China’s breakneck plan to safeguard its future

China is about to do to the global supply chains for grains, livestock and food products what it has already done to the world’s energy and transport systems.

The country is pursuing what amounts to world dominance in the mass manufacture of protein, launching a breakneck plan to end its strategic dependence on food imports and insure its people against the long-term famine risks of climate change.

The Politburo’s 15th five-year plan is marshalling all levers of finance and state power to overcome land and water limits, placing food security on a par with defence as an existential imperative for national survival.

Analysts at consultancy Systemiq say the Communist Party is activating the same playbook already used for solar power, electric vehicles and batteries to reach 70 per cent or more of the world market from a standing start in less than 15 years – a pattern also visible in its push for semiconductors, nuclear fusion, quantum computing and pharmaceuticals.

It is developing genetically modified seeds and crops, but it is also targeting the fast-growing industries of cellular agriculture, lab-grown proteins and food from precision fermentation: Frankenfoods to some, the saviour of humanity to others.

Systemiq foresees a protein revolution picking up speed through the 2030s and 2040s that will radically change what the Chinese people eat, with spillover effects across Asia and the world. It estimates that half of China’s fish and beef consumption, and 40 per cent of its dairy products, will come from “alt-protein” sources by the mid-century.

The country’s leaders have fretted about their food vulnerability for a long time. China has 15 per cent of the world’s population, 8 per cent of its arable land, and 6 per cent of usable freshwater – and some of that is badly polluted with nitrogen.

The Sino-American struggle for global hegemony and the risk of a future US maritime blockade has brought matters to a head. So has the frightening pace of climate damage to Chinese agriculture. The country is now acting fast to future-proof itself for a Hobbesian “three-degree” world.

A throbbing hive of “doctoral farms” and technology courtyards has sprung to life in the Pinggu valley north-east of Beijing, best known for its blanket of pink peach blossom in late spring. It is billed as China’s second Silicon Valley, an agricultural tech (ag-tech) twin to the digital-tech hub at Haidian on the other side of the city.

Other enzyme and amino acid hubs with different niches are being developed in the Yangtze River Delta and Guangdong. “It suggests a shift from isolated pilots towards a coordinated industrial ecosystem. This geographic clustering mirrors patterns observed in solar manufacturing and EV production during their pre-scale phases,” said Systemiq.

The Pinggu nerve centre has begun making proteins for commercial use from micro-algae, as well as EPA fish oil and paramylon which is used in protein bars and cereals.

The question of how soon climate change will erode global food output is a contested debate. The “CO² fertilisation effect” of higher carbon levels has until now been a net plus for crop yields due to faster photosynthesis and reduced water loss via stomatal conductance.

A Royal Society study last year concluded that we have passed the tipping point where friend turns to foes. The carbon dioxide benefits flatten out while the damage from heat stress and degradation of nutrients bites harder.

Scientists from the US, Europe and China concluded in a seminal Nature paper that global crop yields are likely to be 8 per cent lower by 2050 than they would otherwise have been, even after adjusting for plausible ways of adapting. But we don’t know for sure and the process will not be linear.

China’s Pinggu hub has a long way to go to catch up with the Wageningen “food valley” in the Netherlands, the world’s leading ag-tech hub, but the Dutch have recently been hobbled by a raft of anti-innovation EU rules that are driving some of Europe’s food-technology start-ups into exile. Several are migrating to the pro-science haven of Brexit Britain.

What the Chinese lack in frontier biosciences – for now – they can more than compensate with vast industrial scale and state-directed credit. Systemiq thinks this could slash the cost of bioreactors and fermentation systems, achieving “price parity” with traditional food far sooner than widely supposed.

Once alt-protein is cheaper, market forces will make it almost unstoppable, in much the same way that 99 per cent of net electricity added across the world last year came from solar and wind.

Food is not a mere commodity, of course. It goes to the heart of cultural identity and cuisine. It has a primal hold on our brain circuitry. So let me try to separate my analytical view from my personal tastes.

On my farm we make cheese, kefir and whey from a herd of goats that roams at will over land that has been free of chemical pollutants for a very long time, eating whatever they want, much like their wild forebears in the Zagros mountains of Iran.

We never touch the processed foods that line the aisles of modern supermarkets. But large numbers of people do consume such products as a way of life and I doubt they would even notice whether lab-grown protein or milk made by precision fermentation crept into the ingredients. How many would rebel if “bio-identical” cultivated protein and lipids started to make up 10 per cent and then 20 per cent of a minced beef patty, a chicken nugget or a fish cake?

As a rule of thumb, it takes about 40 per cent less energy, 85 per cent less water and 95 per cent less land to make milk, from the gene coding of a cow, in a bioreactor vessel. It is not what I would drink by preference.

But it could hardly be worse than the milk made from grain-fed cows imprisoned, 10,000 or 20,000 at a time from birth to death, in giant agro-industrial barns in China or the US, with little or no grazing in their miserable lives.

The Sino-American struggle for global hegemony and the risk of a future US maritime blockade has brought matters to a head.

China was a net exporter of crops and livestock as recently as 2004, before the shift to a high-protein diet led to soaring reliance on imported grains for animal feed.

Today, Chinese demand sustains the grain export business of the western hemisphere, absorbing 89 per cent of Argentina’s soybean exports, 71 per cent of Brazil’s and (pre-Trump) 54 per cent of America’s. It buys most of Latin America’s beef exports. China’s food deficit has reached $US150 billion ($211.7 billion) a year.

These figures are going to plummet. The country is working on every front towards food self-sufficiency, pushing the growing frontier 200 kilometres north and deep into the Xinjiang desert with modified crops.

It is reclaiming 37 million hectares of saline-alkali land by leaching out the salt. It has belatedly launched a “rural revitalisation strategy” after decades of neglect, finally treating farmers as a precious resource rather than cheap migrant labour for the cities.

But the ag-tech drive at Pinggu is the real wild card, with the potential to flood the teeming cities of the Global South – and not just the South – with cut-price protein and profoundly alter the contours of world food trade.

Readers may prefer to stick to our organic cheeses, grass-fed Angus and stone-baked bread – and nobody will stop us, thank heavens. Much of humanity wants cheaper food.