The Protein Sovereignty Index

Country assessment

China

We assess China as Exposed (59.2). Feed protein is where the system binds: the world's largest producer of pork, farmed fish, eggs and grain imports roughly 84 per cent of the soybeans it consumes, 92 per cent of them from two countries, and on the last published estimate a volume equivalent to 42 per cent of domestic soybean consumption reached it through a single strait.[1][11][16] The paradox at the heart of the system is that China holds about 53 per cent of the world's wheat, rice and maize stocks and total reserves worth 11.9 months of imports while running the world's largest food import bill, at USD 215 billion in 2023; affordability is not the constraint, with 12.9 per cent of the population unable to afford a healthy diet in 2024, a lower share than most of the developing world.[4][12][39][44]

The protein system

China consumed almost 168 million tonnes of meat and fish in 2023, more than a quarter of the global total, and per-capita protein supply for China, mainland reached 131.6 grams a day that year, among the highest recorded anywhere.[3][4] Almost all of the final protein is produced at home: pork output reached 59.38 million tonnes in 2025 from a year-end herd of 429.67 million pigs, or 49.7 per cent of world output, alongside 34.98 million tonnes of eggs and a record 714.88 million tonnes of grain.[6][12][13] China accounted for 36 per cent of global aquatic animal production in 2022 and is the largest aquaculture producer, at 58.1 million tonnes in 2023.[7][8][33]

Beneath the table, the system runs on imported protein. Calendar-2025 soybean imports reached a record 111.8 million tonnes against domestic production of about 20 million tonnes.[1][14] Industrial feed production reached 342.25 million tonnes in 2025, up 8.6 per cent in a single year, with pig and poultry feed taking 86 per cent of it.[2] Fishmeal imports set a record 1.96 million tonnes in 2024, about 40 per cent of global fishmeal imports, and beef imports reached 2.80 million tonnes.[10][16][30] The 2024 Food Security Law codifies the strategy: absolute security in staple foods, basic self-sufficiency in grains, farmland red lines, and statutory provisions on grain reserves, distribution, processing and emergency response.[5] Its emphasis falls on grains and staple foods rather than on the feed oilseeds that drive import dependence, and that emphasis defines this assessment.

Durable domestic capacity: 70

Quantitative score 70, no adjustment applied

Measured by output, China's capacity has no close comparator, and self-sufficiency in the staples the state prioritises is genuine: per-capita protein supply rose every year from 2020 to 2023, rice and wheat are effectively fully domestic, and the 2026 No. 1 Document has raised the grain target from 650 to approximately 700 million tonnes a year, with the draft 15th Five-Year Plan outline proposing capacity of around 725 million tonnes.[2][3][13] Durability is the qualifier. Arable land fell by 12.4 million hectares between 2009 and 2021, to 109.0 million hectares, after which the farmland red line slowed the loss sharply without reversing it: the same World Bank series shows 108.4 million hectares in 2023, while FAOSTAT puts mainland arable land slightly higher, at 108.8 million hectares.[34][35] A widely repeated estimate puts calorie-basis food self-sufficiency at 93.6 per cent in 2000 falling to 65.8 per cent in 2020; we treat it as directional only, since the Council on Foreign Relations attributes it to press reporting and no primary calculation has been published.[37] The five-province North China Plain grain belt works about 24 per cent of national cultivated land on 7.44 per cent of national water resources, and the dominant winter wheat and summer maize double crop draws the water table down by about 0.7 metres a year under full irrigation on a 30-year simulation.[26][36] Irrigated cropland has expanded in precisely the water-scarce regions.[27] Coastal stocks are depleted enough that MARA operates a dual-control cap holding domestic marine catch at or below 10 million tonnes a year, with output stable near 9.5 million tonnes from 2018 to 2023; FAO records total Chinese marine capture falling from 14.65 million tonnes in 2015 to 12.01 million tonnes in 2022, and the distant-water fleet has displaced part of the shortfall offshore at about 2.3 million tonnes a year, 60 to 65 per cent of it landed for the domestic market.[25][32][33] We score capacity 70 unadjusted: the production is real, and so is the erosion beneath it.

