The protein system
China had 131.6 grams of protein available per person each day in 2023.[3] Rice and wheat are supplied almost entirely from domestic farms, while a large livestock and aquaculture sector supplies animal foods.[2, 3, 6, 7] Pork production reached 59.38 million tonnes in 2025; farmed fish output was 58.1 million tonnes in 2023, the world's largest aquaculture harvest.[6, 7, 8, 33] These are large domestic industries, although they draw on feed bought from abroad.
Industrial feed production reached 342.25 million tonnes.[2] Soybean meal is central to poultry and pig rations, and imported fishmeal helps feed farmed fish.[1, 9] In 2025, soybean imports reached 111.8 million tonnes, about 84 per cent of supply; finished meat imports were much smaller, with beef imports at 2.8 million tonnes.[1, 14, 30] China therefore imports much of the protein embodied in feed before producing the meat and fish consumed at home.
Farmers and feed makers have some room to adapt. They are using more alternative feed ingredients and less soybean meal in some rations,[1, 20, 21] while domestic grain stocks are large.[2, 65] But the country's limited arable land and water, especially in the north, constrain how much extra soy or feed grain it could grow during a sustained trade disruption.[26, 34, 35]
Durable domestic capacity:
China's rice and wheat supplies are almost entirely domestic, and protein supply rose each year from 2020 to 2023.[2, 3] Grain targets rose to about 700 million tonnes annually, with proposed capacity of 725 million tonnes.[13] But arable land has contracted by 12.4 million hectares since 2009, to roughly 109 million hectares.[34, 35]
The North China Plain uses about a quarter of cultivated land but less than 8 per cent of national water resources; full irrigation can lower its water table by 0.7 metres a year.[26, 36] Irrigated cropland has expanded in water-scarce areas.[27] Coastal fisheries are also constrained: domestic marine catch is capped near 10 million tonnes, and total capture fell from 14.65 million tonnes in 2015 to 12 million in 2022. The distant-water fleet supplies some of the shortfall.[25, 32, 33]
Resource headroom:
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 .[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 person has fallen 17.8 per cent since 2000, to 0.077 hectares in 2024.[34, 35] Since 2021, the farmland "red line" policy has held cultivated land, on China's own survey, just above its statutory floor of 1.8 billion mu, about 120 million hectares. Under its compensation system, land taken for construction must be replaced elsewhere. A Jilin case study found that replacement land came mainly from river shoals, marshes and saline terrain, and yielded 4.7 per cent less grain per hectare than the land it replaced.[54, 56] Water is also close to its limit: irrigation covers 68.7 per cent of arable land, up from 45.5 per cent in 2000, and uses 97.2 per cent of equipped capacity.[35] China has little unused land or irrigation capacity, while northern water constraints and depleted wild-fish stocks limit future expansion.
Feed efficiency is a practical way to stretch the land base, though estimates differ. MARA says soybean meal's share of feed fell from about 17.9 per cent in 2017 to 12.9 per cent in 2024, with a 10 per cent target for 2030; other estimates put the 2024 level closer to 16 per cent.[1, 20, 21] Feed substitution is also growing: imports of cassava, rice bran and wheat by-products more than doubled in 2025, adding over 5 million tonnes.[2]
Credit and farmland investment can raise yields on existing land. Agricultural credit reached USD 330.8 billion in 2024, though it remained below agriculture's share of the economy.[51] By the end of 2024, the high-standard farmland programme had upgraded 66.7 million hectares, with a 2030 target of 1.35 billion mu.[52, 53] Still, more than three-quarters of assessed upgraded land was classified medium or low quality.[55]
Import exposure:
Soybeans dominate feed exposure: imports reached 111.8 million tonnes in 2025, about 84 per cent of supply, with Brazil and the United States providing 92.1 per cent in 2024.[1, 14, 16]
China imports mainly feed ingredients rather than finished protein, and it has changed suppliers before: Brazil's share rose as the US share fell, and imports continued through the 2025 trade rupture.[1, 4] Finished-protein imports are a smaller exposure: beef imports fell 2.5 per cent to 2.8 million tonnes in 2025.[30] Supplier switching helps, but it has increased reliance on Brazil and the same sea route.
