As global food security becomes an increasingly pressing concern, China’s strategies to achieve agricultural self-sufficiency by 2025 are pivotal for both domestic stability and the broader global food landscape.
While China remains the world’s largest food producer and exporter, with the largest food reserve system, Beijing remains vigilant about the long-term stability of its food supply.
To ensure self-reliance in agricultural production, Beijing continues to prioritize measures aimed at reducing dependency on external sources while also boosting local production and securing overseas agricultural investments.
Agriculture, the backbone of China’s economy, is undergoing a crucial transformation. The country is shifting from a “big country with small farmers” to a “big and strong agricultural nation.”
With over 1.4 billion people to feed, China’s approach to this challenge—amid rising geopolitical tensions, shifting trade relations and environmental pressures—will be decisive in determining its ability to sustain a secure food supply and maintain its strategic position on the world stage.
In recent years, China has intensified its efforts to ensure a reliable and sustainable food supply, recognizing the urgency of safeguarding the nation’s agricultural future in a fragile geopolitical climate.
As Chinese President Xi Jinping has declared, “The food of the Chinese people must be made by and remain in the hands of the Chinese.” Xi and China’s policymakers have consistently placed food security at the forefront, recognizing it as a “top national priority” (国之大者) amid an increasingly complex global environment.
Geopolitical and geoeconomic tensions, climate change, trade disruptions, systemic tensions with the United States (US) and an unstable international food market have made resilience in food supply more crucial than ever.
In response, China has elevated food security and food supply resilience to the highest level in terms of political priorities in recent years.
The release of China’s 2025 “No. 1 Central Document” on February 23 further underscores this commitment to ensuring national food security. The document, an important policy statement from the central government, outlines key national goals.
For 2025, it focuses on rural revitalization, agricultural modernization, and securing the nation’s food supply amid domestic and international challenges.
The 2025 blueprint highlights six key areas of focus: ensuring a stable supply of grain and essential agricultural products, consolidating the gains of poverty alleviation, developing local industries, advancing rural construction, improving rural governance, and optimizing resource allocation in rural areas.
This document emphasizes the importance of self-sufficiency and stability in China’s food supply, positioning the nation to navigate global uncertainties. Two key priorities for the nation’s food security strategy for 2025 include:
Ensuring grain supplies
As the world’s largest agricultural producer and importer, China plays a pivotal role in global grain markets, importing over 157 million metric tons of grains and soybeans last year. Grain security remains central to China’s food policy, reflecting its crucial role in safeguarding the nation’s long-term food supply.
Despite record-high grain production in recent years, China’s need to increase output continues to grow largely due to population growth and dietary changes driven by increasing consumption of meat, eggs, and dairy products among China’s growing population. With evolving dietary habits, maintaining a stable and reliable grain supply has become even more essential.
Grain production remains a cornerstone of China’s food security strategy. The 2025 “No.1 Document” outlines a multi-pronged strategy: stabilizing grain planting areas, raising yields, and improving crop quality.
It prioritizes the expansion in production of soybeans and oilseeds (like canola and peanuts) while leveraging biotechnology and targeted subsidies. For instance, pilot loan programs aim to incentivize grain and oilseed production in key regions, alongside inter-provincial coordination to optimize distribution.
At a State Council press conference on February 24, officials reiterated that food security remains a top priority. Han Wenxiu, director of the Central Rural Affairs Office, warned against complacency, stating, “Grain production must be strengthened, not relaxed. Temporary price fluctuations should not blind us to the fact that food security remains fragile.”
To safeguard farmer morale, the central government also plan aims to introduce a policy toolkit that includes minimum purchase rates for rice and wheat, with market support purchases in various provinces (such as Henan, Jiangsu, Heilongjiang, and Anhui), alongside the expansion of grain storage in key provinces.
These efforts build on the 2024 Central Rural Work Conference, which reaffirmed the government’s commitment to stabilizing domestic grain supply, with a focus on “absolute” stability in wheat and rice production—key pillars of China’s food security.
From 2003 to 2013, domestic grain production rose from 430 million metric tons to over 600 million metric tons, especially in key regions like the Yangtze River, Northeast China, and the North China Plains. Additionally, China has designated key areas for the production of staple crops like double-cropping rice and high-quality wheat in the Yangtze River Economic Belt.