Resource headroom: 38

Quantitative score 34, adjusted up 4 points

China feeds about 17 per cent of the world's population from about 8 per cent of the world's arable land, and the protein mix it is converging on is the feed-intensive kind.[34][35] Corn feed and residual use is forecast at 241 million tonnes for MY2026/27.[2] Aquaculture, once dominated by unfed carp and molluscs, increasingly farms fed species; national fishmeal consumption reached a reported decade high of 2.22 million tonnes in 2024.[9] Arable land per capita has fallen 17.8 per cent since 2000, to 0.077 hectares in 2024, and the aggregate area has been held in a narrow band since 2021 only by the farmland "red line" policy, which keeps the national total 140 million mu above its statutory floor through a requisition-compensation mechanism: land taken for construction must be offset elsewhere, and a Jilin province case study found the offsetting land drawn overwhelmingly from river shoal, marsh and saline-alkaline terrain, yielding 4.7 per cent less grain per hectare than the cultivated land it replaced.[34][35][54][56] Water banking is not the binding constraint: 68.7 per cent of arable land is equipped for irrigation, up from 45.5 per cent in 2000, and utilisation has climbed to 97.2 per cent of nominal equipped capacity, leaving little further margin.[35] There is no meaningful land frontier, the northern water constraint is structural rather than cyclical, and the wild-fish input to aquafeed draws on stocks that peaked decades ago. On the raw numbers this pillar sits in the mid-30s.

We add 4 points for a funded, operating efficiency programme that the land statistics miss, taking the pillar from 34 to 38; the underlying evidence is contested. MARA's 2023 three-year action plan and its low-protein diet guidelines are credited with cutting the industry-wide soybean meal inclusion rate from about 17.9 per cent in 2017 to the 12.9 per cent MARA reported at the end of 2024, against a stated goal of 10 per cent by 2030.[1][20] The national rate then moved back up for 2025, to 13.2 per cent on the National Livestock Station's figure or 13.4 per cent on the China Feed Industry Association's,[1] and independent work at the University of Illinois finds the decline slower and less smooth than official figures suggest, with estimates built from USDA balance data edging up to around 16 per cent by 2024.[21] The stronger evidence is substitution rather than formulation: when domestic corn prices moved in 2025, imports of cassava, rice bran and wheat by-products more than doubled, adding over 5 million tonnes of substitute feed in a year.[2] That capacity stretches the resource base without expanding it.

The adjustment stops at +4 despite two much larger bodies of positive evidence, because both act on a land base that is fixed rather than a frontier that can grow. Agricultural credit reached USD 330.8 billion in 2024, up 88 per cent in current dollars since 2014, equivalent to about USD 3,050 for every hectare of arable land, though it remains below parity with agriculture's share of the economy and below the 2.15 per cent world-average share of national credit.[51] The national high-standard farmland programme had built more than 1 billion mu, 66.7 million hectares, of upgraded cropland by the end of 2024, with over 10 million kilometres of irrigation channel constructed under it, against a 2030 target of 1.35 billion mu.[52][53] Both are real, funded and executing on schedule, and both raise the ceiling on the land already under cultivation rather than extending cultivation onto new land; more than three-quarters of that land was still classified medium or low quality by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs in the most recent published assessment.[55]

Import exposure: 40

Quantitative score 35, adjusted up 5 points

China's import exposure is deep and narrow. Soybeans are the centre of gravity: 111.8 million tonnes imported in calendar 2025 against about 20 million tonnes grown, an import dependence of roughly 84 per cent of consumption; Brazil and the United States together supplied 92.1 per cent of soybean imports in calendar 2024, Brazil alone 71.1 per cent, rising to about 75 per cent in MY2024/25 on Trade Data Monitor figures.[1][14][16] On Chatham House's 2013 data, the volume shipped through the Strait of Malacca was equivalent to 42 per cent of China's domestic soybean consumption, up from 8 per cent in 2000, and Chinese cargoes accounted for 43 per cent of all strategic agricultural commodities passing that chokepoint.[11] The pattern repeats: Peru supplied 43 per cent of China's fishmeal imports in 2024, and China took about 90 per cent of Peru's fishmeal exports over the first nine months of that year, against about 80 per cent in a typical year, tying Chinese aquafeed to one of the most variable major protein sources in world trade;[10][16] New Zealand held 51 per cent of dairy imports in the first half of 2024 and 89.6 per cent of whole-milk-powder imports (HS 040221) in 2024;[16][24] Brazil leads a 2.80-million-tonne beef trade.[30]

Two considerations lift the pillar to 40. First, what China imports is overwhelmingly feedstock rather than finished protein, and feedstock is more substitutable than food on shelves. Second, supplier-swing capability has been demonstrated under live conditions: the United States' share of Chinese soybean imports fell from 49 per cent in 2000 to 25 per cent by 2023 while Brazil's rose to 69 per cent, and in late 2025 US arrivals fell to zero for four months during the tariff rupture while crush continued uninterrupted on record South American supply.[1][4] Seventeen countries now hold soybean market-access protocols, up from fifteen in April 2025, and a 70-million-tonne, twelve-year grain and oilseed agreement worth about USD 27 billion has been signed with Russia.[1] We add +5 for this re-routing capacity. Concentration on Brazil has nonetheless become the system's single point of failure: diversification away from the United States was achieved by deepening dependence on one southern-hemisphere crop and one strait.

