Dim Sums: Agricultural Markets in China

The 2026 China Agricultural Development Report released on June 10 had a theme of "Launching the 15th Five-Year Plan: Structural Transformation and Optimized Trade" that peddled the priority of upgrading the "quality" of the Chinese diet, farm machinery and technology, agricultural imports and exports during the 2026-2030 five-year plan. The report was written by PhD economists, includes input from a prestigious international institute based in Washington, and it is littered with buzz words and mathematical modeling. But the report's guiding concept is the notion that a resource-stressed country should try to produce all the farm products it consumes and simultaneously export more of them.  A summary of the report in Farmers Daily emphasized foreign trade and self-sufficiency, noting that China had an agricultural trade deficit of $103.25 billion in 2025 on agricultural exports of $104.16 billion and ag imports of $207.41 billion. China was the world's top...

On June 18, USDA announced sales of 132,000 metric tons of soybeans to China--the first for the 2026/27 crop year. As the market begins to watch progress on China's 25-mmt purchase commitment for 2026, let's review how China met its commitment to purchase 12 million metric tons of soybeans during 2025. The U.S. began announcing tariffs on Chinese goods during March-April 2025. Soybean sales to China promptly slowed to a dribble of less than 20,000 metric tons in April 2025. Sales to China then stopped completely for 6 months from May through October 2025. Sales restarted as Trump and Xi met in Busan, South Korea and the White House announced  China's commitment to buy 12 mmt of U.S. soybeans during the last two months of 2025 and 25 mmt annually from 2026 to 2028. After sales restarted at the end of October 2025, they surged during November-December 2025 and in early January 2026. A little more than 6 mmt of sales were made by the original target of December 2025--only half...

China's corn market has flipped from tight to loose. Policymakers have been dumping old grain reserves into the market while simultaneously buying corn in the northeast to prop up prices for farmers in the biggest production region. Meanwhile, weather impacts that don't officially exist have been buffeting the corn market. Chinese corn prices had bottomed out below RMB 2000 per metric ton in late 2024 before strengthening during the first half of 2025. Chinese corn prices plummeted during the September-October 2025 harvest and soon began rising again after torrential rains ruined a significant portion of the harvest . That event was quickly memory-holed by Chinese censors, but tight supplies boosted corn prices to around RMB 2300 by March 2026. From December through February 2026 spot prices for corn were 9%-to-11% ahead of year-earlier levels. With livestock producers and industrial processors encountering headwinds and corn substitutes flowing into the market, prices began de...

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 intelli...

A Chinese contractor complained about a deadbeat agricultural bureau's unpaid bills by posting a video showing a banner demanding payment. This item has attracted a lot of attention as it crystallizes the widespread phenomenon of unpaid bills at the grassroots level in China. A still image from the video and an article explaining the dispute  has been posted online this week showing a drone hoisting a banner with the message: "Shanghe County Agriculture Bureau: It’s been three years—pay up!"  Drone displays a banner demanding payment from Shanghe County Agricultural Bureau. The company displaying the banner is Shandong Junshen Hydrocarbon Biotechnology, Ltd. which won a government contract in May 2023 to spray the wheat crop in six townships of Shanghe County, on the outskirts of Jinan--the capital of China's Shandong Province. Every spring China conducts a nationwide spraying of the winter wheat crop called "one spray, three defenses" that douses wheat fiel...

China and Cuba have been conducting low-key agricultural exchanges. China has stepped up food aid to Cuba with modest amounts of rice shipped during 2026. On May 25, Chinese Vice Minister of Agriculture Zhang Zhili met with his Cuban counterpart Terce González in Beijing to discuss agricultural assistance projects in rice cultivation, swine and poultry farming, corn production and "juncao" (a tall grass used for ecological control). The discussion highlighted a rice breeding project that is said to be helping Cuba in its food security capabilities.  The Cuban vice minister praised China's agricultural and rural achievements, pledged his support for Chinese technical assistance projects in Cuba, and expressed hope that more Chinese companies would invest in Cuba.  Several days earlier China's ambassador to Cuba attended a ceremony  in Havana celebrating the arrival in Cuba of 15,000 tons of rice granted by China as food aid. China's ambassador explained that the f...