By Jin Sanlin, Liu Yan & Liu Naixi, Research Team on “Changes of International Economic Pattern and China’s Strategic Options”, DRC

Research Report, No.125, 2018 (Total 5400), 2018-8-9

Abstract: Driven by the factors including population growth, economic development and technological advancement, the amount of global food consumption and production will continue to increase and the overall performance of global food safety will witness improvement by 2035, whereas food safety will face some challenges in some regions with increasingly profound imbalanced development among different regions and some changes in the direction of global food trade flow. Viewing from domestic perspective, China is expected to reach the peak value of food consumption by 2030-2035. Due to the constraint of domestic resources and environment, the room for food production growth is limited, and China’s structural dependency on international food market will become heavy. The changes in global food safety will not only offer opportunities for China to play a bigger role and make full use of global resources to meet the needs of global market, but also impose challenges on China to improve its capacity for international cooperation in agricultural field. China is supposed to comply with the objective trend of the changes in international food safety, seize major strategic opportunities such as the Belt and Road Initiative, follow the general principle of laying emphasis on both internal and external major issues relating to global development, intensify government support and actively develop and utilize global agricultural resources on a higher level and with a larger scale.

Key words: global food safety, food safety pattern, China’s strategy