Upstream dependence: 52

Quantitative score 46, adjusted up 6 points

The upstream ledger is split between what China dominates and what it lacks. Feed protein is the binding import: 62 per cent of all oilseeds consumed in MY2025/26 are forecast to be imported.[1] Potash production of 6.3 million tonnes of K2O equivalent in 2024 sat against imports of 12.87 million tonnes of potassic fertiliser product, roughly 7.7 to 8.0 million tonnes of K2O equivalent, implying an import share of about 55 per cent of apparent consumption, drawn from Russia, Belarus, Canada and Laos.[15][16] High-end genetics remain partly foreign: overseas varieties held about 85 per cent of the white-feathered broiler breeder market in 2021, and USDA assesses an annual requirement of 5,000 to 10,000 purebred breeding pigs to refresh nucleus herds, against actual imports of 3,769 head in 2024.[17][19]

On the surplus side, China is self-sufficient or a net exporter in nitrogen and phosphate fertiliser, machinery and veterinary inputs, and it dominates the industrial fermentation complex on which other feed sectors depend. IFEEDER's assessment of the amino acid supply chain records China as the origin of 100 per cent of US lysine imports and 85 per cent of US threonine imports, against North American production capacity of 12 and 7 per cent of the global total respectively.[28] One industry research house puts a single Meihua site in Jilin at 1.3 million tonnes of lysine capacity from early 2026, nearly 30 per cent of the global total, which is arithmetically consistent with IFEEDER's global capacity figure of 4.7 million tonnes, though the company figure is uncorroborated and we treat it as indicative.[28][29] This matters for sovereignty, because synthetic amino acids are what make low-protein rations work. We add +6 for that capability and for demonstrated genetic substitution, taking the pillar from 46 to 52: after avian influenza cut broiler grandparent-stock imports from 1.24 million sets in 2021 to 368,800 in 2022, the domestic Shengze 901 line took more than 20 per cent of the domestic grandparent-stock market by August 2024, and 156 GE corn and 19 GE soybean varieties were approved for planting between 2023 and 2025.[1][18][19] The National Pig Genetic Improvement Plan (2021-2035) targets over 95 per cent nucleus-herd self-sufficiency by 2035.[17]

Access and affordability: 75

Quantitative score 75, no adjustment applied

China's affordability outcomes are the strongest of the six pillars on paper. FAOSTAT's Cost and Affordability of a Healthy Diet series puts the share of the population unable to afford a healthy diet at 12.9 per cent in 2024, some 183.1 million people, down sharply from 28.8 per cent in 2017, with a 2025 nowcast of 11.3 per cent within the same release.[39] Prevalence of undernourishment has held below 2.5 per cent on FAO's three-year average since 2009-2011,[40] and child stunting under five was 4.8 per cent on the most recent Joint Child Malnutrition Estimates survey year, though that figure dates to 2017 and has not been updated since.[41] Price stability at the protein level is weaker than the outcome measures suggest: pork prices rose 110.2 per cent year on year at the November 2019 peak of the African swine fever shock,[43] and in December 2025 fresh vegetable prices rose 18.2 per cent year on year while pork fell 14.6 per cent and eggs fell 12.7 per cent in the same month, even as full-year 2025 food prices fell 1.5 per cent on average.[42] Physical access is not conflict-constrained and national logistics are extensive, but rural and western cold-chain and retail infrastructure lags the coastal cities, and the hukou system limits many internal migrants' access to the local food-related social support that would matter most in a downturn.[49][50] We apply no adjustment: the national outcome data are strong enough, and the volatility and access caveats specific enough, that the indicators already carry the picture.

