Will China Import More Corn

The growth and modernization of China’s livestock industry has rocked global soybean markets in recent years and many expect a similar impact on world corn markets in coming years. Despite the importance, there is a dearth of verifiable information of the underlying supply and de mand of meat and feed ingredients in China to make such forecasts. Moreover, China seeks the conflicting goals of maintaining high prices for corn to encourage production and developing a competitive and modern livestock industry, all the while embracing market mechanisms. How China addresses these conflicting objectives will impact the feed and livestock industry in China and around the world. Information available to construct a rough supply and demand framework for meat and feed ingredients in China indicate that there is still room for animal product consumption to grow in China. However, whether the additional demand will be met by increasing domestic production or by importing meat and other animal products will depend, partially on whether China can improve production efficiency and if it can effectively address the environmental consequences of greater animal production in large, modern, and more efficient operations. If so, China will likely turn to global markets to procure sufficient feed grains to meet the growing demand as corn production is expected to grow more slowly than feed grain consumption.