Recent achievements underscore this momentum. In 2024, China’s grain output reached a record high of 706.5 million metric tons, a 1.6 percent increase from the previous year. At the same time, the national average yield per mu (0.0067 hectares) rose to 394.7 kilograms (kg), an increase of 5.1 kg from 2022. This is largely due to yield improvements contributing to more than 80 percent of the overall grain production increase.
To sustain this trajectory, the MARA released a statement in January outlining ambitious targets: raising annual grain production by 50 million metric tons by 2030 (a 7 percent increase) and maintaining over 1.75 billion mu (117 million hectares) of farmland dedicated to grain cultivation.
In line with these objectives, China’s current Five-Year Agricultural Plan targets annual grain production exceeding 770 million tons, alongside a push to increase domestic soybean production to 23 million tons by 2025. By doing so, the central government aims to reduce reliance on imports from Western countries amid global trade uncertainties.
Agricultural innovation and technology
Amid rising supply chain uncertainties and climate challenges, China has prioritized agricultural security and technological self-sufficiency. China’s current “No.1 document” emphasizes agricultural technology as central to its food security strategy.
The central government plans to accelerate the research and application of advanced, domestically produced agricultural machinery and smart farming systems, including artificial intelligence (AI), 5G, big data, and low-altitude systems, to enhance efficiency across the sector.
To support this, China aims to establish 500 national-level agricultural industrialization consortiums by 2025. These consortiums will foster collaboration among research institutions, agribusinesses, and farmers, focusing on drought-resistant crops, smart machinery, and sustainable practices.
China is expected to continue encouraging efforts in agricultural innovation, particularly regarding the productivity of key grains and oilseeds (like rice, wheat, corn, soybeans, and rapeseed) to achieve national food production and related food security goals.
To this end, Beijing has consistently emphasized the need for increased local production, evident in policy measures, targets, and five-year plans.
More broadly, to support this technological transformation and help safeguard the country’s food future, China has already heavily invested in biotechnology and digital technologies. This includes supporting the development of genetically modified (GM) crops like soybeans and corn, despite some public opposition.
While the inclusion of the commercialization of GM crops into the country’s food security plans remain implicit, several moves suggest that it is heading in this direction. Notably, in late 2024, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs (MARA) approved safety certificates for 12 GM crop varieties, signaling a long-term strategy to integrate biotechnology into China’s food security framework.
More recently, in February 2025, MARA released the Key Areas of National Agricultural Technology Innovation (2024-2028) which outlines 10 key priority areas: the cultivation of new agricultural varieties, soil quality improvement, agricultural
machinery equipment development, pest and disease prevention in crops, livestock and aquatic diseases control, efficient planting and breeding, green and low-carbon agriculture, agricultural product processing and food manufacturing, agricultural product quality and safety, and rural development.
The document further underscores the importance of technological innovation in China’s pursuit of global (agricultural) leadership, particularly in AI and biotechnologies.
Concurrently, the central Chinese government is pushing to create new seed varieties. In recent years, Chinese President Xi has called for an independent seed industry. This aligns with previous leadership goals to achieve technological breakthroughs in seed development.
Current research also targets high-yield hybrid seed technologies for key crops, aiming to reduce reliance on foreign seeds. These efforts are more broadly linked to national five-years (such as the National Medium and Long-term Science and Technology Development Plan (2021-2035) and the 14th Five-Year Agricultural Plan (2021-2025), which emphasize the creation of new food sources to achieve China’s broader strategy of agricultural self-sufficiency.
Simultaneously, the country is embracing digitization to modernize agriculture, as exemplified by a multitude of national plans like the National Smart Agriculture Implementation Plan (2024-2028) and the 14th Five-Year Plan for Agricultural Modernization (2021-2025).
The former includes, among others, the construction of “digital villages” and modern agricultural parks aimed at enhancing productivity through technological innovation. These initiatives are crucial to China’s vision of transforming agriculture through digital technologies and improved efficiency.
Food challenges
China’s agricultural transformation and broader efforts to safeguard food security are beset by major domestic and international challenges. In addition to concerns about growing import reliance on key agricultural products (such as edible oil), which reshape the country’s food consumption, and extreme weather events that destroy parts of local production, other factors should be considered.
