I’m not all that familiar with China’s geography but I’d think there’d be plenty of good agricultural land. The country is huge.
We start in 2019, which according to Beijing was a very good year on the food front. The official Xinhua News Agency, in a piece titled “China’s Food Self-Sufficiency a Blessing To World,” claimed in October that China was producing far more food than it needed. The country, Xinhua reported, contained 20 percent of the global population and produced a quarter of its food. Moreover, Beijing felt it was time to brag, noting China had been able to accomplish this feat with only 9 percent of the world’s farmland and 6 percent of its freshwater.
Xinhua in 2019 was exaggerating, and that became clear in 2020, an especially difficult year for Chinese agriculture. Floods in the country’s south, drought in the north, typhoons in the northeast and pest infestations in the southwest took their tolls. Disease continued to spread among animals across China.
https://www.newsweek.com/watch-out-china-cannot-feed-itself-opinion-1575948
China’s 1.4 billion people are building up an appetite that is changing the way the world grows and sells food. The Chinese diet is becoming more like that of the average American, forcing companies to scour the planet for everything from bacon to bananas.
But China’s efforts to buy or lease agricultural land in developing nations show that building farms and ranches abroad won’t be enough. Ballooning populations in Asia, Africa and South America will add another 2 billion people within a generation and they too will need more food.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-feeding-china/
They are trying very hard to user technology to create new ways to utilize farmland. But time is running out on them when other countries that are in about the same boat, along with them, are increasing in population also and are going to have a greater need for food. Lot of competition.
wy69