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Feedback Advertise China’s Hunger GamesHow Beijing Turned Its Food Insecurity Into Geopolitical Leverage Caitlin Welsh
and Brian Hart August 11, 2026 A supermarket in Beijing, October 2024 Florence Lo / Reuters Caitlin Welsh is Director of
the Global Food and Water Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. She served as Director
for Global Economic Engagement at the National Security Council and as Acting Director of the U.S. Department of
State’s Office of Global Food Security.Brian Hart is Deputy Director and Fellow of the China Power Project at the
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Reprint Request reprint permissions here. Among the many sectors shaping China’s economic strategy toward the United
States and other Western countries, few are as important as food and agriculture. As one of the world’s largest
importers of agricultural products, China has frequently used access to its vast markets as leverage in trade
negotiations. In 2025, for instance, it suspended soybean imports from the United States for several months—a major
setback for U.S. farmers—in response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. As part of Trump
and Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s fragile trade truce in May of this year, China agreed to purchase at least $17 billion
per year of U.S. agricultural goods for the remainder of Trump’s presidential term, and it restored market access for
U.S. beef and poultry imports from certain U.S. states.The United States is not China’s only target for this strategy.
In 2026, China similarly stopped importing a variety of Canadian agricultural products in retaliation for Canadian
tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles. And in other cases, Beijing has gone further, wielding its market for food
products as a weapon in political disputes. When, in late 2025, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi signaled the
potential for Japan to intervene in a conflict over Taiwan, China suspended more than $86 million in purchases of
Japanese seafood and sake. Yet Beijing’s enormous market for agricultural products also reflects a precarious
reality: China is heavily dependent on imports to meet domestic demand. As Chinese people’s incomes have grown, so has
their appetite for meat, dairy, and other goods. Despite major efforts to shore up domestic food production, China has
grown more reliant on imports—for animal products as well as feed to produce them. China’s food imports reached $215
billion in 2023, the world’s largest at the time, with nearly 85 percent of its soybeans, more than 67 percent of its
oil crops and nuts, and nearly 25 percent of its beef coming from foreign suppliers. China’s food-import bill has
receded slightly in recent years but has remained above $200 billion, a figure greater than the total imports of most
countries.Given China’s shrinking labor force and the effects of overproduction and climate change on its arable land,
Beijing is likely to remain reliant on foreign food products in the coming years. Although its strategy of leveraging
its import market for geopolitical influence has served it well so far, Beijing also seems to recognize its great
vulnerability. As a result, it is taking steps to become a leader in agricultural biotechnology, such that China could
ultimately wield not only its vast food import markets but also select agricultural exports for political gain.FEEDING
THE PEOPLEThe threat of food insecurity looms large in the minds of Chinese Communist Party officials. Uprisings over
food have contributed to political crises throughout China’s history. As many as 25 million Chinese starved in the
famine of 1906–7, an event that accelerated efforts to overthrow the Qing dynasty, China’s last imperial dynasty.
Even worse was the Great Chinese Famine of 1959–61, which was brought on by severe mismanagement amid Mao Zedong’s
revolutionary zeal. It claimed the lives of roughly 30 million people and is widely considered the deadliest famine in
history. In the late 1980s, surging food prices inflamed the popular discontent behind the Tiananmen Square protests,
which resulted in the massacre of protesters in 1989.Given this dark history, Beijing has long sought to shore up the
national food supply, and in recent decades has made enormous gains in its ability to feed its population. Economic
reforms launched by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s ushered in market-oriented policies that ended the food rationing
system and provided new incentives to increase agricultural yields. The transition from collective production to a
“household responsibility system” brought about rapid marketization and shifting dietary patterns, and China’s
accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 flung open the doors of China’s economy to global food and
agriculture trade. China also put in place several regulations to promote and protect agricultural production and manage
consumption. In 1996, for instance, the government called for a self-sufficiency rate of 95 percent for staple grains,
and in 2006 it established a minimum threshold of farmland that must remain in agricultural use.Under Xi, these efforts
have intensified. Chinese state media is replete with stories of a young Xi experiencing hunger as one of Mao’s
“sent down” youths during the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution. Xi’s own mother even turned him in when
he escaped his school one night to beg for food. As a young official in the CCP, Xi then traveled to Iowa in 1985 as
