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.

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.

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 reduce poverty and ensure social stability in rural areas have driven infrastructure development across the country. E-commerce companies such as JD.com and Pinduoduo have expanded into new markets in the countryside. Companies like DJI have also built a business around agricultural drones. Last year, as I was taking a high-speed train from Beijing to Shanghai, I saw a drone working in a field.

Tech company Qicaihong has gone further, expanding from China’s Silicon Valley, Shenzhen, to a very rural part of Yunnan province to standardize local corn production for bigger markets.

The local subsidiary, Shijing Agriculture Technology, uses sensors and software — including AI from DeepSeek — to optimize regional production. Rather than having to find their own sales channels, participating farmers working off tiny plots on mountain steppes can sell their corn to the company at a set price for unified processing, before the corn is sold online and to major distributors.

A similar story plays out in the northeastern Heilongjiang province, where farmers can process their corn at a centralized plant and sell it nationwide and abroad under the brand “Laojieji.”

That’s just one aspect of local agricultural development. China is investing heavily in agricultural research and development, and its public sector spending was roughly double that of the U.S. in 2019 and 2021.

By 2022, China started commercializing its first generation of biotech seeds that improved corn yield by 10%, said Trina Chen, co-head of China equity research at Goldman Sachs.

That allowed the country to import just 2.65 million metric tons of corn in 2025, down from peak levels of nearly 30 million metric tons in 2022 and 2023, according to official data accessed via Wind Information.

Investor interest

More money is poised to enter China’s agricultural sector.

Last week, reports emerged that Chinese-owned agritech giant Syngenta is trying again to go public, this time in Hong Kong. The listing for 20% of the company would support investments in research and development, The Financial Times reported, citing a source.

Syngenta, whose management is still headquartered in Switzerland, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, the company’s China business is making strides in supporting domestic seed development, with 111 new varieties getting national approval for commercial use in the quarter ended Oct. 30. With Syngenta’s global reach, it’s building an agricultural edge that could also compete overseas.

That’s just a snapshot of China’s very complex national effort to reduce reliance on the U.S. and other countries for food. But long-held perceptions about China’s food quality won’t disappear overnight — think tea growing alongside diesel-blasting trucks.

As an urban consumer in the country, what I know is that I can now order produce online and it will arrive with almost the same freshness as if I’d visited the farm.

And for American farmers who face a more self-sufficient China, it may be time to start looking for new customers.

Cheng Lu, CreateAI’s CEO, discussed the company’s move to integrate AI in video game creation. He added that AI investments alone won’t pay off; they need to be paired with applications.

Eric Zheng, president of AmCham Shanghai, stressed the importance of an early visit by President Trump to China, given the potential for commercial deals between the two countries.

Lenny Zephirin of The Zephirin Group said capital markets have been able to digest the surge in Mainland Chinese companies going public through Hong Kong IPOs so far, and that regulators stepping in have minimized the risk to markets.

Trump-Xi call. The U.S. and Chinese leaders discussed Taiwan and trade late last week, ahead of Trump’s highly anticipated trip to Beijing in the spring.

Coffee wars. Luckin Coffee opened its first premium drinks store in Shenzhen on Sunday, ramping up the pressure on Starbucks, which is selling most of its China business to Boyu Capital.

EV struggles. BYD and other major Chinese electric car companies saw a sales dip in January from December amid persistent sluggish demand.

Chinese and Hong Kong stocks were mixed in afternoon trading Wednesday, even as most Asian markets advanced, with investors appearing to brush aside concerns over artificial intelligence that pressured U.S. benchmarks.

Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index rose 0.43%, while the mainland CSI 300 index slipped 0.11%. Technology and electric vehicle shares led gains in the city. Xiaomi rose 4.72%, while BYD advanced 3.86% and Li Auto added 3.23%.

For the year to date, the Hang Seng is up 6.51%, while the CSI 300 has gained around 1.9%. China’s benchmark 10-year government bond yield slipped to 1.8%, while the offshore yuan was little changed at 6.9088 against the greenback.

— Nur Hikmah Md Ali