In Depth: Warming Climate Threatens Chinese Farmers’ Livelihoods

By Wang Shuo and Kelly Wang

After the Mid-Autumn Festival celebrations ended in Huma, a county at the northern reaches of Northeast China’s Heilongjiang province, farmer Xu Xiujian began harvesting his soybean crop. He had planted earlier than usual this year, in line with the spring rains, which had come early in mid-April.

Xu’s case, while alone seemingly unremarkable, reflects a much larger shift happening in China’s climate and the impact it is having on the country’s agricultural industry.

As climate change impacts global weather patterns, China is warming, meaning farmers in the country’s northern climes have the potential to grow a wider variety of crops as well as higher yielding strains that require a longer growing season.

Over the past 40 years the average temperature in China has increased by 1.5 degree Celsius, according to Liao Yaoming, a researcher at the National Climate Center’s climate change impact and adaptation division. As a result, the planting boundaries of many crops have shifted to higher latitudes and higher altitudes, with an increase in the plantable area of crops including corn and rice, and a change in the varieties of wheat, soybean and cotton to those with longer growth periods and greater potential yields.

This warming, coupled with government subsidies and technological advancements, has prompted major agricultural provinces to adjust their cultivation varieties in recent years, introducing rice farming in formerly unsuitable regions of Northeast China and increasing soybean planting in North China’s Inner Mongolia autonomous region by around 145% over the past decade.

But while warmer temperatures may boost yields for farmers in high-latitude regions, it brings new challenges like pest issues and heightened natural disaster risk. Over the past four decades, the number of extreme rainfall cases increased by 8% per decade in China, while drought-affected areas have expanded by 1.7% per decade, according to Liao.

A May report released by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment stated that climate change has already exerted a “significant adverse impact” on China’s natural ecosystems. For agriculture, which is highly susceptible to climate fluctuations, adaptation has become not just an option but a necessity.

Shifting north

In agriculture production, key meteorological factors such as precipitation and cumulative temperatures — the total average daily temperatures over a period of time — are central to climate zoning. In China, the cumulative temperature of the period each year when the daily average temperature was at least 10 degrees Celsius, a threshold that marks the start of the growth period for most heat-loving crops such as corn and rice, increased by 485 degrees Celsius in the past four decades, according to Liao.

According to a 2019 report by several members of the nation’s top political consultative body, the northern boundary of warm temperate zones moved north by more than one degree of latitude over the 30 years to 2010.

In Heilongjiang, which covers a region with latitudes similar to Toronto and Dublin, thermal belts have noticeably shifted northward between 1991 and 2020.

This warming trend has prompted an expansion of planting zones for crops like soybeans, rice, corn and wheat in the region. In Heilongjiang’s Heihe, farmer Cai Ming can now grow a soybean variety requiring at least an 80-day growing season, a feat not feasible three decades ago due to the region’s lengthy and freezing winters.

Meanwhile, in Huma, where wheat once dominated over half of its 400,000 mu (65,894 acres) of arable land in 1994, around 90% of its 1.1 million mu are now planted with soybeans, which has higher heat requirements, according to Li Hongmei, director of Huma’s rural revitalization service center.

Similarly, in Inner Mongolia, the annual average temperature in major soybean-producing areas has risen by 1.05 C in the three decades to 2024 compared to the previous 30 years, and the frost-free period has increased by 10 days, according to Tang Hongyan, a senior engineer at the regional ecological and agricultural meteorological center.

This warming has shifted the northern boundary of the early-maturing soybean planting area further north by 0.911 degrees latitude, which is around 100 kilometers, adding 7.4 million mu of potential soybean land in Hulunbuir and 150,000 mu in Hinggan League.

In Henan, China’s largest wheat-producing province, warmer conditions have allowed less frost-resistant wheat varieties to expand northward, with increased heat and moisture promoting this shift, according to Yu Weidong, chief engineer at Henan Provincial Institute of Meteorological Sciences.

Policy, technological development

In addition to climate change, shifts in subsidy policies, technological advancements, and evolving consumer demand have also shaped China’s agricultural production landscape.

“The warming climate is one factor… while the national subsidy policy for soybean cultivation has been a key driving force,” Tang said. Since national soybean subsidies were introduced in 2015, Inner Mongolia’s soybean planting area has expanded by nearly 150% from 2014 to 2023, reaching 18.53 million mu and comprising 12% of the country’s total soybean area.

In Heilongjiang, a transition from soybean fields into rice paddies began in the early 2010s. A district in Heihe initiated policies in 2012 to encourage rice planting, including a subsidy of 70 yuan ($10) per mu for each increase of 1,000 mu of rice paddies, according to Shang Quanyu, director of the rice research division at the Heilongjiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences’ Heihe branch.

