Dim Sums: Agricultural Markets in China

China is setting up an ecological police system (生态警务机制) that combines citizen surveillance with law enforcement and prosecution to crack down on "environmental and resource crimes" as a strategy for beautifying the countryside.  The system is led by the Ministry of Public Security--highlighting the focus on law enforcement--in conjunction with the Ministry of Justice, the central government's planning ministry, and ministries responsible for environment, agriculture, water management, grasslands, forests, and the coast guard. The plan set forth in an "Opinion on Building an Ecological Police Mechanism" (关于加强生态警务机制建设的意见 which does not seem to be publicly available) aims to have the basic mechanism in place by 2027 and fully operational by 2035.  The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs said the policing system will severely punish environmental pollution, destruction of wild flora and fauna resources, damage to ancient and famous trees, illegal fishing, i...

China is pursuing an unworkable project of layering a space-age agricultural sector on top of a medieval collective land ownership system. Today, a dwindling cadre of aging villagers "own" the land, leasing it out on a short-term basis to a separate class of business entities that do the farming. Conflicting interests and uncertainty about the future breed a short-sighted approach to land management that undermines the long-term investments needed to put China's agriculture on an upward trajectory.  This year's communist party "Document No. 1" on rural policy included a directive to upgrade the quality of arable land, apparently the inspiration for a law on protecting and improving arable land drafted and approved last month by China's State Council. The day after it was approved, an essay in State-run Economic Daily  decried the unresolved degradation of farmland, including thinning and hardening of top soil, formation of gullies in the rich black soi...

China's latest plan to upgrade the quality of its farmland was  announced by China's Xinhua News Agency  March 30, 2025. The new target is to create 1.35 billion mu (90 million hectares) of "high standard farmland" by 2030. (China's total amount of arable land is 1.93 billion mu, or 128.6 million hectares.) The new plan implements a decree issued in the 2023 "Document No. 1" that all "permanent basic farmland" be converted to high standard farmland. The 2024 and 2025 "Documents No. 1" also included paragraphs directing officials to build high standard farmland. The "high standard farmland" initiative aims to overhaul village-wide parcels of land by leveling fields, consolidating fragmented plots, installing drainage ditches, wells, irrigation pipes, access roads, and electric lines to make fields more productive, resistant to droughts and flooding, and accessible for farm machinery. The goal of the initiative is to raise the...

China had 128.6 million hectares of arable land in 2023 according to the Ministry of Natural Resources' Communique on Natural Resources released last week. That was a 1-million-hectare increase from the previous year's value published in the China Statistical Yearbook . In contrast, the area sown in crops dropped by about 1 million hectares to 169 million hectares in 2023, seemingly in conflict with the increase in cultivated land area reported by the Ministry of Land Resources. The area sown to crops had peaked at nearly 170 million hectares in 2022.  The area sown to crops in China exceeds the cultivated area because some land is planted intensively by planting 2 or 3 crops each year on the same field. (In contrast, the amount of harvested crop area in the United States is substantially less than the total area of cropland because a substantial amount of U.S. land is left fallow or put into conservation uses.) There is no explanation for why the rising trend in sown area ...

A video circulating in China last week may be the latest example of emboldened rural officials clearing aging villagers off collectively owned farmland. These enclosures with Chinese characteristics can be motivated by the need to increase productivity, lucrative opportunities to grow ornamental shrubs, or just plain corruption. The only power villagers have to assert their interests is their sheer numbers...and that's exactly what communist leaders are most afraid of. The video  appeared to show dozens of villagers stealing corn from a large field in Henan Province. A corn combine unable to complete its harvest sat idle as elderly villagers scooped up ears of corn into bags and loaded them into motorized carts parked in the field. Sirens sounded as police showed up but there were too many people to arrest. The operator of an idled corn combine unable to complete his harvesting work took a video of villagers fighting over a bag of corn in the field. While the videos circulati...

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...

China has tasked a new network of field bosses (田长) with watching for misuse of farmland as new statistics revealed huge losses of cropland in many provinces. The new system selects key people in village groups--the most basic rural unit--to watch over "permanent farmland" to ensure it is not converted to nonfarming uses or planted with non-grain crops. These grassroots field watchers report up to a field boss at the administrative village, who reports to a township field boss, who reports to a prefecture field boss official.  The new farmland-watching system was launched in 2021 after a new national land survey discovered that China's cultivated land base was 5 percent less than had previously been reported in statistics (see table below). Many southern provinces had their cultivated land area cut by 20-to-30 percent after the survey. Major agricultural provinces like Shandong (-15%), Henan and Hebei (-7% each) had reductions. Top rice-producing provinces Hunan and Jiang...

There was one new Chinese investment in U.S. farmland in 2020, according to the USDA's latest report on foreign farmland holdings --not exactly a "land grab." The USDA report said 194,179 acres of farmland held by "China" was valued at $1.86 billion at the end of December 2020. These holdings were composed of 266 parcels held by 82 investors. The number of Chinese investors increased from 81 to 82 between 2019 and 2020, and their holdings increased by 3,127 acres.  Source: USDA, Foreign Holdings of U.S. Farmland and Farms and Land in Farms . The China land holdings were 0.5% of the total of 37.6 million acres held by foreigners in 2020. Chinese holdings were 0.02% of the total U.S. farmland area of 896.6 million acres reported in a separate USDA release . Chinese holdings of U.S. farmland had been stagnant since 2013 until last year's 3,127-acre increase. The leap in Chinese landholdings between 2012 and 2013 reflected the acquisition of Smithfield Foods by...

Chinese real estate creates riches out of thin air by seizing rural land on the urban fringe, re-classifying it as "state-owned," selling it, building on it, and reselling it, padding its value each time. This process has created countless millionaires and bolstered municipal finances. Now Chinese officials have belatedly decreed that a larger share of those riches should be returned to the countryside to support agriculture and rural infrastructure.  A document issued in September 2020 decreed that the 50 percent of income from sales of requisitioned land should be earmarked for agricultural and rural use by the end of the 14th five-year plan in 2025.  At a press conference on the document last year a rural policy team headed by former rural development czar Han Jun (now governor of Jilin Province) estimated that the average share had been 34 percent during 2013-18. Han's task force estimated that increasing the share by 1 percentage point would generate 60-70 billion ...

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...

Some U.S. politicians warn of a Chinese takeover of American farmland, but the one big acquisition of U.S. farming assets may have been a bust for the Chinese buyer. At the same time U.S. politicians were moaning about land grabs, a Chinese meat scion got booted from his dad's company for arguing that the acquisition of Smithfield Foods was a boondoggle.  Last month Rep. Dan Newhouse of Washington State warned , “The current trend in the United States is leading us toward the creation of a Chinese-owned agricultural land monopoly.” National Public Radio got in early on the story by running  a May 27 segment  on the threat of foreign investors gobbling up U.S. farm fields and destroying rural communities, with a nod toward a Chinese company's ownership of Smithfield grain elevators as a prime example. Within days, politicians glommed on and numerous stories led with a warning that "China is buying up U.S. farmland," citing USDA statistics and the example of the Smithfi...

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...