Enhancing capacity and mitigating approach to food security

2025-07-31

In the context of globalization and modernization, food security remains a fundamental pillar of national security. China’s food system faces growing challenges driven by shifting domestic food demand, climate change, geopolitical conflicts, and rapid technological transformation. Particularly in the past two years, tensions have intensified between policy goals and market performance, coupled with heightened risks of international supply chain disruptions. In response to these complex and evolving dynamics, China must focus on two strategic pillars—enhancing production capacity and mitigating systemic risks—and recalibrate key tasks to establish a new development paradigm for national food security.

Developing new  quality productive forces in agriculture to sustainably increase food output

The development of new quality productive forces in agriculture—through technological breakthroughs, innovative allocation of production factors, deep industrial upgrading, and a full-scale green transformation—lays the foundation for enduring food production stability amid changing conditions. This requires:

1. Expanding agricultural research funding and reforming innovation mechanisms, with a focus on major technological breakthroughs such as increasing yields of soybeans and corn, enhancing oil content in oil crops, and improving feed protein conversion efficiency to reduce dependence on soybean meal and other imported protein feed.

2. Cultivating a new generation of agricultural talent and integrating intelligent technologies to modernize traditional production factors and upgrade production models.

3. Developing new business models in the grain industry and enhancing the value of the grain industry chain, with efforts needed to encourage large and medium-sized grain enterprises to expand across the entire industrial chain, develop diversified grain products, cultivate premium brands, promote the integration of agriculture with tourism and other sectors, advance digital transformation, develop e-commerce, and strengthen production-marketing linkages.

4. Promoting green cultivation techniques, encouraging environmentally friendly agricultural inputs, strengthening control of non-point source pollution, and advancing resource utilization of agricultural waste to protect the natural resource base of food production.

Integrating the grain industry chain and enhancing supply chain resilience

To guard against both systemic and sudden risks in the food system, China must simultaneously strengthen the integration of the grain industry chain and improve supply chain resilience:

1. Industrial integration and innovation: Foster agricultural industrial clusters through new organizational models and service innovations. Accelerate the application of research outcomes, shifting from fragmented production toward integrated value chains and from single-product outputs to diversified industrial systems. Continuously develop new sub-sectors and drive industrial upgrading.

2. Enhancing supply chain resilience: Build a digital emergency management platform and develop targeted risk management strategies and contingency plans. Strengthen monitoring systems for agricultural production, market fluctuations, and disaster early warnings. Improve resource allocation for disaster relief and promote the adoption of risk-mitigation technologies. Establish a high-efficiency emergency response and recovery system. In parallel, optimize the layout of emergency grain supply, distribution, and processing infrastructure to boost the responsiveness of food reserves. Diversify agricultural import channels and deepen cooperation with Europe and Belt and Road countries—particularly by strengthening China–Russia grain trade, overcoming maritime transport bottlenecks, expanding agricultural collaboration with Africa, and tapping into Africa’s arable land potential to build greater resilience in global food trade networks.

Strengthening the policy mix and enhancing precision and reserve-based regulation

To improve the effectiveness of food policy and stabilize key commodity markets, China must refine its “policy toolbox”:

1. Improve the “three-in-one” policy system—comprising price support, subsidies, and insurance—for key agricultural products, increasing the precision and adaptability of interventions.

2. Optimize the minimum purchase price mechanism for rice and wheat, and enable local grain reserves to play a flexible regulatory role, allowing the state to “buy high during surpluses and sell low during shortages” to maintain price stability.

3. Refine corn and soybean producer subsidies, expand direct payments to grain farmers, and utilize satellite remote sensing to implement targeted subsidy mechanisms. Design differentiated subsidy schemes based on regional conditions, linking support to both output and quality, and prioritize green, low-carbon, and high-quality agricultural products.

4. Expand coverage of full-cost insurance and income insurance for rice, wheat, corn, and soybeans. Design multi-layered insurance systems tailored to the diverse risk profiles of grain producers. Promote the integration of “technology + agricultural insurance” for precise underwriting and claims settlement.

5. Gradually advance horizontal compensation mechanisms across provinces, increase subsidies for grain farmers in major production areas, and boost financial support for the crop insurance coverage in these regions to ensure robust coverage of both staple and specialty crops.

Li Xiaoyun and Jia Yuxuan, Huazhong Agricultural University