This is nothing like my usual topics, and I only read the first few paragraphs and skimmed the rest. But I know that some of you think about these things at a deeper dive, so I figured I would pass it along. Does China Have Enough Food To Go To War?
Despite this remarkable progress, Chinese authorities are increasingly challenged to feed their 1.4 billion people. Recent events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, several outbreaks of African swine fever, floods sweeping southern regions, and severe droughts in the northern areas have revealed weaknesses in China’s food security.3 For instance, these events caused pork prices (the main source of protein for Chinese population) to spike and the imports of grains and oilseeds to soar to unprecedented levels. China is now the world’s largest buyer of key agricultural commodities, and it imports nearly 60 percent of global soybean export flows.4 These developments are in clear contrast with China’s decades-long efforts to develop and implement policies aimed at grain self-sufficiency.
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They've got some room to press their population back onto a grain-based diet, cutting back on the meat and milk products that have become more popular lately. Soybeans look like a real vulnerability for them, though.
The core problem is here: "A handful of countries supply most of these imports. More specifically, in the past five years, the United States and Ukraine accounted for 98 percent of China’s corn imports (see figure 3). The United States, Brazil, and Argentina supplied nearly 97 percent of all Chinese soybean imports, with Brazil emerging as the world’s leading producer and exporter."
Ukraine isn't producing as much corn as once, although if they can press Russia to end the war and get production back to normal China would at least have clear ground lines of communication for Ukrainian grain. There are Soviet-era railways connecting Ukraine to Russia to China's frontier, where you'd have to transship because China decided to adopt a different rail gauge than the USSR (to prevent betrayal and invasion by their Soviet brothers in Communism).
The rest of that stuff has to travel over the very sea lanes where the war would be. The US presumably will stop sending any, and so will South American nations that are sufficiently under US influence. Even if they do send ships, good luck getting them there.
The sea lanes of communication for their southeast Asian allies would be endangered as well, though they can establish ground lines for many of them. I don't know how much extra food India has to sell, though.
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