The announcement came after Russia’s July missile strikes on Ukraine’s Port of Odessa, destroying 60,000 tons of agricultural products intended for shipment to China.
Ukraine & BRI
When the CCP introduced its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013, food and agriculture cooperation was a significant aspect of the vision.Beijing has invested heavily in Ukraine to meet its mission: to diversify food imports.
Ukraine, which contributes nearly 30 percent of Chinese corn imports, officially joined the BRI in 2017.
As part of the BRI, China’s state-owned agricultural products import and export group, COFCO (China National Cereals, Oils and Foodstuffs Corporation), built a modern terminal for grain storage, cleaning, drying in Mykolaiv, Ukraine, along with a laboratory for quality testing.
The company said in May 2016 that it had invested $75 million in the Ukrainian project.
In July 2020, the first direct container train ran between Wuhan and Kyiv in what became a weekly route.
Exports from Kyiv to China via the train line began in September 2021.
Chinese state infrastructure development in Ukraine over the past decade had made Ukraine China’s “cheapest source” of grain, according to Chinese state media reports.
Ma Wenfeng, a senior analyst with Beijing Orient Agribusiness Consultant, told the Chinese state media that, “Without imports from Ukraine, prices in the domestic market will rise.”
But after Russia’s announcement that it would not continue to support the Black Sea Grain Initiative that allowed Ukraine to safely export its grain, China is now faced with a challenge to secure other sources of grain amid the disruptions.
However, economist Davy Jun Wong believes the loss resulting from uncertainty during Russia’s war on Ukraine isn’t very significant.
“The impact is probably less than 5 percent, it’s not as big as imagined,” he told the Chinese language edition of The Epoch Times.
The obsession with food security in Chinese state media, he said, are likely more for the regime’s propaganda purposes. To convince the public of the need for the increasing import, mainland Chinese have been told that China could suffer a food crisis.
Wong says that the state propaganda messaging is less to do with China’s food reserves, but more likely related to the regime’s fears that the West could reciprocate its wolf-warrior behavior in recent years, when it often resorted to coercive agricultural tariffs as part of its global competition strategy.
Take the recent lift of its barley tariff as an example. Beijing imposed the high tariff on Australian barley in 2020—which consisted of a 73.6 percent anti-dumping tariff and a 6.9 percent anti-subsidy tariff—in response to calls from Australia’s then-foreign minister Marise Payne for an independent investigation into the origins of COVID-19.
Increasing Grain Imports
According to official data from China’s National Bureau of Statistics, China’s grain output reached a record high of 686.53 million tons in 2022, despite natural disasters like extreme weather and disrupted planting during pandemic lockdowns.That doesn’t seem to have eased Beijing’s concern about food security.
Imports of both corn and wheat reached record volumes this February. However, much of China’s rising imports of grains and soybeans go to animal feed, according to analysis by Gro Intelligence.
As early as 2013, surging imports to China led the Council of Agriculture in Taiwan to issue a warning that the CCP was working to “disturb the global food supply market.”
The Agenda
Experts have told The Epoch Times that the CCP’s publicly expressed concerns about food security are more a reflection of its lack of confidence in competing against liberal democracies—both politically and economically.Lin Yaling, an associate researcher at the Taiwan-based Institute for national defense and security research, said that the regime’s concerns over food security very much reflect a lack of confidence.
“China has been the largest importer of grains in the past but Xi also wants to hold the rice bowl [the world’s food resources] in his hand. That’s not really about food security, but rather a sense of insecurity and uncertainty of the regime itself, especially facing the trade war with the United States, and the heightened conflict with the U.S. allies,” she said.
Ms. Lin believes that China wants to reduce its reliance on the United States. “It’s deeply worried that the West will restrict its food supply,” she said.
Gu Min (pseudonym), a China-based agricultural researcher, said that while the common people already feel insecure in China, for the CCP, its food imports are actually out of concern over China’s foreign exchange reserves.
“The Chinese grain production has not changed, and there is no global shortage of food. Therefore, I’d say it is rather a security issue and concern of the Chinese foreign exchange reserves,” Mr. Gu said of China’s increasing supplies of grain.
Wang Weiluo, a well-known Chinese hydrologist and expert in China’s land use and planning, previously told The Epoch Times’s sister media NTD TV that China will never face a food crisis as long as it’s willing to import food with its foreign reserves. If not, “Any disaster could happen,” he said, just like the Great Famine that took place in China between 1959 and 1961.
Qiu Wanjun, a finance professor at Northeastern University in Boston, said that food security to the CCP is related to its goal of global strategic dominance.
However, Beijing is hitting a roadblock in its international relations with the major grain exporters such as Canada, the United States, and Australia. “It’s in fact a psychological issue to the regime,” Mr. Qiu said.
Free trade, including the import and export of grain, is internationally interdependent, he added. “It’s free, fair, and based on mutual support.” But this is exactly where the CCP’s confidence may be lacking, he said.
