As increased rain makes grasslands and cornfields
possible in areas that once were deserts, the world’s largest beef importer is becoming
more self-reliant by expanding domestic herds.
·
Tongliao, on the eastern edge of the Gobi Desert in Inner Mongolia, has been transformed
from an arid landscape into grasslands, forests, and cornfields.
·
An
area roughly the size of Maryland has been reclaimed over recent decades
through afforestation, grassland restoration, and agriculture.
·
Land
covered by crops, grass, or forests has increased from 12% to 64% of the region.
·
Increased
rainfall since the 1990s, linked to climate change, has made
northern China significantly wetter.
·
Previously
arid regions across northern China, comparable in area to Arizona, are now capable of supporting grasslands
and crops.
·
Chinese
officials attribute the desert’s retreat to a combination of:
o Large-scale tree planting.
o Expansion of solar panel installations
that stabilize shifting sands.
o Increased rainfall due to climate change.
·
Tongliao has become a major cattle-raising region,
resembling beef-producing areas in Montana and Argentina’s Pampas.
·
China's
beef cattle herd has expanded by one-third
since 2018,
reaching nearly 90
million head.
·
Tongliao alone now has nearly 4 million cattle.
·
China
is now the world’s
third-largest beef producer,
after Brazil and the United States.
·
China
remains the world's largest
beef importer,
previously purchasing:
o About two-thirds of Argentina's beef exports.
o Significant volumes from Australia,
Brazil, and other exporters.
·
Beijing
is pursuing greater self-reliance by expanding domestic production.
·
Annual
beef imports have been capped at 2.69
million tonnes in
2026, down from a peak of 2.87
million tonnes in
2024.
·
China
introduced country-specific
annual import quotas on 31 December 2025.
·
Once
quotas are exhausted, 55%
tariffs
apply.
·
Australia exceeded its quota by late June 2026 and
became subject to the higher tariff.
·
Brazil is also approaching its quota limit.
·
Imports
from the United
States
remain negligible despite limited easing of trade restrictions during the
Trump–Xi summit.
·
China
is investing in higher-quality beef production rather than only increasing herd
size.
·
It has
become one of the world's largest importers of bull semen for artificial insemination.
·
Local
cattle are being crossbred with:
o Swiss Simmental
o Angus
·
Hybrid
cattle can weigh up
to twice as much as
traditional Chinese breeds while retaining local disease resistance and cold
tolerance.
·
China
has promoted cattle farming by:
o Providing free cattle to poor households
in earlier years.
o Encouraging large commercial feedlots.
o Offering subsidies of US$44 per head to feedlots sending at least 500 cattle annually to local slaughterhouses.
·
Grazing
is prohibited in restored desert areas to prevent land degradation.
·
Grasslands
are mechanically harvested for hay instead of open grazing.
·
Motion
sensors monitor protected areas, with authorities removing stray cattle and
fining owners.
·
The
transformation has improved local incomes through:
o Beef production.
o Corn cultivation.
o Wind turbine manufacturing.
·
Mechanized
farming has largely replaced animal-powered agriculture.
·
Rising
prosperity has significantly improved living standards, with most households
now owning cars.
·
China's
booming imports until 2024 were driven by rising incomes and higher protein
consumption.
·
Following
the property market downturn, many consumers shifted toward cheaper pork and
chicken.
·
Combined
with rising domestic production, wholesale beef prices fell 21% in 2024, hurting cattle farmers.
·
Import
restrictions have since supported a recovery, with wholesale beef prices rising
17.6% from their low in March 2025.
·
Climate
experts caution that increased rainfall is often arriving as short, intense downpours, which are less beneficial for
agriculture than steady rainfall.
·
Many
of China's 7
million small cattle-raising households
remain reluctant to adopt imported cattle breeds, preferring native grass-fed
livestock.
·
Climate
change, ecological restoration, and government support are reshaping northern
China into a major cattle-producing region.
·
China's
strategy aims to:
o Reduce dependence on imported beef.
o Improve food security.
o Strengthen domestic livestock production.
·
The
shift could reduce export opportunities for major beef suppliers such as Argentina, Australia, Brazil, and the
United States, with
broader implications for the US$500
billion global beef industry.
Tongliao, long an area of sand and gravel and camels
at the eastern fringe of the Gobi Desert, has been transformed into lush grasslands
crisscrossed with rows of poplar trees — and the heart of China’s growing cattle
industry.
Over
the past several decades, the administrative prefecture in China’s Inner Mongolia
region has converted an arid expanse the size of Maryland to cornfields, grass or
forest. Large expanses of northern China have become significantly wetter since
the 1990s because of climate change, according to the Chinese government’s National
Climate Center.
Today,
areas of Tongliao look more like famous beef-raising areas
in Montana or Argentina’s Pampas. Grass and corn are harvested from the reclaimed
desert and fed to cows along with corn and cornstalks on local farms. China’s nationwide
herd of beef cattle has expanded by a third since 2018 to nearly 90 million, including
nearly four million head in previously arid Tongliao.
“The
situation has now been reversed: The sand is retreating, greenery is expanding,”
said Shen Zhixin, a senior forestry and grassland engineer in western Tongliao.
Rainier
summers in northern China have the potential to upend the $500 billion global beef
industry, with consequences for beef-exporting countries like Argentina, Australia,
Brazil and the United States.
China
is the world’s biggest importer of beef by a wide margin, buying two-thirds of Argentina’s
beef exports and large shares of other countries’ shipments. Now, Beijing has seized
on the chance to become more self-reliant by expanding the country’s beef industry,
already the world’s third largest after Brazil and the United States.