Despite these successes, challenges remain. Scaling up grain production to meet new targets is complicated by demographic and environmental pressures, requiring substantial investment and structural shifts in technology and infrastructure. Whether China can meet these ambitious goals will depend on overcoming these significant hurdles.
China’s agricultural model, primarily based on small family farms scattered across the country, faces significant challenges to modernization, particularly in adopting agricultural technologies and standardizing practices.
Some initiatives, like the National Agricultural Technology and Education Cloud Platform, aim to address these gaps through online training. However, stronger efforts are required to achieve broader agricultural innovation to ensure long-term food security.
Additionally, growing certain agricultural products can be much more expensive in China than in other countries, such as the US, and the yield may be much lower too. Data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization shows that corn and soybean yields in China are about half of those of many exporting countries in the Americas, which have relatively high yields per hectare.
When it comes to soybeans, for instance, the average yield for soybeans in the US is about 3.5 tons per hectare in comparison to China’s 1.6 tons per hectare.
Similarly, for corn, the average on-farm yield of corn is 11-12 tons per hectare in the US, while China’s average corn yield is 6.2 tons per hectare. Given China’s major water, soil, and arable land constraints, addressing yield gaps is important for Beijing to achieve its food production goals.
Furthermore, increases in disposable income are leading to changing dietary preferences and tastes, as reflected in the country’s changing food consumption structure with consumers demanding greater quantities of more expensive animal protein and dairy, as well as sugar, edible oils, and processed foods. By 2025, China is expected to account for 31% of the total global increase of protein consumption.
The continued growth of the country’s middle class means that China’s total food demand is projected to increase by 16-30% by 2050, while demand for meat such as beef and dairy products is expected to nearly double. To meet this demand, some researchers argue that up to 12,000 square kilometers of additional agricultural land within China is necessary.
Financial barriers exacerbate challenges. Smallholder farmers, who manage more than 70% of China’s agricultural land, are particularly burdened by these financial constraints. Many also struggle with limited access to credit.
Studies show that 18.87% of family farms in China face a gap in operating funds, with around 26.20 percent unable to fully bridge funding gaps even after securing lands, further deterring investments in agricultural technologies.
At the same time, local governments are trapped in a vicious cycle of high debt and dwindling revenues. This means that they may struggle to fund rural projects or place less emphasis on such projects. While the government has introduced measures such as a 10 billion yuan (US$1.38 billion) in one-off subsidy in 2023 to boost farmers’ incomes, these efforts fail to tackle the underlying financial and structural barriers.
A 2024 debt relief package of 10 trillion yuan ($1.4 trillion) also offers limited respite, as municipalities grapple with plummeting revenues from land sales—a consequence of the ongoing real estate crisis.
With total government debt expected to rise to nearly 150 percent of gross domestic product by 2030, local governments will face even greater fiscal strain. As a result, this could put investments into agriculture—such as rural infrastructure and technological innovation—at risk.
Concurrently, China grapples with demographic challenges, including declining fertility rates and a shrinking workforce. In 2022, approximately 176.6 million people — or 24.1 percent of the workforce — were employed in agriculture, fishing, and related industries.
The vast majority of this workforce (90%) are smallholder farmers. Nevertheless, the average age of agricultural workers is 53, with over a quarter aged 60 or older. This aging population poses a significant barrier to agricultural productivity and wage growth.
Projections are also grim. By 2050, the proportion of the country’s agricultural workforce in China could plunge to around 3%, while the total agricultural labor force may fall to under 31 million.
These workforce challenges extend beyond agriculture, impacting sectors like transportation and logistics, which are vital to the agricultural supply chain. By the end of 2021, China faced a shortage of 4 million truck drivers, a problem likely to worsen as the working-age population declines and younger people pursue better opportunities in cities.
In 2021, the number of rural migrant workers reached 292.51 million, a 2.4% (6.91 million) year-on-year increase. This demographic shift means that China will soon face not only a shrinking agricultural workforce but also fewer rural workers available for critical sectors such as transportation and logistics, essential to maintaining food supply chains.
China has made significant strides toward ensuring its food security. But the path to agricultural self-sufficiency by 2025 is fraught with challenges. The nation’s ability to overcome these hurdles—ranging from technological limitations to demographic shifts—will ultimately determine its success in securing a stable and resilient food supply for its growing population.