part of an agricultural delegation from Hebei Province and returned to Iowa as China’s vice president in 2012,
famously impressed by advanced U.S. food production technologies. Soon after rising to power in 2013, Xi emphasized that
“feeding the people has always mattered most in national governance” in a speech on China’s food security.As such,
he has overseen a continuous effort to achieve food self-reliance. In 2017, for instance, ChemChina, a Chinese
state-owned company, bought Syngenta, the Swiss seed and pesticide company, in an effort to improve domestic
agricultural output with cutting-edge technology; at $43 billion, it was—and likely remains—China’s largest
foreign acquisition. By 2019, Xi was demanding “absolute security” in domestic production of wheat and rice and he
reiterated China’s minimum farm-acreage threshold policy, emphasizing strict punishments for officials who fail to
maintain arable land in their jurisdictions. The Chinese government also reclaimed land from other industries and
businesses and dedicated it to agriculture. China even approved its first pilot program for cultivating genetically
modified staple crops in 2021, reflecting Beijing’s shifting stance on the technology and its effort to further
accelerate domestic food production.GROWING APPETITEOn paper, these sweeping efforts have produced results. China’s
production of pork, poultry, and beef, for example, surged by nearly 55 percent between 2000 and 2025; for some fruits,
the figure is 258 percent, and for dairy it is 342 percent. For corn, rice, and wheat, China has achieved near
self-sufficiency. Meanwhile, undernourishment has declined significantly, falling from ten percent of the population in
2001 to under three percent by 2010, where it has remained since.For all these gains, however, production has not kept
up with consumption, and food and agricultural imports have exploded. Today, China is the largest consumer of meat and
fish in the world, consuming more than 30 percent of the world’s total. By 2025, China’s imports of some citrus had
grown 243 percent, imports of meat had grown approximately 669 percent, and imports of dairy had grown more than 1,751
percent compared to 2000.It is unlikely that China will be able to fill this gap with still greater domestic production.
Although Beijing’s past efforts have improved its food security in the near term, they have also introduced long-term
challenges to the agriculture sector. China’s limited farmland has been degraded by overcultivation and excessive use
of fertilizers, for instance. In some of China’s most productive regions, water scarcity and water pollution threaten
farming; in other areas, torrential rainfall and flooding—made more frequent by climate change—are destroying crops.
Overall, scientists project that, by 2050, loss of cropland from urbanization and soil degradation could reduce
China’s food production capacity by up to 18 percent.Meanwhile, the decline in China’s agricultural labor force,
driven by the migration of farmers to urban and industrial centers, is also decreasing productivity. And demographic
shifts, combined with Chinese social norms, have contributed to the country’s outsize food waste problem; today, China
wastes more food than any other country in the world—even after Xi launched multiple “Clean Plate” campaigns and
China’s legislature passed a 2021 Anti–Food Waste Law. China will thus remain reliant on food imports as it
struggles to match domestic production and consumption in years to come.BOTTOM-LINE THINKINGChina’s persistent
reliance on food imports is a likely irritant to Xi, especially given recent global economic disruptions. Following
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, global food prices reached historic highs, and China was temporarily denied
access to exports from Ukraine, a top maize supplier to China in recent years. That same year, access to food became a
flashpoint amid large-scale protests in China opposing the government’s strict COVID-19 policies. In a rare public
display of discontent, one protester unfurled a banner on a Beijing bridge that proclaimed, “We need food, not COVID
tests.” Recognizing the political urgency of these issues, Xi mentioned the term “food security” in at least 71
public engagements that year—double the references from the year before—including his assertion that “food
security is among the country’s most fundamental interests.”Growing tensions with Washington have heightened
Beijing’s anxieties. Following the U.S.-Chinese trade war during the first Trump administration, China rapidly shifted
much of its U.S. soybean purchases toward other suppliers, mainly Brazil. But while the move reduced China’s
dependence on the United States, it increased its exposure to potential crop failures or market instability in Brazil,
which frequently experiences droughts that disrupt production. Despite efforts to diversify imports away from the United
States, the United States and its NATO and Asia-Pacific allies still accounted for 46 percent of China’s agricultural
imports in 2023.As part of a broader emphasis on economic and national security, Xi has repeatedly instructed his
bureaucrats to pursue “bottom-line thinking” in preparation for “extreme case” situations. U.S. Army experts,
for instance, have assessed that a direct confrontation between China and Western countries would disrupt international
trade flows and force the Chinese population to change its food consumption patterns, which could undermine Beijing’s
ability to maintain domestic stability and sustain a protracted war. The United States and its farmers would pay a price