China
is not only increasing the number of cattle but also pushing to breed plumper animals
with better quality beef. China now vies with the European Union each year as the
world’s biggest importer of bull semen for the artificial insemination of cows,
according to World Bank data.
Beijing
is taking broader actions to protect its domestic market from lower-cost imports
that come from countries with much larger, more efficient ranches and feedlots.
China set annual quotas on Dec. 31 for beef imports from each of the world’s biggest
beef producers, with 55 percent tariffs taking effect as soon as those quotas are
reached. Australia reached its full-year quota by late June and was hit with the
tariffs three days later, and Brazil is close to its quota.
At
a summit in Beijing in May, President Trump pressed China’s top leader, Xi Jinping,
for the country to buy more American beef. China had halted nearly all imports from
the United States early last year after Mr. Trump’s increases in American tariffs.
Although Beijing lifted one regulatory barrier during the summit, American shipments
are still nearly nonexistent.
Nobody
expects China, with its enormous population, to become self-sufficient in beef anytime
soon. But until recently, its beef imports accelerated as an increasingly affluent
population demanded a higher-protein diet that exceeded the domestic supply.
As
recently as 2015, China imported less than 500,000 tons of beef, according to the
country’s customs data. As imports began rising quickly, China started expanding
its own herd, even handing out free cattle to impoverished households in the country’s
poorest counties. Imports peaked in 2024 at 2.87 million tons — a huge windfall
for ranchers around the globe. It was a pace of annual increases matched by few
industries other than China’s own rapid growth in car exports.
But
by 2024, real estate prices had tumbled and many Chinese households were switching
to less expensive chicken or pork after losing their savings in the country’s housing
market crash. Combined with rising domestic production, beef wholesale prices plunged
21 percent that year.
The
price drop incited considerable anger in rural China, where millions of families
put their life savings into raising cattle for slaughter.
China
capped overall imports from the rest of the world this year at 2.69 million tons,
using the country quotas system and the threat of 55 percent tariffs. It is a politically
delicate move by Beijing, which has strongly opposed tariffs by the European Union
and the United States on its own surging car exports.
Beef
prices are now recovering, helping farmers like those in Inner Mongolia.
Tongliao typifies the transformation now taking place
along the southeastern edge of the Gobi Desert. Several decades ago, only 12 percent
of Tongliao had grasslands or forests and the rest was
desert, according to the local government. Now 64 percent of the area is covered
with crops, grass or forests.
China’s
propaganda apparatus attributes the retreat of the Gobi Desert to decades of hard
work in planting trees, supplemented more recently by the extensive deployment of
solar panels. These actions have stabilized the region’s shifting sands and have
helped tame dry desert winds that used to wick away moisture from surface soil,
the government has said.
But
climate change is also making a big difference. Annual rainfall has significantly
increased, although there have been yearslong dips and surges along the way, according
to China’s meteorologists. Across northern China, previously dry expanses with a
total area similar to Arizona have begun receiving enough rain to support grassland
or crops, although the soil quality for agriculture in many of these areas is poor.
“What
we’re seeing is a long-term increase associated with climate warming, with pronounced,
decade-long swings superimposed on top of it,” said Xu Xiaofeng, the president of
the China Meteorological Service Association. He warned that rain also increasingly
occurs during brief, heavy downpours instead of in long, gentle showers better for
crops.
To
prevent damage from hooves or overgrazing, Chinese officials are using farm equipment
to mow the new grasslands once a year and distributing the hay to farmers for cattle
in pens.
The
government also installed a large network of motion sensors on Tongliao’s newly green areas to detect cattle, Mr. Shen said.
Government workers get alerts, then remove the offending animal and fine the owner.
“Grazing
is strictly prohibited throughout our sand restoration areas,” Mr. Shen said.
The
Tongliao region has become one of the world’s largest
manufacturing centers for wind turbines, many of which
are installed on the new grasslands and send electricity to big cities to the south.
Rapid growth in the beef industry, expanding cornfields and extensive factory construction
have contributed to a sharp rise in local standards of living, including the plowing of fields with machinery instead of livestock.
China
is also trying to plump up its bony, domestic cows, which for centuries were bred
for pulling plows. Local cattle are better at resisting
local viruses and withstanding Siberian blizzards that come south.
So
local cattle are now crossbred through artificial insemination with very large and
meatier Swiss Simmental and Angus cattle. The resulting offspring weigh up to twice
as much as local cattle, said Guo Jie, deputy director of the Tongliao Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Bureau.
“The
Simmentals with our local cattle’s genes can better adapt to the local environment
and grow fast,” she said.
(Ms.
Guo spoke during a media tour this summer in Inner Mongolia, a border region where
foreign media access is sometimes restricted. The New York Times paid its own travel
costs.)
But
many small-scale farmers are wary of the heftier, imported breeds. Nearly seven
million Chinese households still raise nine or fewer cattle apiece.
A
herder in China’s Hebei Province with several dozen local cattle said she had no
interest in hybrids. “The beef from our cattle is much better than what you see
in supermarkets — these are native Chinese breeds,” said the herder, who gave her
family name, Zhao. Many of her grass-fed cattle, grazing in a remote mountain valley,
had protruding pelvic bones and visible ribs.
Inner
Mongolia authorities have turned to incentives to encourage consolidation of the
region’s herd at large feedlots, where artificial insemination and other programs
are more easily managed. The region’s government now provides a subsidy of $44 per
head for cattle fattened at feedlots that send at least 500 cattle each year to
local slaughterhouses.
Wholesale
beef prices are up 17.6 percent from their low in March last year as import restrictions
start to bite, helping farmers in Tongliao as part of
a longer-term increase in prosperity.
“In
the past, people had to travel on foot or ride camels,” Mr. Shen said. “Today, almost
every household owns a car.”