities and s...

China's Heilongjiang Province announced that grain subsidies will be paid a month earlier than usual this year. Producer subsidies for corn, soybeans, and rice will be issued to Heilongjiang farmers by the end of August based on area they planted in the three crops.  Heilongjiang accounts for about 10 percent of China's grain output, and it produces the biggest surplus of grain to supply to other provinces. The producer subsidy policy is meant to encourage Heilongjiang farmers to produce by offsetting the province's low prices to generate better net returns. The amount of the subsidies will not be determined until August, but officials indicated the corn subsidy will be raised from last year while the soybean subsidy will be held steady. Last year's corn subsidy was 38 yuan per mu, and the soybean subsidy was set at 238 yuan per mu to stimulate more soybean production. This year the priority has switched to boosting corn output, with corn prices soaring and record corn...

Stratospheric Chinese hog prices helped float prices of feeds and meat upward last year, but sinking hog prices this year may be exerting a downward gravitational pull on other prices as hog farmers fall underwater. Hog prices reported by China's National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) in May 2021 were more than 50 percent below their early January level and are now below breakeven levels for wean-finish farms and at or near the breakeven point for farrow-finish farms in China. Farmers have been selling hogs in a panic as prices fall in the offseason for Chinese pork consumption. Last week's Beijing Xinfadi wholesale market report said mainly large carcasses are arriving--super-sized "second-time fattening" hogs--but very small carcasses are also arriving as farmers slaughter immature animals to cut their losses. Another industry report commented that a fattened hog brought 3000 yuan in profit last year, but now loses 1000 yuan.  Source: China National Bureau of Statist...

Big Chinese swine companies are transforming the industry by replacing rudimentary "backyard" brick piggeries with huge automated barns, but the hefty overhead costs of the new farms are also boosting hog production costs. Consequently, falling hog prices are hitting their breakeven level faster than expected. That could put a brake on the industry's expansion and create a permanent opportunity for imported pork in China's market. On May 17, an official from China's livestock and veterinary bureau  claimed the country's swine inventory has almost fully recovered from its dramatic shrinkage during the 2018-19 African swine fever (ASF) epidemic. But he also warned that the steady drop in hog prices this year has put Chinese farmers perilously close to financial losses. The cadre of swine companies--despite being privately owned--delight Chinese officials who love big things they can subsidize and manipulate. On May 19, Vice Minister of Agriculture Ma Youxiang  m...

With China's cities expanding at a rapid clip, the loss of farmland seems to have set off alarms among Chinese leaders, but statisticians are not allowed to report farmland loss. Rapid urbanization was one of the most notable features in China's new population census data, released last week. China added 236 million to its urban population between 2010 and 2020, while its rural population shrank by 164 million. The population was 64 percent urban in 2020, up from 50 percent in 2010.  Source: China's 7th population census. Urbanization is a reversal of China's heritage as a nation composed primarily of rural peasants. The urbanization rate was only about 10 percent when the communist regime took over in 1949. Most people lived directly off the land, and only a small portion of the food supply was needed to feed city-dwellers.  The urbanization rate began its long upward climb with "reform and opening" in the late 1970s. The  64-percent urban share of population...

Did the Chinese government's ban on swill-feeding of pigs to prevent spread of African swine fever (ASF) in 2018 really stamp out the practice? Even if it didn't, the idling of food service establishments during 2020 surely cratered the supply of swill. Are grain-feeding swine farms now replacing swill-feeders? The long history of feeding food scraps and other waste to pigs in China shifted into high gear as the country's food service industry boomed over the past two decades. Restaurants, cafeterias, and hotels collected table waste in drums and bags, then sold it to dealers who picked it up in small vans and delivered it to surreptitious farms hidden in villages on the outskirts of cities. There, the garbage is cooked in vats and fed to dozens or hundreds of pigs held in rudimentary pens and sheds. Restaurant waste is delivered in barrels to be cooked down and fed to pigs. These were photographed at a farm on the outskirts of Kunming, China, in 2014. Over the past decade,...