Shock endurance: 72

Quantitative score 76, adjusted down 4 points

Endurance is the pillar the state has spent decades building. USDA Production, Supply and Distribution estimates for MY2026/27 put Chinese ending stocks at 120.6 million tonnes of wheat (44.2 per cent of world stocks), 107.0 million tonnes of milled rice (55.6 per cent) and 165.1 million tonnes of corn (60.0 per cent), with FAS Beijing forecasting corn at 168 million tonnes; across the three grains China holds about 53 per cent of world stocks.[2][12] Industry sources told USDA in 2026 that state reserve silos are filled with grain and that no grain imports are needed for at least two years, and policy has shifted from accumulating reserves to releasing them, with imported corn auctions resuming in July 2025 and reserve wheat sales in January 2026.[2] Soybean ending stocks of about 45.5 million tonnes cover roughly five months of crush against a forecast crush of 103 million tonnes.[1] The Food Security Law adds statutory provisions on grain reserves, distribution, processing and emergency response.[5]

The shock record supports a high score. African swine fever cut the hog inventory by more than 40 per cent year on year by October 2019, brought pork output to a 16-year low of 42.6 million tonnes and caused estimated direct losses of USD 141 billion; output was rebuilt over roughly a 30-month cycle, having lost some 27.9 million tonnes of pork.[22][23][31][38] The 2025 trade rupture with the United States was absorbed without domestic disruption, as was the tariff round that began in 2018, after which the United States' share of Chinese soybean imports fell to 25 per cent by 2023.[1][4]

Crisis purchasing power reinforces the reserve picture on one leg and weakens it on another. Foreign-exchange reserves stood at USD 3.358 trillion at end-2025, and total reserves were worth 11.9 months of imports on World Bank data for the same year, several times the conventional three-month adequacy benchmark.[44][45] Fiscal space is under more strain: general government gross debt has risen from 77.3 per cent of GDP in 2022 to an IMF-projected 99.2 per cent in 2025, and Moody's moved the outlook on China's A1 rating to negative in December 2023, having affirmed the rating itself; S&P has held China at A+ since the September 2017 downgrade from AA-. Capital controls and an overwhelmingly domestic-currency debt stock keep market access intact for now, though the debt trajectory is adverse.[46][47][48] Social protection is the weaker leg. The dibao minimum livelihood guarantee reached 3.1 per cent of the population as at mid-2020, a level the World Bank judged inadequate for a country of China's means, and it excluded migrants; the pandemic response was centrally financed and unusually hukou-blind, extending emergency assistance and dibao eligibility to migrant workers, yet it ran through a decentralised delivery system whose full reach the World Bank could not benchmark, and outside a crisis the hukou system still limits many internal migrants' access to the local schemes that would matter most in a fast-moving shock.[49] Crisis purchasing power is close to what reserves and stocks alone would imply on their own, and it does not change the pillar's direction.

We deduct 4 points for opacity, taking the pillar from 76 to 72: China publishes no reserve volumes, the estimates above cannot be audited, quality problems surfaced in the 2025 North China corn crop, and reserve wheat auctions resumed in January 2026 partly to clear old inventory.[2] A buffer that cannot be verified is discounted.

Trajectory

The direction of policy is unambiguous and the funding is real: a 700-million-tonne grain target rising towards 725 million tonnes of capacity, GE corn and soybean commercialisation, the soymeal-reduction programme, domestic genetics plans for pigs and poultry, and a statutory food security architecture.[1][2][5][17][20] The one shift current policy does not attempt is the one that matters most: a structural reduction in soybean import dependence, which would require a dietary plateau, a feed revolution beyond current inclusion-rate gains, or the equivalent of the 108 million tonnes of soybeans forecast to be imported in MY2026/27 grown on land and water China does not have.[1] The 2026 No. 1 Document points the other way, acknowledging the role of agricultural imports while directing that their pace and volume be coordinated with domestic production.[2] The path upward runs through continued feed efficiency, supplier diversification beyond Brazil, and verified reserve transparency; the path downward runs through a Brazilian crop failure, a Peruvian anchovy collapse in the same year, or a maritime crisis in Southeast Asia. On present evidence China is a system of considerable strength wrapped around a single, well-understood, unresolved dependency, and Exposed is where that combination lands.

Sources

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  18. China Poultry and Products Annual (CH2024-0108) · USDA Foreign Agricultural Service (2024)
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What we could not measure

China releases no official data on state grain or soybean reserves, so the estimate that it holds around half of world wheat, rice and maize stocks rests on USDA modelling rather than disclosure. No verified calculation of China's food self-sufficiency exists, and the widely cited fall from 93.6 to 65.8 per cent between 2000 and 2020 traces only to press reporting with no published primary source. Child stunting data still rest on a 2017 survey.

Published August 2026 ·How scores are produced