Inside China’s push to feed 1.4 billion people without U.S. crops
This report is from this week’s CNBC’s The China Connection newsletter, which brings you insights and analysis on what’s driving the world’s second-largest economy. You can subscribe here.
The big story
Over the last few years in China, it’s gotten easier to buy food straight from the farm.
Whether it’s boxes of apples or bags of vacuum-sealed corn-on-the-cob, online orders placed through popular e-commerce apps take just a couple of days to arrive in Beijing.
China’s food safety standards are still a work in progress. But what I’ve noticed is that even if the apples from a nearby supermarket taste artificial — the ones I can order from the countryside taste like the ones I ate in the U.S. And I can’t say it’s just as easy to get apples shipped from a New York orchard.
Farmers clear the snow covering the corn in Binzhou City, Shandong Province, China on January 18, 2026.
Cfoto | Future Publishing | Getty Images
The economics behind this consumer experience boil down to a few key differences at the heart of the U.S.-China trade story.
Over the past decade of trade tensions, the U.S. has repeatedly asked China to buy more American agricultural products. But many American farmers have lost sales under the Trump administration’s tariffs.
As the largest U.S. agricultural export by value, soybeans get the headlines. But even there, the White House has struggled to define the deadline for new Chinese purchases of U.S. soybeans. China did buy a record amount last year — mostly from Brazil. But Beijing’s end goal is food security — reducing reliance on other countries.
That’s where corn comes in.
Chinese researchers are developing corn with higher protein that could replace significant amounts of soybean imports. Most of those soybeans are used in animal feed that supports domestic meat production. Here, China has a clear goal to boost self-sufficiency. By 2030, China aims to cut the amount of soymeal in animal feed to just 10%.
Notably, Beijing this month called for increasing the quality of domestic soybeans, rather than simply planting more, as it had urged last year. That indicates the land is being saved for something else.
Tech-driven agriculture
To tackle the challenges of limited farmland and a large rural population, Beijing has sought to use technology and targeted policies to achieve its food security goals.
China has about three-fourths the arable land of the U.S., according to Goldman Sachs, despite having a population four times as large, which means policymakers have had to double down on increasing yield per acre. Around 34% of China’s population lives in rural areas, compared with roughly 20% in the U.S.
While corn fields and tractors dominate much of rural America’s plains, on a similar drive through China’s countryside, I’d see more mountains — and far more people still working the land by hand. The difference for urban consumers in China is that those farms are more connected to the internet and high-speed trains.
Beijing’s efforts to…
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