Dim Sums: Agricultural Markets in China

Chinese officials view scaled-up techno-farms as their farms of the future. Small-scale peasant farmers still blanket the countryside, but subsidies are gradually tilting toward big farms.  business propaganda outlet Yicai proclaimed recently that scaling up farming operations is the key to addressing a crisis of chronic low earnings from grain production that undermine incentives. Yicai insisted further that small-scale farms of 10 mu could never improve rural living standards. The  Yicai  article featured the head of a "cooperative" who had acquired 19,200 mu of land through "land transfer" as a technologically adept farmer superior to the small-holder peasants who still dot China's countryside. The cooperative had boosted wheat yields and quality, linked up with a flour manufacturer, and had plans to expand his business even more. Yicai  cited a 5-year-old Farmers Daily article that found 60 percent of China's cropland is farmed by small-scale farmers ...

China's August 2022 CPI report  said pork prices were up 22 percent from a year earlier, the largest increase of any component of the price index. The Statistics Bureau reckoned that the 10-percent increase for the broader meat category contributed 0.32 percentage points to the 2.5 percent year-on-year rise in consumer prices. A year ago, the August 2021 CPI report said pork prices were down 44.9 percent from a year earlier, the largest decline of any component of consumer prices. In August last year, the meat component of the CPI pulled down the 0.9-percent CPI change by 1.2 percentage points.  According to agriculture ministry wholesale market price monitoring, August 2022 pork prices averaged 33.88 yuan per kg (about $2.23 per lb). That was higher than any historical pork price excluding the once-in-a-lifetime prices during Sept 2019 to January 2021 when African swine fever cratered pork supplies.  Data from China Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs market mo...

China's expensive corn is upending agricultural markets in unexpected ways. India banned exports of broken rice last week and imposed a 20-percent export tax on most other types of rice to pre-empt food security risks. Booming demand for broken rice has been blamed on the war in Ukraine as importers sought out replacements for Ukrainian corn. That's true, but China's demand for broken rice has been on the rise for two years, driven by spiraling Chinese corn prices. Customs data show a relentless growth in Chinese imports of broken rice--a type of grain typically used as an industrial or feed raw material and often imported by African nations. China's broken rice imports tripled from about 200,000 metric tons per quarter in 2020 to around 600,000 metric tons per quarter in 2021. With the onset of the Ukraine war, imports accelerated again to 800,000 metric tons in 2022 Q1 and over 1.2 million metric tons in 2022 Q2. Back in 2020, China imported broken rice mainly from V...

A revival plan for China's soybean industry bears all the marks of Xi Jinping's broader "China Dream" of a glorious rejuvenation of Chinese culture and economic leadership. The doctrine asserts that it is now time to throw off foreign domination of an inherently Chinese commodity. China will create a market for soybeans with distinct Chinese features that will pull along suppliers in Eurasia and Africa, with processing led by Chinese companies and with prices determined in Chinese markets.  Economic Daily led off the month of August with a brief article, "Who has the power to set prices for domestic soybeans?" ( reposted on the Chinese commerce ministry's web site ) and followed up with a 12,000-word " Investigation of the Soybean Issue " feature article ( Harbin TV version with photos ). Many articles described the experimental corn-soybean strip-cropping technique rolled out this year. Several addressed non-GMO futures market topics, and the...

China Enterprise United Grain Reserve Ltd. Company was established yesterday to manage China's national grain reserve. The new company is a joint venture between two state-owned grain behemoths, Sinograin and COFCO. The merger is part of a bigger program to wring inefficiencies out of China's bloated state-owned enterprises. Officials praised the new grain company as signaling a new chapter in maintaining national food security, improving capacity to intervene in grain markets, and enhancing communist party leadership.  Earlier this year, explanations of maneuvers to meld Sinograin and COFCO explained that efficiencies could be gained by combining the two companies' overlapping businesses in specialized joint ventures. Sinograin is responsible for managing national grain reserves, but COFCO also hires out facilities to store grain and is China's premiere player in international grain trade. China Enterprise United Grain Reserve Ltd. Co will utilize Sinograin's poli...

Chinese officials thought they could stabilize the pork industry by replacing small farmers with corporate behemoths. China cut the number of pig farming operations in half over 5 years. Of the 21 million producers that remain, China's top 4 companies produced about 78 million hogs last year, about 12 percent of the country's total. But the industry is as unstable as ever.  Data from Ministry of Agriculture price reports. Compiled from China livestock industry yearbooks and 1996 agricultural census. China's number-2 pig producer, Jiangxi Zhengbang Technology Co., attracted attention in July with reports that some of its pigs were starving due to disrupted feed deliveries . There were reports that farmers producing hogs for Zhengbang in multiple provinces were not getting feed supplies, farmers were not getting paid, and employees complained of unpaid wages.  This summer, Zhengbang's monthly hog sales volume shrank to less than half the pace of a year ago. Another indica...

A crackdown on vacation homes disguised as greenhouses reveals China's clashing priorities: leaders say they want farm-related tourism to pump money into the countryside, but most of the land can only be used to grow crops that pay farmers a pittance.  Last week China's Agriculture and Natural Resources ministries jointly published a list of cases where rural villas and vacation homes were disguised as farming structures . These have been demolished and reclaimed as farmland since authorities launched a campaign against such projects 4 years ago (see this blog's September 2018 post on greenhouse villas ). The projects skirt strict zoning of rural land for agriculture by building hotels, teahouses and villas inside giant greenhouses or by disguising vacation cabins as sheds for field laborers. With scarce land and robust demand for bucolic vacations and getaways in the countryside, the projects are an easy way for rural villages to earn money. Vacation cabins illegally bui...