By The Straits Times | Created at 2026-07-24 10:51:58 | Updated at 2026-08-03 07:13:07
1 week ago
BEIJING – Rows of rice paddies sit along the roads of Jianghua county in southern Hunan province, presenting a picture of compliance with China’s central authorities’ instructions that valuable farmland be used to grow grain.
But away from the main roads, drone footage of the mountainous county captured a different landscape. Large tracts of land were planted with pumpkins, bitter gourds, taro and monk fruit – higher-value cash crops that offered farmers better returns than rice.
The contrast was laid bare in a July 14 investigative report by China’s state broadcaster CCTV, which alleged that local officials in Jianghua Yao Autonomous County had inflated rice planting figures and maintained two sets of ledgers to give the appearance that centrally-assigned grain production targets had been met.
The expose has shone a spotlight on a long-running tension at the core of China’s food security policies, where Beijing pushes to expand grain production to safeguard the country’s food supply while market forces often lead farmers to plant more profitable cash crops instead.
Food security has long been a top strategic priority for China, but it has taken on even more importance in recent years following the trade war with the US and disruptions to global markets and supply chain during the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Memories of past famines in China have also reinforced a deep-seated belief that maintaining a high degree of food self-sufficiency is critical to political and social stability. Political sensitivity around grain production also has deep historical roots, such as during the Great Leap Forward industrialisation campaign from 1958 to 1962, local cadres were under political pressure to overstate grain output figures, including rice, which worsened the famine that followed.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has repeatedly described food security as a matter of national security, saying that “the Chinese people’s rice bowls must be firmly held in our own hands.”
Beijing has long stressed that the country’s 1.8 billion mu (about 120 million hectares) of arable land is a “red line” that must not be breached, and has since tightened oversight and demanded greater accountability from local governments responsible for meeting grain production targets.
The emphasis is central to China’s policymaking. The 2026 No.1 Central Document, the first policy document released by the central government every year, called for annual grain output to be stabilised at around 700 million tonnes while strengthening food security and agricultural resilience.
China’s grain production hit a record high of about 715 million tonnes in 2025.
While the national objective is straightforward, implementation on the ground has proved far more complicated.
“Staple grains such as rice, wheat and corn don’t yield much profit for farmers, but cash crops and livestock can bring significantly higher returns,” Dan Wang, a director on Eurasia Group’s China team, told The Straits Times.
“But because local officials have to prioritise the redline for farmland first, there’s always a conflict between the pursuit of profits and meeting the grain requirement set by the central government,” said Wang, whose postdoctoral research focused on Chinese agriculture.
The Jianghua county case has thrown those competing incentives into sharp relief.
The county was assigned a target of nearly 390,000 mu of rice and reported it had met the target. But CCTV said a separate set of ledgers showed that only about 238,000 mu of rice received government subsidies in 2024, which it described as a reasonably accurate proxy for the area actually planted. This points to a shortfall of roughly 150,000 mu, or about 40% below the target.
Drone footage filmed by CCTV during a visit in mid-June 2026 also showed areas planted with cash crops rather than rice.
Following the broadcast, authorities in Yongzhou, which administers Jianghua county, said they had formed a joint investigation team and launched a rectification campaign to correct the figures, restore non-compliant farmland to grain production where required and investigate those responsible.
The case has sparked debate on Chinese social media. Some netizens questioned whether local officials should bear sole responsibility when the government subsidies for growing rice appear to be insufficient and farmers have strong financial incentives to grow more profitable crops instead. Others argued that falsifying data undermines the country’s food security goals.
“There is no negotiation room on the cultivated land red line,” Eurasia Group’s Wang said, adding that the Jianghua case was intended to serve as a warning to other counties that Beijing is prepared to punish counties found to have falsified grain production figures.
According to Wang, the falsification of agricultural statistics is not new. What has changed is the degree of scrutiny and enforcement as Beijing has elevated food security up the policy agenda, she said.
Before 2018, local officials faced relatively little scrutiny over discrepancies in agricultural statistics as urbanisation and raising rural incomes were higher policy priorities and farmers were encouraged to diversify into more profitable crops, she said.
That began to change as Beijing elevated food security as a higher priority with accountability mechanisms becoming more established after 2018 before tightening significantly after 2021, a trend that accelerated after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 which drove up global grain prices.
“Since 2021, the central government has been trying to monitor agricultural figures much more closely, and food security requirements started to be seriously enforced,” she said.
At the same time, economic pressures have made the task harder.
China’s property downturn that started in 2021 prompted many migrant workers who lost their jobs in cities to return to their rural hometowns. But for many households, relying solely on grain cultivation was not economically viable so many diversified into cash crops, crayfish farming and livestock to supplement household incomes.
“While some local governments attempted to discourage such shifts through fines or administrative orders, enforcement was often difficult,” Wang said.
Constraints and creative solutions
The dilemma is compounded by structural constraints in China’s agricultural industry.
Less than 12 per cent of China’s land is classed as arable by the World Bank, compared with about 17 per cent in the US, despite the two countries being similar in size.
The average Chinese farm is also less than one hectare, among the smallest in the world, making it difficult to deploy large high-tech agricultural machinery or achieve the economies of scale common in major agricultural exporters.
Since 2004, China has been a net importer of agricultural products and is a leading purchaser of soybeans, driven by rising demand for animal feed and edible oils, changing diets, limited land and water. While China is a leading importer of rice by volume, it accounts for only 2 per cent of domestic consumption with the country remaining largely self-sufficient in the staple grain.
For local governments, the answer is to find ways to make grain cultivation more profitable, Wang said.
Some localities have experimented with ways to raise farmers’ incomes while keeping land in grain production. In Zhejiang province’s Qingtian county, authorities have promoted integrated rice-fish farming, allowing farmers to earn additional income from aquaculture without taking land out of rice cultivation.
Integrated rice-crayfish farming in Jiangxi province’s Duchang county brought in a net income of 3,000 yuan per mu in 2020, which is at least double the returns compared with rice cultivation alone, according to local media reports.
Others have encouraged land transfers to create larger farms that can use machinery to reduce costs, or implemented crop rotation systems that allow higher-value crops to be grown outside the main rice planting season.
However, such approaches require funding along with knowledge and expertise that many agricultural counties lack.
“Successful examples exist but much depends on the local fiscal capacity. That’s also why it’s difficult to eliminate data falsification completely,” Wang said.
