I found this post at Fortis Analysis on the disruption in China’s food imports interesting. Here’s a sample:
In short – China is desperately short of crucial grains and oilseeds needed for domestic human and animal consumption. Understand, food security is not an unknown issue in China. So too is it widely known that CCP media organs and official ministries routinely lie about a range of food-related issues, from grain and oilseed production to hog population and slaughter figures. The CCP even went so far as to engineer the collapse and takeover of Swiss agriculture and chemical conglomerate Syngenta several years ago to short-path China’s rise to being a tier one agriculture research powerhouse alongside the United States, Japan, and the European Union.
The immediate causes of China’s food security woes are twofold:
- An ongoing, multi-year outbreak of African Swine Fever
- Two consecutive years of reduced grain and oilseed production due to widespread catastrophic flooding
Despite China’s rosy claims about its 2020 production, its year-long buying binge for available global inventory of grains and oilseeds indicates significant flooding-related production woes in several major agricultural reasons in the Yangtze River and Amur River basins. 2021 is shaping up to be potentially as bad. Notably, the critical crop-producing province of Heilongjiang (16% of China’s total corn production, and 40% for soybeans) is showing significant excess moisture stress during the critical corn development stages between pre-tassel and silking, with excess moisture also being a major factor in yield drag for soybeans during seed-fill. The general time period for both crops to reach these reproductive stages are July through end of August.
And consider this:
The simple reason is that China consumes enormous quantities of animal protein products. Though it is middle of the pack in annual per-capita consumption at 49.3 kg (compared to the US at 100.7 kg), the overall appetites of 1.41 billion people generates demand for more than 90 million tons of pork, poultry, and beef products. The US, with its population being roughly a quarter of China’s, uses around 44 million tons of the same proteins per year. Further, China is far and away the global leader in aquaculture production (“farmed†marine protein, vice “capture†fisheries in the world’s oceans) at 68.4 million tons produced annually, while the US checks in at 490,000 tons. Similarly, China’s capture fishing activities utilizing its massive commercial fishing fleet is reported to generate another 14.4 million tons of protein, while US fishing is comparatively much smaller at 5.35 million tons. And yet with all of that effort, China cannot catch a break as Brazil has been forced to temporarily suspend all beef exports to China over an outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or “mad cow diseaseâ€), cutting off China’s source of around 71,000 tons per month of beef.
To place some of this in perspect the U. S. imports from two to three times the percentage of the food it consumes (15%) than China (6%+). That is simultaneously a “cup half empty” and a “cup half full” situation. Food independence has long been one of China’s primary economic objectives. They’ve been pretty successful at it. Unlike the Soviet Union whose ability to move relatively unproductive labor from agriculture to manufacturing in the 1930s, China has been able to follow the same path without the Soviet Union’s drastic decline in agricultural production.
On the other hand I for one think that China should abandon its objective of food independence and import much, much more food and that the U. S. should import less.
I look forward to additional installments in the series from Fortis Analysis.
