I think it's possible for China to be fully sufficient in food, both in calories and luxury foods like meat, quite soon in fact. But this depends on new technology, while China has been extremely slow on the uptake. China needs to change it's regulations and fully support the development of this new technology if it wants rapid development. There's a lot of room for growth here, since yield per surface area in China is quite a bit lower than on other western nations. It also needs to get people to accept this new forms of food.
The roll out of GMO crops are going well. But it stills needs a lot more work. China is slowly expanding the amount of land that can be planted by GMO crops, but at this rate, it's gonna take more than a decade before the land area outnumbers the amount of land being used for conventional crops. As a reminder, GMO crops have been a thing for more than 3 decades at this point, in most western countries like America, their farmland is dominated by GMO crops.
With climate change, extreme weather and geopolitical tensions messing up the global food supply, I think China really really needs to hasten the rollout of GMO crops.
There's a few main issues I can still see with China's GMO policy, other then the slow implementation speed.
First thing is that GMO crops are still limited for crops meant solely for livestock, they are not meant for human consumption. That needs to change. GMO crops for humans have been a thing for decades, with hundreds of studies backing them up, safely issues really shouldn't be such a contentious topic.
Secondly, regulations being so strict and time consuming China, companies are mainly focusing on modification of existing genes, adding, removing or modifying existing gene within a particular crop, which limits things. For example, you can over-express the gene that already exists that regulates resistance to drought in a plant, but you can't add an entirely new gene to a plant that doesn't already have it. This really limits the kind of modifications you can do with a GMO crop. You can't make holy grail crops like C4 rice for example.
Thirdly, no real focus GMO livestock. Unlike GMO crops, there's no policy, 5 year plans, no regulations, nothing. We're probably a decade away from seeing the first GMO livestock on chinese soil. Well work on GMO livestock is slow even in the West due to well founded concerns but it's still years ahead of where China is at, America and Japan already have GMO fast growing fish being farmed. Forget super fast growing chickens or ultra fat cows, just some simple gene editing to help with disease resistance could save China billions every year. And China has the technology for this, it's just a regulation issue.
The other big new food source would be alternative protein/carbohydrate sources, precision fermentation, plant protein, cultured meat, insect protein, industrial synthesis of protein/fat/carbohydrates.
Precision fermentation and cultured meat have large potential, are rapidly falling in price every year and are vastly more efficient then traditional agriculture, if industry predictions are right, they could be cheaper than traditional protein sources in a decade if the proper investments are made. Once again China needs to step up support for this new technologies and also ease the regulations. There's mountains of benefits to precision fermentation and cultured meat, from less waste, much more efficient conversion of raw feedstock, less usage of land and water, less carbon emissions, less animal cruelty and being able to produce it in the middle of a city, instead of a large farm.
Insect protein is also much more efficient. They can be fed off the mountains of food waste that modern society produces. It will be hard to impossible to get people to eat bugs, but they can be grinded up for use in protein additives like protein powder and feedstock for livestock. Technology and regulations aren't as much of an issue here, but cities will probably want to encourage companies and various food waste companies to set up such insect farms for food waste rather then chucking everything into a landfill.
Industrial synthesis of food is also another massive source of food. You can turn hydrocarbons like coal into fat. Methane into protein. Carbon dioxide into starch and glucose. You can produce truly enormous amount of food with this method. Probably not ever going to be fit for consumers, unless you enjoy eating protein shakes and raw sugar but again, perfect for livestock feed or use in precision fermentation and cultured meat. The technology is already here, it's again just a regulation and investment issue to build all those factories and getting farmers to use them for their animal feed.
Aquaculture and mariculture are another big source of food, considering the sheer amount of surface area and volume by China's coastline and it's generally more efficient than traditional livestock. It's already being intensely developed and invested into by China and technology isn't as much of an issue as with the other fields, so it's already seeing massive growth over the last few years. Seaweed or kelp farming is also enjoying steadily growth
But there's still lots of development to be done. One big area is further reducing the amount of wild fish or meat used in fishmeal. And discouraging the farming of carnivorous fish. If protein is needed, it should be from substainable sources like insects. GMO fish would also be a game changer, seeing as the major issue with fish farming is disease and pests and GMO fish resistant to common disease and pests will completely change the entire industry.
There's also an ongoing development to move into deeper and deeper waters to reduce disease and waste issues. Better robotics, A.I and increased automation will also completely change the nature of the industry, since humans are the weak link when dealing with anything water related. You could see even deeper submerged fish farms, or even sea cages anchored to the seabed, farming lobsters and other shellfish, being maintain and operated entirely by robots.
One big one, and this is the biggest deal of them all is using gene drives to completely wipe out various crop pests forever. Goodbye armyworm, Weevils forever. And if you don't want to render them extinct, there's dozens of genetical methods of pest control is still much longer lasting, effective, cheaper and healthier than spraying pesticides everywhere.
It's frustrating, I feel like with a few policy/regulation changes, like with GMO crops, and with a some steady investments into certain key techlolongies, China can easily be more than self sufficient in it's food supply already. Instead it's probably going to take another decade as the regulations slowly sort themselves out and techologny improves.