Another factor that further pushed the shift was purchase price. After the central government raised the purchasing price of rice seven times beginning 2008, Heilongjiang province, a high-latitude region previously deemed unsuitable for rice cultivation due to its short frost-free period, saw its rice planting area peaked at nearly 60 million mu in the 2010s.

Recently, however, there has been a policy shift to reduce soybean imports and bolster national food security. Heilongjiang is now promoting crop rotation between rice and soybeans, encouraging farmers to increase soybean planting, Gong Lijuan, a senior engineer at Heilongjiang Provincial Institute of Meteorological Sciences, told Caixin.

“Just like the reasons that once promoted the spread of rice, the current constraints are still price and yield,” Shang from Heihe said.

Between 2015 and 2023, the soybean price subsidy in Heilongjiang nearly tripled from 130 yuan per mu to 366 yuan, with national policies released in 2022 and 2023 supporting soybean production. Now Heilongjiang and Inner Mongolia account for nearly 60% of the nation’s soybean planting area and production.

Technological advances have also influenced crop production, said Zhang Daoming, an employee from Heihe agricultural and rural service center. In 2005, the introduction of varieties that can be planted at a higher density led to higher yields of corn production in Heilongjiang, resulting in a yearly increase in the corn planting area in Heihe.

Before 1995, the main crops grown in the city were wheat and soybeans, with a small amount of corn and rice cultivated, said Zhang. By 2024, soybean cultivation in Heihe by area had reached 14.87 million mu, while corn stood at 5.04 million mu, with wheat and rice areas at 163,000 mu and 118,000 mu, respectively.

Moreover, changes in consumer demand for higher-quality food products have also affected farmers. “In the past, we thought increasing yield was enough, but now we have to consider not only yield but also quality and the demand for consumption upgrades,” said Yu from Central China’s Henan, the country’s largest wheat-producing region.

Yu noted that increased demand for bread and cakes has driven a shift from traditional medium-gluten wheat to strong-gluten and weak-gluten varieties. Henan has promoted diverse wheat varieties in recent years, with Xi county, in southeastern Henan, seeing its weak-gluten wheat area grow from 50,000 mu to over 1 million mu within the past decade.

Climate risks

While rising temperatures have affected some regions’ agricultural industries, climate change has brought increasingly frequent extreme weather events and could exacerbate the risks facing agriculture and uncertainty in farming productivity, experts said.

In August and September 2020, Heilongjiang and other northeastern regions were struck by three typhoons in less than two weeks. The following year, record-breaking rainfall in North China caused significant flooding in the region.

The abnormal rainfall led to reduced corn yields and delayed autumn sowing in North China, while an unusual autumn drought in 2022 caused significant impact to crop yields and quality. In 2023, meanwhile, heavy rain caused Henan’s summer grain production to drop by 6.9%.

Northwestern province Shaanxi, a major apple-producer, saw unstable yields after expanding orchards northward. When a severe spring cold snap swept across the province in April 2013, coinciding with the blossoming period of fruit trees, over 1.8 million mu suffered frost damage, with estimated economic losses exceeding 4 billion yuan. Another cold wave in spring 2018 reduced yields of apples, pears, walnuts, kiwis and cherries.

“A warmer climate isn’t necessarily always beneficial. It might also bring extreme cold or heat, and severe drought or floods,” said Liu Buchun, chief expert at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences’ Institute of Environment and Sustainable Development in Agriculture.

Warmer winters have also contributed to an increase in pests. Farmer Cai from Heihe noticed an uptick in aphids and spider mites, which were previously rare in the area. Li in Huma county also noted soybean aphids have been plaguing the region in recent years. Li attributed the worsening pest problem to milder winters as well as monoculture, the practice of continuous planting of the same crop on the same piece of land.

Monoculture — especially common among soybean growers — can also lead to reduced yields and exacerbate diseases such as root rot, according to Zhang. In an effort to combat this, Heilongjiang has initiated crop rotation subsidy programs in some areas in recent years, offering 150 yuan per mu of incentives to encourage farmers to alternate between soybeans and wheat.

But for the central and local governments to effectively manage agricultural production, they need more up-to-date information: Much of China’s agricultural zoning is based on two nationwide surveys conducted in 1964 and again in 1979.

Beijing called for a new survey of agricultural climate resources in 2023 to reflect recent environmental changes, as experts suggest that climate conditions change significantly every 30 years.

As part of the updated zoning efforts, preliminary studies are underway in seven provincial-level regions this year, including Inner Mongolia, Heilongjiang, Shaanxi, Henan as well as Jiangxi, the Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region, and Liaoning.

Contact reporter Kelly Wang (jingzhewang@caixin.com) and editor Jonathan Breen (jonathanbreen@caixin.com)

caixinglobal.com is the English-language online news portal of Chinese financial and business news media group Caixin. Global Neighbours is authorized to reprint this article.

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