if Washington moved to restrict agricultural exports to China. Nevertheless, Xi is keenly aware of the risks and
political consequences of significant disruptions to China’s food supplies.It is thus no surprise that China maintains
enormous national reserves for fertilizers, grains, and even pork. Although details of China’s reserve system are held
as a state secret—and the quality of reserves is a topic of debate—China holds a significant proportion of grains in
reserves worldwide, including about 44 percent of global wheat reserves, 53 percent of global rice reserves, and 59
percent of global corn reserves, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates.SEEDS OF POWERChina’s continued
inability to produce the food it needs presents existential vulnerabilities for Beijing. Yet paradoxically, Beijing has
found ways to leverage its extraordinary need for food imports as a source of strength on the world stage. With
agriculture and seafood imports totaling more than $207 billion in 2025, China was among the top three agriculture
export markets for at least 32 economies. This is a major transformation from just a few decades ago. In 2005, according
to Trade Data Monitor, Brazil exported less than eight percent of its agriculture products to China. By 2025, that
number was 33 percent. Similarly, Australia’s agriculture exports to China more than doubled from ten percent in 2005
to 22 percent in 2025, while Thailand’s food exports to China more than doubled in an even shorter timeframe, from
nine percent in 2010 to 24 percent in 2025.By exploiting its importance to food-producing countries, Beijing has found
growing opportunities to pressure its rivals. According to analysis by the Center for Strategic and International
Studies, Beijing has deployed coercive agriculture trade restrictions 26 times since 2010, including five in 2025 alone.
These measures are often a response to perceived geopolitical affronts, with Chinese policymakers attempting to pressure
the targeted country to reverse a specific policy decision or deter other countries from doing the same. In addition to
using these measures against Canada and the United States, Beijing has also aimed them at the European Union, which has
lost nearly $4 billion in exports of pork, dairy, brandy, and cognac since 2024 for imposing antidumping duties on
Chinese electric vehicles. Australia is another target. In 2020 and 2021, in response to Australia’s inquiries into
the origins of COVID-19 and China’s human rights record, China restricted purchases of Australian meats, grains,
seafood, wine, and other products, affecting over $4 billion in exports. Chinese officials were overt about the tactic:
when asked about the drop in Australian agricultural exports to China, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson
responded, “We will not allow any country to reap benefits from doing business with China while groundlessly accusing
and smearing China.” At a port in Lianyungang, China, April 2020 China Daily / Reuters Beijing will likely continue
hanging its vast agricultural market as a sword of Damocles over agriculture exporting countries. But, aware of its own
vulnerabilities and reliance on foreign countries, it also appears to be finding new ways to gain leverage in the global
agricultural market. China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, for instance, calls seeds the “chips” of
agriculture; that is, the technology foundational for all other agricultural production. Beyond its purchase of
Syngenta, Beijing has been increasing investments in advanced seed-breeding technologies, including genetically modified
technologies enhanced by AI. In 2019, China surpassed the United States and the EU in applications for all international
patents—many for agricultural patents using state-of-the-art biotechnology—and China has grown to be the largest
funder of agricultural research and development globally. By 2022, China had commercialized its first generation of
biotech corn seeds, increasing corn yields by ten percent. China’s imports of corn decreased from 23 million metric
tons in 2023 to six million metric tons only two years later. By the end of 2025, Syngenta had developed 111 new seed
traits, which Chinese regulators have since approved for commercial use.China has also worked to dominate the production
of the vitamins and amino acids that are essential to animal feed. China already produces between 80 and 100 percent of
some of the inputs to livestock and poultry feed, leading the U.S. animal feed industry to conclude that “heavy
dependence on imports from a limited number of sources highlights the vulnerability of U.S. animal feed production to
global supply chain disruptions.” Chinese dominance of an industry critical to U.S. animal production serves as a
potential counterweight to the threat of restricted U.S. food exports to China. A U.S. decision in this direction could
be met with Beijing’s decision to do the same, harming the U.S. farm economy and consumers alike.A China that is a net
exporter of select but critical commodities could present a new type of challenge in the global agriculture market.
Beijing would hold sway over countries reliant on its imports as well as key exports. The United States should expect
Beijing to continue to wield its agriculture sector for geopolitical influence, whether through curtailing imports of
food, restricting exports of select commodities, or both. As Beijing seeks to exploit all possible avenues for
geopolitical leverage against Washington, food exports and imports could become an even more acute pressure point in the
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