The Future of China’s Food

More and more Chinese farmers are leaving their fields in favor of urban centers, no longer meeting the majority of domestic food needs. According to experts, China’s current status as a net importer of food greatly concerns the Chinese government and contributed to the failure of the Doha trade talks. One solution to China’s trade deficit would be to promote industrial farming that may inevitably put the remaining small farmers out of business, a shift familiar to American farmers.

So what does the future hold? To the dismay of some environmentalists, experts say that historically, trying to stop the evolution from local to industrial farming doesn’t work. What does work is investing in health and education programs that help farmers transition to new livelihoods. This type of change typically requires public sector support -- potentially a strong point of China’s “socialist system with Chinese characteristics."

Besides the impacts on water resources and energy demand, if China is able to successfully and rapidly shift to industrial agriculture there will be many changes in store for US agrobuisness, technology exports, the US trade balance, and US farms that are currently China’s biggest supplier of food.