Can China’s leap into smart agriculture ensure its food security?

As China faces food security challenges, can a digital revolution in agriculture hold the key to its food future? Beijing thinks so. It unveiled a five-year action plan on October 25 to accelerate this transformation, aiming to establish a digital planting technology scheme and a national agricultural big data platform by 2028.

Covering farms, livestock and fisheries, this initiative is designed to reduce costs and enhance efficiency. The push to use big data, the global positioning system (GPS) and artificial intelligence arises as China ramps up investment in farm machinery and seed technology to safeguard its food security.

China is the world’s biggest agricultural producer and importer. With less than 10 per cent of the planet’s arable land and even less of the water resources, China produces a quarter of the world’s grain and feeds one-fifth of the world’s population. It is also a major food exporter.

Amid changing geopolitical dynamics, climate change, trade disruptions and domestic challenges, China’s ambitious new strategy emphasises a greater role for technology in food production. Food security and self-sufficiency have long been priorities for China, and remain so under President Xi Jinping. But it is an uphill battle.

Chinese agricultural production faces many challenges, including changing dietary preferences and rising incomes, demand outstripping supply, arable land and water constraints, environmental degradation and competing land uses. Declining fertility rates and urbanisation patterns also raise questions over who will make up the future rural workforce.

Climate shocks exacerbate matters, raising fears of crop failure and increases in pests and diseases. A severe drought across the Yangtze River basin in 2022, China’s rice production base, laid bare 2.2 million hectares of arable land and left countless livestock dead.