Upstream dependence:
China imports about 62 per cent of oilseeds consumed.[1] It produces nitrogen and phosphate fertiliser but imports roughly 55 per cent of potash use, mainly from Russia, Belarus, Canada and Laos.[15, 16] When phosphate is needed at home, China keeps it there: exports fell from about 11 million tonnes in 2015 to about 4.5 million in 2025 as farms and battery makers took priority,[66, 67] and were halted from December 2025 through August 2026.[68] Aquaculture also depends on imported fishmeal, with Chinese imports reaching a record 1.96 million tonnes.[9, 10] High-end genetics also remain partly foreign: overseas varieties held about 85 per cent of the white-feathered broiler breeder market in 2021, and pig-breeding imports remain below USDA's estimated annual need.[17, 19]
China is a major supplier of veterinary inputs, machinery and feed additives. It supplied all US lysine imports and 85 per cent of threonine imports.[28] Synthetic amino acids support low-protein rations, while domestic poultry genetics are gaining ground: the Shengze 901 broiler line held over 20 per cent of the market by August 2024 after imports fell during avian influenza.[18, 19] China also approved 156 GE corn and 19 GE soybean varieties for planting between 2023 and 2025, and targets over 95 per cent self-sufficiency in pig nucleus herds by 2035.[1, 17]
Access and affordability:
Healthy-diet unaffordability fell from 28.8 per cent in 2017 to 12.9 per cent in 2024, or 183.1 million people; the 2025 nowcast is 11.3 per cent.[39] has stayed below 2.5 per cent since 2009–11.[40] National logistics are extensive, though rural and western cold-chain access lags coastal cities, and hukou restrictions limit migrants' access to local support.[49, 50]
Public stocks, export restrictions and pork subsidies kept domestic rice prices almost unchanged during the 2007/08 world-price spike.[57, 58] More recently, food prices fell 4.4 per cent between January 2021 and December 2023 despite a 9.8 per cent renminbi depreciation.[59, 60]
By March 2026, China's food-price index was 1.0 per cent below March 2022, while the FAO world index had fallen 19.7 per cent.[60, 61] Domestic pork prices follow the hog cycle: they rose 110.2 per cent year on year in November 2019 and fell 14.6 per cent in December 2025.[42, 43] At the median provincial minimum wage, a day's pay bought 5.1 kg of pork or 6.9 kg of eggs in June 2026.[63, 64]
Shock endurance:
China has built large grain reserves. 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.[65] 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]
China rebuilt pork production within about 30 months after African swine fever cut the hog herd by more than 40 per cent and output to a 16-year low.[22, 23, 31, 38] The rebuild concentrated pork in large, intensive, biosecure farms, and many small and mid-sized farmers left the industry between 2021 and 2023.[69] That brings its own risks. Disease that breaks into a large unit reaches far more animals at once, and the new farms lean on imported soybeans and imported breeding stock: 15,346 breeding pigs were flown in during the first nine months of 2020 alone.[70] China also absorbed the 2025 trade rupture with the United States; after the 2018 tariff round, the US share of soybean imports had fallen to 25 per cent by 2023.[1, 4]
China has ample money to buy food in a crisis, but its public finances are stretched. 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 less reliable. The dibao minimum guarantee reached 3.1 per cent of the population in 2020 and excluded migrants. COVID-19 assistance extended eligibility to migrant workers, but its reach could not be benchmarked; hukou still limits migrants' access to local support.[49]
Trajectory
China is investing in grain production, feed efficiency and domestic crop and livestock genetics.[2, 5, 17, 20] These measures can help farms make better use of the food and feed they already have. They cannot yet replace imported soybeans at the scale livestock farms require: USDA forecasts 108 million tonnes of imports in 2026–27.[1]
Maintaining soybean stocks and buying from more than one origin would reduce the effect of a disruption, but supplier changes alone would not eliminate the need to move huge volumes by sea. A simultaneous interruption to Brazilian soy, Peruvian fishmeal and shipping through Southeast Asia would put feed and seafood production under pressure. China's grain reserves provide a substantial staple buffer; the harder task is protecting the protein supply that depends on imported ingredients.